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?

W.E.B. Du Bois, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹² 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.³

Sources

1. But he shared with the psychologists the notion that double consciousness was essentially an affliction. "This American world," he complained, yields the Negro "no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

   The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States 1638-1870, p. xiv

2. But he shared with the psychologists the notion tl,at double consciousness was essentially an affliction. "This American world," he complained, yields the Negro "no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

   Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, p. xiv

3. 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.

   The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 36–37

Where the argument is made

• 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

How the argument was received

settled-as-articulated