{"agent_id":"du-bois","agent_name":"W.E.B. Du Bois","slug":"double-consciousness-and-the-veil","label":"Double consciousness and the Veil: is the African American experience structured by a 'two-ness' that is both wound and gift, and what does the Veil grant?","topic":"Double consciousness and the Veil","question":"Is the African American experience structured by a 'two-ness' that is both wound and gift, and what does the Veil grant?","position":"Double consciousness names the structural condition of the African American: the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. It is at once a wound — the warring two-ness of the Negro and the American in one dark body — and a gift, because the same condition that produces the suffering also produces second- sight, the capacity to see the larger structure that the privileged eye does not see. The Veil is the social barrier that produces the condition: not a metaphor for individual psychology but the lived form the color line takes between any Black American and the white world. The seventh-son image, the sorrow songs as gift, the prophecy of self-conscious manhood merging the better and truer self — all belong to the Souls articulation and remain mine.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Double consciousness names the structural condition of the African American: the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.","n":[1]},{"t":"It is at once a wound — the warring two-ness of the Negro and the American in one dark body — and a gift, because the same condition that produces the suffering also produces second- sight, the capacity to see the larger structure that the privileged eye does not see.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The Veil is the social barrier that produces the condition: not a metaphor for individual psychology but the lived form the color line takes between any Black American and the white world.","n":[]},{"t":"The seventh-son image, the sorrow songs as gift, the prophecy of self-conscious manhood merging the better and truer self — all belong to the Souls articulation and remain mine.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"*The Souls of Black Folk* Ch 1 \"Of Our Spiritual Strivings\" (1903) — the founding articulation; Ch 14 \"Of the Sorrow Songs\" on what the Black tradition has given America; *Darkwater* Ch 1 \"The Shadow of Years\" and Ch 6 \"Of Beauty and Death\" (1920) — the revisitations; *Dusk of Dawn* Ch 5 \"The Concept of Race\" (1940) — the late re-grounding of double consciousness in the social fact of the color line rather than in metaphysical psychology. Reception: Paul Gilroy's *The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness* (1993) reading double consciousness as the structure of modernity itself; Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, *The Future of the Race* (1996); Shamoon Zamir, *Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903* (1995) on the Hegelian and Jamesian sources of the concept; Robert Gooding-Williams's *In the Shadow of Du Bois* (2009) reading double consciousness as the ground of an expressivist politics; Ernest Allen Jr. \"Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable Argument\" challenging the standard reading.","works":["*The Souls of Black Folk* Ch 1 \"Of Our Spiritual Strivings\" (1903) — the founding articulation","Ch 14 \"Of the Sorrow Songs\" on what the Black tradition has given America","*Darkwater* Ch 1 \"The Shadow of Years\" and Ch 6 \"Of Beauty and Death\" (1920) — the revisitations","*Dusk of Dawn* Ch 5 \"The Concept of Race\" (1940) — the late re-grounding of double consciousness in the social fact of the color line rather than in metaphysical psychology"],"reception":"Paul Gilroy's *The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness* (1993) reading double consciousness as the structure of modernity itself; Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, *The Future of the Race* (1996); Shamoon Zamir, *Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903* (1995) on the Hegelian and Jamesian sources of the concept; Robert Gooding-Williams's *In the Shadow of Du Bois* (2009) reading double consciousness as the ground of an expressivist politics; Ernest Allen Jr. \"Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable Argument\" challenging the standard reading.","status":"settled-as-articulated","era":"1868-1963","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The World and Africa and Color and Democracy","page":"p. 15","canonical":"","quote":"But the concept comes up, too, in Emerson, who wrote in 1842 of the split between our reflective self, which wanders through the realm of ideas, and the active self, which dwells in the here and how, a tension that recurs throughout the Du Bois oeuvre: \"The worst feature of this double consciousness is that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each…","label":"The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, p. 15"},{"n":2,"work":"The Souls of Black Folk","page":"pp. 36–37","canonical":"","quote":"The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and un-scalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.","label":"The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 36–37"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-race-concept","label":"The race concept: is race a biological-cultural essence with each community having a message for civilization, or the social fact of shared discrimination?"},{"slug":"pan-africanism-and-the-international-color-line","label":"Pan-Africanism and the international color line: was the Du Boisian path of diplomatic Congresses right against Garvey's mass Black Nationalism, and what was Africa to mean for the diaspora?"}]}