ON DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS


ON DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

"Double consciousness " is a trope to be used sparingly as when one is quoting famous sentences  from The Souls of Black Folk -----



"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 twoness, ---an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

or

making a sardonic quip ---

"You see my friend, the horse trampled double consciousness when the world went blind."

or

suggesting that

"Vietnamese Americans possess more double consciousness than Hungarian Americans."

or

being as raunchy as the leader of the free world ---

"It is perfect that the genitals of the hermaphrodite have double consciousness."



The trope has been used so frequently that half-alert readers  believe it is more than an explanatory image;  they believe it is an essential, innate truth.  PLEASE.  If our ancestors were able to read the North Star, we ought to be capable of reading as a code of condemnation in biocultural ecology. Double consciousness is not an ethnic privilege.



Without using the words "double consciousness," the code can be activated in advertising writing about life history.  Hype from Wayne State University Press about Black Indian: A Memoir by Shonda Buchanan is typical ---

"Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony   --  only, it isn't fiction.  Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance."



Oh, so Joy Harjo's Crazy Brave: A Memoir , a glorious gift to the world, meets segregated  Mississippi ----Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginning and Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir?



Now is the time for intelligent, literate  Americans to expose the dark conceits of the American publishing industry!



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 4, 2019

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