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.
Interpretation
Double-consciousness refers to the internal conflict experienced by marginalized individuals as they navigate their identity in a society that views them with disdain.
This quote by W. E. B. Du Bois articulates the complex feeling of double-consciousness experienced by African Americans. It describes the struggle of seeing oneself through the lens of societal perceptions, which often include contempt and pity, leading to a fragmented sense of self rooted in both personal identity and external judgments.
In practice
During a discussion on identity politics at a college seminar.
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable 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.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse.
We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
There is a name hidden in the shadow of my soul, where I read it night and day and no other eye sees it.
Incens'd with indignation Satan stood Unterrify'd, and like a comet burn'd That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In th' arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.
It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
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