Double Consciousness

Double consciousness is the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, and of holding two social identities that are in tension, especially among members of marginalized groups who must navigate a dominant society that devalues them. The concept was introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, where he described the experience of Black Americans as a peculiar sensation of two-ness, an American and a Negro, with two warring ideals in one dark body. Du Bois drew on the idea of the veil that separates Black life from white society, and he linked double consciousness to the gift of second sight, a perspective that reveals the workings of racism. Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the psychological effects of colonialism in Black Skin, White Masks and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic developed related themes, and Charles Horton Cooley’s looking-glass self offers a broader account of how people see themselves through others. Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of the outsider within and Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza consciousness extend the idea to gender and borderlands. Double consciousness remains central to research on race, identity, colonialism, migration, and social inequality.