Diagnostic: Double Consciousness

Diagnostic

Read the following passage, being sure to take notes and highlight the main points. Then organize  a short response to passage that reaches at least 300 words. In your response, explain one significant idea from the piece and define its significance. Support your explanation with at least two supporting claims (or reasons that you believe the idea is significant). You will have approximately one hour before I ask you to post your response to your blog. 


Note: This often-reproduced piece was written more than one hundred years ago; you may want to reflect on the author's point of view before you begin your response. In this case, you may detect ideas and language that reveal both 'modern' and 'antiquarian' perspectives on race and culture. Make of it what you will. Enjoy!

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and 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.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. W.E.B. Du Bois, from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (Source)