Blog Post #8: The Double Sidedness of the Double Consciousness

I've been thinking about this concept of double consciousness a lot since reading Du Bois' piece, not necessarily in terms of marginalization, but, as he says himself, "this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others."

To go on a bit of a tangent, I am a quarter Indian. Outwardly, you wouldn't know that as I look as white as the other three-fourths of myself. In many situations, I feel the need to say that I'm Indian so as better to connect with people who are also Indian, or to show that I'm "cultured." I often feel like a fish out of water, either with other South Asians because I look nothing like them and was brought up in a different environment than many of them, but also among other white people, because I have a very different family structure and cultural traditions that they don't share. Take the South Asian Student Association event a couple weeks ago called Jalwa. There were a fair amount of non South Asian people in attendance, but I felt that when people saw me, they classified me as one of them. Someone who is "other." I can't tell you how many thoughts I've had, wishing I was just a little more outwardly brown so that I could fit in better. This is my own inner double consciousness that I struggle with.

But it is people who are outwardly different from the dominant group who face external double consciousness. While double consciousness is, inherently, related to marginalization, it does give those marginalized a unique perspective from which to analyze their society. Take Du Bois for example. As an African American, he faced much persecution and discrimination on the margins of society. However, he used that vantage point to create social commentary and propose changes to the social order in the US.

Another potential flower growing through the cracks of marginalization are the communities formed with people that have marginalized commonalities. Aarti Shahani, an NPR reporter, presents a good example of this. When she was growing up in the US, her and her family were undocumented. They lived in an apartment building with people from many other faiths—Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists. Outside of that building, the countries they were from had tenuous relationships with each other, but inside of it they were a family. It was the marginalization they all faced as immigrants that brought them together and allowed for them to set their differences aside and focus on the things they had in common.

Being on the margins of society definitely brings a host of complications, but there isn't just a blank, cracked pavement, there are also beautiful flowers shooting up with hope.