Web Dubois Double Consciousness Quotes

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

The opinion of others. I was silent for a while, thinking about that. Then I said, “Have you ever read W.E.B. Dubois?” “No. I’ve heard the name in my native time, however. He was a twentieth-century activist, I believe.” “Yes. And biracial. He had an incredibly long life, from the 1860s to the 1960s, and his work was based on a blend of social analyses—but that’s not my point. The thing is, he wrote about something he called ‘double consciousness,’ which he believed was a kind of internal conflict experienced by oppressed people. He described it as the sense of looking at yourself through the eyes of people who believe you to be somehow subordinate or inferior. Your view of yourself is inevitably at war with the oppressor’s view. Anyway, he called it a two-ness, and that’s the word that resonated with me. A two-ness. Although perhaps I experience it differently from what he intended