The Souls Of Black Folk Analysis

This extract is taken from ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ (1903) by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an American sociologist, historian and civil rights activist. Du Bois was the first African American to ever receive a PHD from Harvard, and is considered one of the most profound scholars of his generation for his active protest against Black discrimination in the US. The Souls of Black Folk explores the effect of being ‘identified as a problem’ by American society for the African American people who were experiencing on-going discrimination in post emancipation, post-slavery America. The extract highlights a concept that Du Bois pioneers in his work, the ‘double consciousness’s’: the crisis in identity that Black Americans experience as they attempt to be both American and African in a white society where their identity is
Hegel’s understanding was that self-consciousness is created only through awareness of another’s awareness of one’s self; one can only become self-aware when they can see themselves through the eyes of ‘the other’. A fundamental hostility to any other consciousness is found in consciousness itself; the subject posits itself only in opposition; it asserts itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object. For African Americans this contradiction is between the two parts that create their own single identity. According to Hegel this results in ‘the unhappy consciousness’, a state of awareness of the self as being divided by nature, ‘a doubled and merely contradictory being’ thus resulting in an ‘alienated soul’. Du Bois uses this idea of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ as a resource for his description of the African-American double consciousness, their experience of ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a