Abstract
In Du Bois’s classic work The Souls of Black Folks (1903), he captures the complexity of what it means to be a black person in America. Reed (1997) argues that “the ‘double-consciousness’ or ‘two-ness’ image has been a remarkable, but variously, evocative characterization of the black American condition for several generations of observers identified with widely different intellectual and political projects” (p. 92). Though written over a century ago Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness has transcended time. For example, Alridge (2003) discusses the double-consciousness that he encounters as a black scholar within the academy. This twoness stems from the fact that on one hand, as a black researcher, he feels he has a commitment to uplifting his black community and as a black academic, he also wants to make sure that his work is rigorous and respected within academia. He finds that as a black researcher who does historical research on the education of black people his scholarship has been challenged with concerns of objectivity and presentism—and because of his use of historical research to make connections to current day concerns, voice, and agency. Alridge (2003) asserts that Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness “provides me with a way of situating myself in my research as a member of the Black community and as an academic.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek und Roman, the Teuton und 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.
—Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks
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© 2010 Kyunghwa Lee and Mark D. Vagle
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Harrison, L. (2010). Black Adolescent Identity, Double-Consciousness, and a Sociohistorically Constructed Adolescence. In: Lee, K., Vagle, M.D. (eds) Developmentalism in Early Childhood and Middle Grades Education. Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107854_8
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