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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
All who study W. E. B. Du Bois's conceptualization, interrogation, and international activism regarding the sociopolitical significance of race must contend with a foundation built upon his most famous words:
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's soul 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 souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Originally published in Du Bois's first nationally circulated article, “Strivings of the Negro People” (from an 1897 issue of Atlantic Monthly), these words were then collected into The Souls of Black Folk, by far Du Bois's most famous work, in 1903. The “double-consciousness” metaphor often serves as a proxy for Du Boisian racial theory in its entirety. Du Bois, however, was a notoriously complex and prolific thinker whose views continued to evolve for another sixty years until his death in 1963. Thus while any commentary on Du Bois and race begins with the theory of double-consciousness by no means should it end there.
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