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In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the famous first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois ascribes to the AfricanAmerican consciousness what he perceives to be a fundamental "two-ness." This "double-consciousness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (3), is an effect of the contradictory positioning of African-American culture within the dominant social order of "white Americanism" (4). On the one hand, American democratic capitalism promotes to its ethnic constituents its promise of economic opportunity, material satisfaction, and social justice. On the other, it consistently fails to grant black Americans full and equal access to the socioeconomic structures upon which the fruits of this promise depend.
As Du Bois describes it, this political condition, a consequence of pressures exterior to the black community, creates a corresponding interior dilemma for African-Americans who achieve authority in American culture despite its institutionalized racism. Which of two competing allegiances does one serve? One's loyalty to the black community, which would benefit profoundly from one's acquired expertise in engaging white America? Or one's duty to one's own future, ironically linked to the esteem of a majority culture violently inimical to the minority community of which one is a part?
In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, composed some ten years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, James Weldon Johnson likewise identifies "a sort of dual personality" which "every coloured man" has "in proportion to his intellectuality," a "dualism" which persists both "in the freemasonry of his own race" and "in the presence of white men" (2122). And like Du Bois, Johnson's hero feels a dichotomy at the core of his ambition: "Was it more a desire to help those I considered my people, or more a desire to distinguish myself. . . ?" (147).
Du Bois calls this dilemma "the waste of double aims," a "seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals" (5) which can never be reconciled. The powerfully unitary pull of responsibility to community and responsibility to self, when configured as oppositional by a racist symbolic order, must inevitably become selfdestructive. Thus, sublated in this polarized crisis of responsibility is an equivalently polarized crisis of identity.
Cornel West has argued that it...