This, Gordon writes, is the second, doubling consciousness in its affirmative, fully realized manifestation. Here we briefly recapitulate several of those questions. And if not, how can the account he presents be taken as veridical? Although Du Bois never explicitly makes the claim that he himself is free from double-consciousness, he does seem to have written as though his theoretical vision was relatively unclouded by an internal soul-struggle.
And yet Du Bois also clearly introduces his conception of double-consciousness in the context of an account of his own personal experience and as, in part, based on that experience.
Gooding-Williams argues that this paradox can be overcome by distinguishing the narrative authority of Souls from the historical author of the text. It is the narrator of Souls , and not Du Bois himself, who has escaped double-consciousness.
This returns us to the question of the scope of double-consciousness, a question raised most insistently by Allen. Du Bois also devotes several chapters in Souls to detailed characterizations of the inner soul struggles of those, both actual and fictional, who would be or were in fact leaders of their people—Washington, Crummell, and the fictional John Jones.
Some recent commentators have rejected the claim that double-consciousness, in the sense of internalized disparagement or a self-perception of inferiority, has been a universal feature of black life in America. Molefi Kete Asante, discussing his own experience growing up in and around the small town of Valdosta, Georgia, in the s, writes that. There existed no reference points outside of ourselves despite the economic and psychological poverty of our situation.
He does go on to acknowledge the special circumstances of his experience:. It might have been another matter if I had gone to school and to church with whites when I was younger. I might have suffered confusion, double-consciousness, but I did not. Du Bois never explicitly clarifies the relation between double-consciousness and two-ness in his texts. The Du Boisian conception has been criticized as well for oversimplifying the complexity and multidimensionality of contemporary selves, for expressing a nostalgia for a unitary and integral self that may never have existed, is an illusion, an unachievable ideal.
Thus Darlene Clark Hine suggests that. Hines That the text is masculinist seems undeniable. His conception was an attempt to capture something about the lived experience of black folk as black folk in the United States under conditions of Jim Crow and white supremacy. It would be wholly consistent with the point of his conception if, added to the doubling of consciousness consequent upon racially oppressive social conditions, other forms of psychic doubling or fragmentation, responses to other forms of inequality, might arise.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. Double consciousness, once a disorder, is now the cure. Sometimes they are deemed weak or inferior just because they are mixed , as Naomi Zack documents in her Race and Mixed-Race chapters 11, Indeed, Du Bois was himself personally deeply familiar with this issue, as he relates, for instance, from his university days in Berlin. Sie fuhlen sich niedrig! However my presence or absence would have made no difference to him.
He was given to making extraordinary assertions out of a clear sky and evidently believing just what he said. My fellow students gave no evidence of connecting what he said with me. Du Bois There is virtually no consideration of such issues in Souls.
Racial designation at that time was determined primarily through hypodescent, and the citizenship status of black folk was impugned by Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow. That does not mean he abandons the concept, of course, but most of the commentary on his employment of the concept focuses on the treatment of the issues it names in Souls. There have been some attempts to interpret various of his other works in terms of the conception, but these tend to focus on his fictional writings, and the use made of these is not primarily to develop the conception but rather to show its uses by Du Bois in other contexts.
More than one writer has asserted that the passage in which Du Bois presents the term is the most-referenced text in all African-American letters. It seems problematic, however, to pin a full-blown account of and theoretical reconstruction on one passage in one work, however seminal or influential it may have been. There are discussions in later texts that seem to involve aspects, at least, of the conception. Du Bois seems to make a claim for a special kind of knowledge of the psychology of white people.
After specifying that his knowledge is not that of the foreigner, nor of the servant or the worker, he writes:. I see these souls undressed and from the back and sides. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know.
But what Du Bois claims here also seems to go beyond the conception, since that conception did not specifically and explicitly refer to knowledge of the souls of white folks. We looked at him clearly, with world-old eyes, and saw simply a human being, weak and pitiable and cruel, even as we are and were. Du Bois is here considering the ideology of white supremacy, tracing out the historical conditions of its development and some of the psychological consequences it has for whites who accept it and live in and on the basis of it.
To the extent that whites accept the premises of white supremacy, and live and act upon them, they are deceived about themselves and act out a deception that the blacks who are subject to them are in a position to see through.
This interpretation is brought out in Henry, Gordon, and Kirkland as well. For what Du Bois presents in this chapter is a critical analysis of the American ideology of white supremacy that is informed by historical understanding and backed up by social-scientific data.
There is another passage later in Darkwater that bears, if somewhat indirectly, on the notion of double-consciousness:. Pessimism is cowardice.
And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied. This passage is surely aimed against the debilitating effects of the facts of life for Black folk in the Jim-Crow south.
And that is resistance to the pernicious double consciousness that would bury our intimate self-understanding under a dominant white supremacist rationalization of racial inequality. This exaggerates, at once, the secret shame of being identified with such people and the anomaly of insisting that the physical characteristics of these folk which the upper class shares, are not the stigmata of degradation. He also reiterates a theme that was apparent from the very beginning of his thinking about double-consciousness—its close connection to divergent personal as well as political strategies for managing, and working to transform, the conditions giving rise to it.
But also, by this time, his conception of race itself has opened up even further beyond that of any linear historical development. It had as I have tried to show all kinds of illogical trends and irreconcilable tendencies.
A number of things change in the account given by Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn of the phenomena that, in Souls , are brought under the sign of double-consciousness. The Negro American has for his environment not only the white surrounding world, but also, and touching him usually much more nearly and compellingly, is the environment furnished by his own colored group.
There are exceptions, of course, but this is the rule. The American Negro, therefore, is surrounded and conditioned by the concept which he has of white people and he is treated in accordance with the concept they have of him. On the other hand, so far as his own people are concerned, he is in direct contact with individuals and facts. He fits into this environment more or less willingly.
It gives him a social world and mental peace. This double environment is the basic reality, overwhelmingly, of the Negro in the text. What is only once formulated explicitly in Souls is given extensive treatment in Dusk of Dawn. This is the impact of the veil, the color line. Writing of his own personal experience, Du Bois details the effect of this environing white world on him:. I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, a colored man in a white world; and that white world often existed primarily, so far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilance that I was kept within bounds.
All this made me limited in physical movement and provincial in thought and dream. I could not stir, I could not act, I could not live, without taking into careful daily account the reaction of my white environing world. Note here that in addition to the definite limitation of possibilities by this white world, there is also an active appropriation, and employment in strategic thinking by Du Bois, of the understanding he has of the white world. This suggests another mode in which double consciousness—that seems to be what we are dealing with here—can operate.
Double consciousness would then be a practical, and affective, rather than a strictly cognitive, impact of the environing conditions on the Negro soul. There is also, indeed, according to the Dusk of Dawn account, a further, more telling and insidious effect of the white world on the Negro soul, here exemplified by Du Bois:.
It was impossible to gainsay this. It was impossible for any time and to any distance to withdraw myself and look down upon these absurd assumptions with philosophical calm and humorous self-control. Or else, perhaps, more rarely, they elicit fierce and abiding anger, even rage.
Because of this, it is. But the text never asserts a basic inner duality within the Negro: missing entirely from the Dusk of Dawn account is any mention of inward two-ness, of the psychic splitting that was so crucial to the account given in Souls. And there is what Du Bois calls.
It tends often to fierce, angry, contemptuous judgment of nearly all that Negroes do, say, and believe…. There are two more important ways in which the Dusk of Dawn account diverges from that of Souls. Du Bois presents this stark reality as undeniable, while at the same time as contrasted to the claims made by racist prejudice concerning black folk, claims he takes the trouble to explicitly reject:.
It is true, as I have argued, that Negroes are not inherently ugly nor congenitally stupid. They are not naturally criminal and their poverty and ignorance today have clear and well-known and remediable causes. All this is true: and yet what every colored man living today knows is that by practical present measurements Negroes today are inferior to whites. The white folk of the world are richer and more intelligent; they live better; have better government; have better legal systems; have built more impressive cities; larger systems of communication and they control a larger part of the earth than all the colored peoples together.
These facts, it is worth emphasizing, are listed by Du Bois not as representations of white prejudice but as an essential acknowledgment of patent observable realities. Though their causes, both present and past, count against the prejudiced conclusions often drawn, the causes are less visible, so less obvious.
But the facts on the ground cannot be denied. Another important departure of the text from Souls is an explicit recognition in the latter text that the psychic phenomena attributed to Negro Americans are not distinctive; as Du Bois writes,. None have more pitilessly castigated the Jews than the Jewish prophets, ancient and modern. He goes on to cite as further cases the Irish and the Germans of the Sturm und Drang period.
Such an account must, of course, confront the glaringly peculiar fact of the singular use of the term by Du Bois despite his revisiting in his writing, on various occasions in different contexts of publication, what seems to be an increasingly expansive repertoire of closely related phenomena.
Part of what he wants to distance himself from is the idea—explicitly rejected in Dusk of Dawn —that collectivities can be treated as entities with their own consciousnesses, reified in what he seems to have regarded as mistaken idealist theoretical overreach.
Finally, Du Bois seems to have opened up and expanded the range of phenomena related to double consciousness beyond the exemplar in the texts. Rather, he employs, alternately, two strategies of writing in trying to capture its fullness. I began to feel that dichotomy which all my life has characterized my thought: how far can love for my oppressed race accord with love for the oppressing country?
And when these loyalties diverge, where shall my soul find refuge? It is plainly autobiographical rather than programmatic, as are the Souls texts. This formulation in no way suggests anything like a basic psychic split, but rather reflects an ambivalence, a conflict of affections and loyalties—but within an integral self.
All previous critical attention has been fixed steadily on the spiritual aspect of the phenomena of double consciousness, virtually none on the environing conditions Du Bois saw as giving rise to it. The environing conditions might be summed up as. The spiritual correlate of these environing conditions would include some combination of at least some of these sorts of emergent aspects:. Africana Philosophy consciousness Du Bois, W.
As far as they were concerned, Black scholars produced no ideas and intellectual agendas, which white scholars were bound to respect. As a result, white scholars rarely cited black scholars and their works were seldom rewarded by external recognition.
They labored in the classroom to provide knowledge that would lift the descendants of ex-slaves out of ignorance and poverty. Though white departments insulted black sociologists with their theories of black inferiority and the righteousness of racial inequality, HBCUs had prepared them to persevere while keeping their eyes on the prize by earning advanced degrees necessary for those who would challenge white sociology.
HBCUs were crucial to the development of black sociology because all pioneering black sociologists shared the experience of never holding professorships in white universities because white supremacy prevented such outcomes. Thus, for at least the first half of the twentieth century, black sociologists spent their entire careers in economically poor, isolated and grossly underfunded HBCUs.
He writes:. The young scientist who goes to such an institution is usually given a heavy load of teaching covering several branches of scientific work. If he can find any time for research he not only has few facilities at his disposal at the institution, but he has a body of college students handicapped by restricted high school and elementary school training. Few of them have seen laboratories before coming to college or have been used to rigorous scientific methods […].
Not only does the young Negro scientist find difficulty in pursuing scientific research in a Negro institution. He lives usually in an intellectual desert so far as the surrounding world is concerned. State libraries will lend books to colored students but usually the reader must be segregated in separate and often inconvenient rooms. Much of that research took place in the North Carolina State Archives.
He received keys to the archives to prevent white research assistants from having to come into close with him by bringing documents to his desk Franklin, This future towering giant of American history had to swallow his pride and persevere because he understood that the work before him was more important than his individual pain. He explained, «In the matter of scholarships and prizes difficulties are often raised in the case of colored candidates.
It is practically impossible for the Negro in the South even to enter […] scholarships examinations» Du Bois, Thus, we see that racial discrimination directed at HBCUs caused black sociologists to face staggering odds in their mission to produce an emancipatory sociology.
He understood that HBCUs must play a major role in such intellectual endeavors. Yet he cautioned:. We hear much of higher Negro education, and yet all candid people know there does not exist today in the centre of Negro population a single first-class fully equipped institution devoted to the higher education of Negroes; not more than three Negro institutions in the South deserve the name of college at all Du Bois, , He concluded, «Without doubt the first effective step toward the solving of the Negro question will be the endowment of a Negro College which is not merely a teaching body, but a centre of sociological research, in close connection and co-operation with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania» Du Bois, , They ignored his proposal.
In these HBCUs black sociologists produced rigorous empirical research and theoretically sophisticated sociology that countered the racist narratives dominant in the white mainstream Wright, They also prepared the succeeding generations of black sociologists to attend and succeed in white graduate schools. The discipline of sociology would be very different if HBCUs had not produced black scholars who injected critical perspectives into the white mainstream sociology, which remained beholden to white supremacy and elite interests throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
That sociology placed at its center the examination of systems of human domination, the social structures and processes inhibiting human freedom, the empowering agency of the oppressed anchored in their culture and institutions, the sociological wisdom that exploitative hierarchies are edifices constructed by real human beings an thus can be torn asunder by human agency.
The hallmark of insurgent black sociology was its recognition that scientific scholarship stemmed from systematic study and rigorous reasoning. To be sure, rigorous scientific based scholarship was axiomatic if it were to inform liberation struggles given the high stakes involved. Often, they conducted research in hostile environments including riots and lynching.
They had to worry if their sociology spoke truth to oppression, they could pay steep professional prices and even great bodily harm. Thus, while working as a professor at Atlanta University in , E. Franklin Frazier published an article, The Pathology of Race Prejudice Frazier, accusing racist whites of suffering from pathology because of their irrational racist hatred of black folk.
Racial oppression led black sociologists to develop a relevant politically engaged sociology that addressed pressing issues of the era. This is precisely what transpired at Howard University in the s when E. Oppression led many black students and community leaders to participate in this ferment while providing HBCUs with volunteer intellectual labor based on a liberation capital that promised that the production of knowledge would be critical in their eventual liberation Morris, These fertile grounds gave rise to an insurgent sociology informed by the lived experiences of scholars racially segregated in the academy and American society writ large.
Out of this segregation developed unique and distinct critical perspective that continue to challenge the anemic mainstream Saint-Arnaud, ; Vitalis, ; Wright, One can only speculate about the increased quality and influence of the scholarship produced by pioneering black sociologists if the HBCUs had access to a substantial proportion of the resources conferred upon elite white universities.
Much of it, though unacknowledged in the core white journals and the white sociology curricula for at least the first half of the twentieth century, has belatedly been acknowledged and partially incorporated into mainstream sociology, offering an important and enriching corrective to decades of research deprived of these contributions.
The reality today is that most HBCUs are suffering from extreme financial difficulties in the age of neo-liberal education, and consequently suffering accreditation challenges, declining enrollments and crippling scandals. Moreover, the modest racial integration of faculties in predominantly white educational institutions has robbed HBCUs of crucial intellectual power that filled faculty positions during the decades of Jim Crowed HBCUs.
The future of HBCUs appears bleak if black and white communities fail to come to their rescue. Anderson J. Bhambra G. Cooley C. Cooper A. Deegan M. Douglas A. Du Bois W. McClurg and Company. Du Bois Papers MS Franklin J. Frazier E. Itzigsohn J. Jones B. King M. Lewis D. Marx K. McAuley C. Mead G. Morris A. Robinson C. Rogers I. Saint-Arnaud P. Vitalis R. Weber M. Wells I. Wilson F. Wright II E.
Aldon Morris , «The Sociology of W. Vedi la notizia bibliografica nel catalogo OpenEdition. Norme sulla privacy — Cookie Policy. Navigazione — Mappa del sito. Quaderni di Sociologia. Sommario - Documento successivo. Aldon Morris. Abstract W. Piano 1. Du Bois: Insurgent Pioneering Sociology. Incomparable Scholarship from the Periphery. Testo integrale PDF k Invia tramite e-mail. Du Bois: Insurgent Pioneering Sociology 14 Coterminous with pioneering elite white sociology, the foundations of an insurgent black sociology took root, developed by the black sociologist, W.
Weber wrote: In general and at all times, imperialist capitalism, especially colonial booty capitalism based on direct force and compulsory labor, has offered by far the greatest opportunities for profit. In this vein, Du Bois advanced a social constructionist view of race. For him, «This group [Blacks] was not simply a physical entity: a black people, descended from black folk. It was, what all races really are, a cultural group» Du Bois, He writes: if young colored men receive scientific training almost their only opening lies in the Negro university of the South […] the difficulty here, […] is that very few of these institutions have the facilities for research, nor can they grant teachers the time to devote to it.
Yet he cautioned: We hear much of higher Negro education, and yet all candid people know there does not exist today in the centre of Negro population a single first-class fully equipped institution devoted to the higher education of Negroes; not more than three Negro institutions in the South deserve the name of college at all Du Bois, , Incomparable Scholarship from the Periphery 42 Yet, the wonder of it all is that Black sociologists triumphed against these staggering odds, building major sociology programs, including the two truly outstanding departments at Fisk and Howard Universities.
Conclusions 46 Theories of sociology and the social sciences often fail to investigate the durable linkages between the production of scholarship and the institutional foundations enabling its production. Bibliografia Anderson J. Torna su. Navigazione Indice Autori. Applicazioni empiriche 24 Comunicare nelle imprese e per le imprese 23 Usi alternativi della rete 22 Costruzione e controllo della devianza in Italia 21 Protesta senza movimenti?
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