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
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less equal to the other. In this essay I endeavour to discuss this extract with reference to the specialised language and concepts Du Bois adopts, the historical and intellectual context of his work, along with the social relevance and significance of the ideas raised in this extract.
The Souls of Black folk is entirely unique piece of scholarly literature in so far as the language Du Bois uses to express his ideas evoke a particularly emotive response. With reference to the extract Du Bois has used poetic literary techniques, ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’ as well as heavily descriptive language which often draws on his own experiences. The reader gets a true feeling of the passion Du Bois has and the personal connection he feels to the subject. In doing this Du Bois highlights his concern with the subjective and emotional aspects of social life and individual experience as appose to just the social structure these are situated within.
In this extract, Du Bois describes African Americans as existing with a ‘double consciousness’, a concept used to understand how one experiences having two identities, or a split identity. For Du Bois the contradiction of double aims as both an American and an African leaves people feeling unfulfilled, and their potential as human beings unrealised. This was a revolutionary concept because it did more than recognise black discrimination by whites as the sole reason for unequal access to jobs, education and opportunity, but that it was also an effect of the way Black people came to understand their own identity as Americans. The ‘double consciousness’ weighs so heavily on the souls of Black people that they become shut out from the world by what Du Bois describes as a ‘vast veil’. By this he means that the cultural racism that exists in American society stops whites from seeing Black people as true Americans, while simultaneously preventing Black people from seeing themselves as apart from how whites see them.
Du Bois ideas about a double-consciousness were influenced by Hegel’s work ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ which he read while studying at Harvard in 1989-1990.
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
world’.
The passion and emotional connection Du Bois expresses within this extract can perhaps be understood in terms of the historical context it was written in, and of the life of Du Bois more generally. Born just years after the American civil war and black emancipation, Black American citizens were just beginning to experience their reality of freedom in American society. During slavery, emancipation was seen as ‘the key to a promised land of sweater beauty’ for the black Negro. However in reality, the spectre of otherness continued to haunt the Negro years after emancipation. Du Bois experience of carving out a meaningful life for himself an African American where as an identity it was thus far non-existent fuelled his passion to end black discrimination.
Another African American sociologist with the same desires was also working at the time of Du Bois: Booker T Washington. He and Du Bois were fighting for the same end, but addressed black discrimination with differing ideals. Washington advocated gradual change, believing that progress for Blacks comes from a steady job, a bank account and owning his own property. He was critical of Du Bois for trying to integrate black citizens into a white system, rather than working to create a new system that existed wholly for the needs of Black American citizens. Washington believed that it was purposeless to demand political rights in a country where one has not yet established the economic power to back up this demand. Du Bois approach may have been favoured and more widely celebrated, particularly by white Americans, because it did not contest their system and values, rather encouraged black people to situate themselves within this situation.
Regardless of its criticisms, Du Bois work continues to be widely recognised and hold great political influence with regard to Black discrimination in the US and elsewhere. For example in the 1960’s it helped to inspire the American civil rights struggle. It is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece that wonderfully articulates the cost of hatred and the power to resist it. Du Bois work was revolutionary because it recognised that Black US citizens were not just experiencing discrimination from whites, but that they were struggling to form their own singular identity that incorporated both their African roots and the American ideal, or as Du Bois himself pronounces within this extract, ‘two warring ideals in one dark body’.
less equal to the other. In this essay I endeavour to discuss this extract with reference to the specialised language and concepts Du Bois adopts, the historical and intellectual context of his work, along with the social relevance and significance of the ideas raised in this extract.
The Souls of Black folk is entirely unique piece of scholarly literature in so far as the language Du Bois uses to express his ideas evoke a particularly emotive response. With reference to the extract Du Bois has used poetic literary techniques, ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’ as well as heavily descriptive language which often draws on his own experiences. The reader gets a true feeling of the passion Du Bois has and the personal connection he feels to the subject. In doing this Du Bois highlights his concern with the subjective and emotional aspects of social life and individual experience as appose to just the social structure these are situated within.
In this extract, Du Bois describes African Americans as existing with a ‘double consciousness’, a concept used to understand how one experiences having two identities, or a split identity. For Du Bois the contradiction of double aims as both an American and an African leaves people feeling unfulfilled, and their potential as human beings unrealised. This was a revolutionary concept because it did more than recognise black discrimination by whites as the sole reason for unequal access to jobs, education and opportunity, but that it was also an effect of the way Black people came to understand their own identity as Americans. The ‘double consciousness’ weighs so heavily on the souls of Black people that they become shut out from the world by what Du Bois describes as a ‘vast veil’. By this he means that the cultural racism that exists in American society stops whites from seeing Black people as true Americans, while simultaneously preventing Black people from seeing themselves as apart from how whites see them.
Du Bois ideas about a double-consciousness were influenced by Hegel’s work ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ which he read while studying at Harvard in 1989-1990.
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
world’.
The passion and emotional connection Du Bois expresses within this extract can perhaps be understood in terms of the historical context it was written in, and of the life of Du Bois more generally. Born just years after the American civil war and black emancipation, Black American citizens were just beginning to experience their reality of freedom in American society. During slavery, emancipation was seen as ‘the key to a promised land of sweater beauty’ for the black Negro. However in reality, the spectre of otherness continued to haunt the Negro years after emancipation. Du Bois experience of carving out a meaningful life for himself an African American where as an identity it was thus far non-existent fuelled his passion to end black discrimination.
Another African American sociologist with the same desires was also working at the time of Du Bois: Booker T Washington. He and Du Bois were fighting for the same end, but addressed black discrimination with differing ideals. Washington advocated gradual change, believing that progress for Blacks comes from a steady job, a bank account and owning his own property. He was critical of Du Bois for trying to integrate black citizens into a white system, rather than working to create a new system that existed wholly for the needs of Black American citizens. Washington believed that it was purposeless to demand political rights in a country where one has not yet established the economic power to back up this demand. Du Bois approach may have been favoured and more widely celebrated, particularly by white Americans, because it did not contest their system and values, rather encouraged black people to situate themselves within this situation.
Regardless of its criticisms, Du Bois work continues to be widely recognised and hold great political influence with regard to Black discrimination in the US and elsewhere. For example in the 1960’s it helped to inspire the American civil rights struggle. It is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece that wonderfully articulates the cost of hatred and the power to resist it. Du Bois work was revolutionary because it recognised that Black US citizens were not just experiencing discrimination from whites, but that they were struggling to form their own singular identity that incorporated both their African roots and the American ideal, or as Du Bois himself pronounces within this extract, ‘two warring ideals in one dark body’.