Sociology Plus
Double Consciousness Definition
Double consciousness is a theory of black consciousness in the United States associated with the sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois argued that the black man always has consciousness of himself through the consciousness of the white man: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Influenced by Hegel’s description of the master–slave relationship — in which master and slave cannot achieve mutual recognition because absolute power separates them — Du Bois held that slavery had destroyed black self-consciousness, and proposed educational reform to begin restoring self-respect and hence self-awareness.
Intellectual Background
When Du Bois introduced the concept, doubleness was already a major motif in the literature of Dostoevsky, Stevenson, Melville, Conrad, Poe, and Goethe, and had been addressed in the psychological and philosophical writings of Nietzsche, Dewey, and James. In both traditions the merger of doubleness and consciousness suggested an irrational force — a dual, split personality entombed in one body, implying a “true” and genuine self contrasted with a “false” and inauthentic one. Du Bois’s usage incorporated many of these psychological and, by extension, sociological assumptions. The core of his logic runs: (1) double consciousness denies an objective consciousness; (2) the “other” becomes the eye through which the world is viewed; (3) it creates an internal warfare between black and white values and norms; (4) ultimately the black and white selves may merge into a more creative and unique self; and (5) the struggle to appease both strivings has gravely handicapped an already oppressed black population.
Critical Reassessment
Critics such as Rutledge M. Dennis argue that Du Bois placed the concept in a sociological cul-de-sac. His claim that blacks lacked “true” self-consciousness treats the consciousness that emerged from black families, communities, and institutions as less than real — yet a consciousness reflective of unfreedom is still a genuine consciousness of lived conditions; to expect the consciousness of the free among the unfree would itself exemplify what Marx called false consciousness. The assertion that blacks saw themselves only “through the revelation of the other world” is contradicted by Du Bois’s own empirical research: accounts of slavery, Reconstruction, and the early Jim Crow years show a people grounded in pragmatic politics, using every available resource and strategy to navigate a system stacked against them, and fighting precisely against seeing themselves only through others’ eyes. Victims were defining the “other” who victimized them even as they were being defined — a dialectical “shadow boxing” in which victims are never as weak as victimizers assume, nor victimizers as powerful as they believe. Du Bois’s rhetorical strategy — painting oppression in stark, uncompromising colors to alert those who indirectly oppress — risked reducing sufferers to cardboard figures incapable of will.
A second objection concerns inverted logic. If there is a double consciousness there must be a single one: a black consciousness rooted in black experience, out of which — as Ralph Ellison observed — blacks created a world for themselves “on the horns of the white man’s dilemma.” It would seem natural to use “double consciousness” for the keen insight blacks gained into the white world; instead Du Bois inverted the term to mean blacks seeing themselves through their oppressors’ eyes, keeping the focus on blacks as supposedly incapable of constructing an objective view of themselves. Taken to its conclusion, this would mean blacks had placed themselves wholly within white consciousness. Critics also note that Du Bois’s metaphor of “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” misplaces the battle: the war was not internal to the black body but external, stitched into the social structure — one soul in the black body confronting another in the white body opposed to it.
Legacy and Relevance
Sociology, Dennis suggests, would be enriched by “socializing” the term — linking doubleness analytically to social interaction and turning the focus onto the dominant community and its institutions, rather than onto what the powerful think of the powerless; what matters is that powerless groups hold an accurate view of themselves and develop an objective critique of the dominant society. Notably, Du Bois did not develop the concept beyond two chapters of Souls of Black Folk or use it in later works, raising the question whether it was chiefly of metaphorical value. Yet the idea remains widely used today — extended to women, homosexuals, and other ethnic and racial groups — and may best be understood as a legacy of literature and of psychology’s analysis of the internal dynamics of the self, closely allied to the concepts of individual and group identity.