Robert Louis Brandon Edwards

Columbia University, New York, United States of America
rle2134@columbia.edu

The Double

Of course, Plato, Freud, Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, and Blanchot are mentioned here, but what about Du Bois? For Du Bois, the concept of the double was the consciousness of Black people. For him, this “double-consciousness” is the psychological experience of Black people in America, who have to navigate both their own identity and the dominant, often racist, views of white society. The double, for Du Bois, is the feeling of “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on with amused contempt and pity,” and never feeling like an equal but an other.1
Du Bois writes, “It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, 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 twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…”2
The double has taken on new meaning in contemporary society. What is known as code switching today can be an extended form of Du Bois’ double consciousness. To feel a part of yourself would not be accepted, and to switch into an altered state is the psychological experience of remaking yourself into a chameleon-like creature that can adopt its surroundings as a form of survival. The two-ness that Du Bois refers to as double consciousness is the double that I not only experience every day but also find most interesting as a site of tension between the self and other and being and non-being, and how this relates to how we experience and navigate social and architectural landscapes.

Keywords: African American; identity; the Black experience; double-consciousness; the veil; racism.