Entry · catalog no. 1322
double consciousness
/ /ˈdʌbəl ˈkɒnʃəsnəs/ /DUH-buhl KON-shuhs-nuhs
noun phrase · Atlanta and Massachusetts; read nationwide · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
The condition W. E. B. Du Bois described of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others — measuring one's soul, as he put it, by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
“He called it double consciousness: you are doing the work and watching yourself be watched doing it.”
2.
The two-ness that follows from it — being American and Negro at once, two unreconciled strivings held in one body.
“Every job interview is a small exercise in double consciousness.”
Origin & Attribution
From W. E. B. Du Bois, who set it out in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), reworked from his Atlantic Monthly essay "Strivings of the Negro People" (1897). Du Bois was a Black scholar from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, writing about the interior cost of the color line in a country that had just abandoned Reconstruction. The phrase was borrowed from nineteenth-century psychology and medicine, but Du Bois turned it into a description of Black American life that the discipline of sociology had not produced and could not.
1897
Strivings of the Negro People appears in The Atlantic Monthly, August
1903
Reworked as Of Our Spiritual Strivings, the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk
1960s
Taken up as a founding text by Black studies departments as they are established
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Atlanta and Massachusetts; read nationwide · 1900s
Spoken by
Black scholars, teachers, preachers and writers; now standard in Black studies, sociology and everyday reflection on race
$DOUBLEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady129 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
72/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1897
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago
book · 1903
■
+ Cite a sourceW. E. B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro People, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1897
magazine essay · 1897
See also