Warring Images in Afro-American Thought

The subject, ‘Literature and the evolution of Black Consciousness: The Making of an Image’, brings to mind the two often quoted statements of W.E.B. Dubois: one that the problem of the twentieth century is that of the colour line, ‘the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’; and the other, the ‘double consciousness’ through which African American life and thought have evolved. ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity.’ Black consciousness is the awareness and self-identification with the fact of ones blackness in a world that had defined it in negativity. But the image one has of one’s colour depends on whether one is looking at it from the outside or from within oneself. Inside out to the world; or outside inside. But since the world on which the outside-inside gaze is based is full of contempt and pity for that very colour, to adopt it as the base is to get a very distorted idea of oneself. It is to get an image of oneself very different from the image within oneself. Now since much of black writing and thought has at various times adopted one or the other position as the starting base, we can argue that there is not one image: there is not one black consciousness in Afro-American literature, life and thought. There are in fact two opposing consciousnesses, two images, two opposing trends shaped by different persons’ perception of the nature of American society and where one stands relative to the double consciousness of Dubois’ article, ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’.

In all societies, the images we have of ourselves in relation to other selves, or the images we have of other people in relation to ourselves are dependent on the place we occupy in the entire system of organization and control of wealth. It matters whether we are only part of the productive forces, suppliers and sellers of labour power or whether we are hirers of the labour power of others and control the entire environment of production.