“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… two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
-W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black folk
The experience Du Bois is discussing here is what we generally know as internalised oppression now but remain oblivious to the profundity of it. W.E.B Du Bois, a prominent sociologist and civil rights activist, coined the term “Double consciousness” to explain the colonisation of the ideal selves of the marginalized communities by the privileged.
The occurrence of a voice in one’s head monitoring their behaviour, critiquing it, is familiar to everyone. Philosopher Simon Critchley describes it as an essential aspect of the human mind. He believes that the mind is split into two, the experienced self and the ideal self, the voice in our head that guides our ideals, the self we think we should be. And he thinks it can never completely go away since its demands are part of having a mind. Critchley describes the self as “a split subject divided between itself and a demand that it cannot meet, a demand that makes it the subject that it is, but which it cannot fulfil.” Our ideal self can be the voice of reason, it can be our moral conscience but it can also be cruel, it can adapt ideals through experienced self’s lens and get infiltrated in a way that goes against the experienced self’s well being.
The concept of Double Consciousness stems from this contamination of the ideal self, only this time it’s not just feeding your insecurities, it’s political. Du Bois coined this term in reference to the friction within the African-American consciousness, including his own. He grew up in a family which was a part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington, Massachusetts at that time. Usually treated well by the European American community, and recognised for his intellectual abilities by his teachers, the term also refers to his experience of being brought up in a privileged dominated society. Through his perspective, we can observe how double-consciousness tends to be more prominent amongst the marginalised trying to fit in the world than the ones who prefer to stay in their safe spaces which is another indication of their ideal self barring them, a protection, so the conflict within doesn’t cultivate.
In India, the systemic problem that is caste has been so deep-seated amongst the general population that it has cultivated into its own consciousness, the caste consciousness. Caste consciousness and double consciousness amongst the marginalised communities run parallel to each other. Upper Caste is outspoken about their oblivious, unmindful take on the lower caste and remains unaccountable, ignorant of a likely presence of the marginalised in their company. This unawareness, toxic to the underprivileged, results in intensifying their anxieties. Marginalised have to incorporate the perspectives of the privileged who have an aversion to their identity, as a means of survival. Du Bois describes this feeling of always having to be thinking of oneself from the viewpoint of somebody who hates you as a uniquely distressing experience.
Double consciousness thus, plays intrinsically into the survival of the systemic structure beneficial to the privileged of the society. Academia is overwhelmingly white accounting for 76% of it when it comes to America and overwhelmingly upper caste in case of India, with more than 65% of it constituting of them. Focusing on academic philosophy, since it’s a way to analyse ideas but also incorporate ideals amongst students, awareness of who they are required to study might just be essential, and assuring when it comes to the people of colour.
Immanuel Kant, one of the single most influential moral philosopher to ever live was a huge, blunt racist which might seem contradictory to his moral philosophy. He used to argue how people of colour can’t be educated to the same levels, how they are suited for menial jobs. He asserted his racism using what we now know as false science, and that too as a serious academic. We can argue that he was a product of his time but learning about this inconsistency of his philosophy and his personhood might tell us more about his own philosophical system and how he believed it was supposed to work. In his paper “How to deal with Kant’s racism — In and Out of the classroom” Victor Abundez-Guerra argues that if we don’t teach philosophy students about these oppressive ideologies of influential philosophers then we are deliberately allowing them to form a false picture of the person behind the ideas being taught which they can’t help but imagine. And to say that their position doesn’t matter can be impudent to students coming from socially underprivileged sections. In “Blackness Visible” philosopher Charles Mills writes:
“There is a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off… The impatience or indifference that I have sometimes detected in black students seems to derive in part from their sense that there is something strange in spending a whole course describing the logic of different moral ideas, for example, without ever mentioning that all of them were systemically violated for blacks”
Kant never left his hometown but was extremely outspoken about his racism as a serious academic, never thinking of actually interacting with the people of colour. This makes one wonder if the Academia is full of people coming from a privileged background because their ideal self hasn’t been colonised to the extent oppressed communities’ ideal selves have? Double consciousness is just another tool of oppression, it’s passive, it’s systemic and it’s a terrifying barrier between an individual and their individuality.
References:
Abundez-Guerra, Victor. How to Deal with Kant’s Racism — In and Out of the Classroom, University of California Riverside
Mills, Charles. Blackness Visible, Cornell University Press, 1998
UCL, Why is my curriculum white? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dscx4h2l-Pk
Philosophy Tube, Why Do I Hate My Self? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AuFvboGKrQ
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk, A.C McClurg & Co, 1903
Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding, Verso Books, 2013
