W.E.B. Du Bois Redux:

Double Consciousness in Independent Schools

An interactive workshop, NAIS People of Color Conference 2002—Chicago

Today’s Objectives:

1. Use the concept of Double Consciousness as a launching pad to share stories and learn from each other

2. Share excerpts from Black intellectuals that may be useful in creating dialogue

3. Get some work done so we can return to our schools with additional tools to promote change and growth

Background

Harlem Experience:

So I was talking to this student, and she asked, “Miss K, are you Puerto Rican?” I get asked that sometimes because of my hair [it’s thick and curly]. I said, “Nope.” And you know what she said? She said, “So you’re all Black?” I mean, have you ever seen whiter skin than mine? I guess this girl just thought there were only two kinds of people in the world, Latino and Black, and since I wasn’t one, I must be the other

--E. K., a White teacher in Harlem

Black Intellectuals--coursework

· Institute for Research in African-American Studies-- Columbia University

· Professor Farah Griffin, Columbia University

Double Consciousness

It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring oneself by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

--W. E. B. Du Bois, from The Souls of Black Folk

Discussion Questions======================

1. What does “double consciousness” mean?

2. How applicable is the concept of Double Consciousness in your school?

a) Faculty

b) Students

Richard Wright—On “White Secrets”

In Native Son, Bigger Thomas ventures from his neighborhood to the Dalton home. This is a new world for him, an unknown and confusing world with different norms of behavior, different expectations, and a different role for him within it:

The houses he passed were huge; lights glowed softly in the windows. The streets were empty, save for the occasional car that zoomed passed on swift rubber tires. This was a cold and distant world; a world of white secrets carefully guarded. He could feel a pride, a certainty, and a confidence in those streets and houses.[1]

Contrast the observations and perceptions of Bigger Thomas in the Dalton home to when he returns to his family:

He looked around the room, seeing it for the first time. There was no rug on the floor and the plastering on the walls and ceiling hung loose in many places. There were two worn iron beds, four chairs, an old dresser, and a drop leaf table on which they ate. This was much different from Dalton’s home. Here all slept in one room; there he could have a room for himself alone. He smelled food cooking and remembered that one could not smell food cooking in Dalton’s home; pots could not be heard rattling all over the house. Each person lived in one room and had a little world of his own. He hated this room and all the people in it including himself. Why did he and his folks have to live like this? What had they ever done? [2]

Discussion Questions======================

1. What are “white secrets, carefully guarded”? (Note:Lisa Delpitt talks about the “code of power.” Is this the same thing?)

2. How can we teach/learn these secrets?

3. Frantz Fanon—Different Worlds

Frantz Fanon writes about French Colonialism in Africa in The Wretched of the Earth:

The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans can swallow all leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settlers’ feet are never visible except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settlers’ town is a well fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners.

The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro Village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they died there, it matters not where nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their hearts were built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.[3]

In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressors’ culture, the native has had to leave a certain of his intellectual possessions in pawn. These pledges include his adoptions of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie…The danger that will haunt him continually is that of becoming the uncritical mouthpiece of the masses; he becomes a kind of yes man who nods assent at every word coming from the people, which interprets as considered judgments.[4]

Discussion Questions======================

1. How much of Fanon’s imagery, written about colonial Africa in the 1950s, applies today?

2. What does it mean to be living in one “town” and going to school in the other? How can we support these students?
Lisa Delpitt—The Code of Power

“My kids know how to be Black—you all teach them how to be successful in the White man’s world.”

--Parent comment, from Other People’s Children, by Lisa Delpit[5]

Lisa Delpit addresses the “culture of power” and the differences in communication styles between those within and outside the culture of power. Specifically, she points out the penchant of those in power—the white majority—to communicate indirectly; they encode their power position in an egalitarian ethos that adds to the confusion of students and adults from the non-majority culture because behaviors and expectations are only subtly and indirectly communicated. (Her example: “Please take a bath” versus “Get your rusty behind in the tub!”) Under this guise of equality lies a code of power that can be indecipherable to the minority culture.

Discussion Questions======================

1. What is the “Code of Power?” (Note: Richard Wright identifies “white secrets, carefully guarded.” Is this the same thing?)

4. How can we teach this Code? Who needs to learn it?

Paul Lawrence Dunbar—The Mask

“We Wear the Mask”

by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh, the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask.

Discussion Questions======================

1. How do you respond to this poem? What memories or stories does this evoke?

2. How can this poem be used to further understanding in our schools?

Note: To see an example of how this poem can generate dialogue, please read the attached story, The Story of Doc, told to me by a classmate at Columbia. Together we read “We Wear the Mask;” afterwards, she told the story.

On Economic Strength

Frantz Fanon—from Wretched of the Earth

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”[6]

Malcolm X in his speech, “Message to the Grass Roots,” (1963):

The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. It’s the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks—on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.

Shelby Steele in his essay, “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?”

I think the real trouble between the races in America is that the races are not just races but competing power groups – a fact that is easily minimized, perhaps because it is so obvious. What is not so obvious is that this is true quite apart from the issue of class. Even the well-situated middle-class (or wealthy) black is never completely immune to that peculiar contest of power that his skin color subjects him to. Race is a separate reality in American society, an entity that carries its own potential for power, a mark of fate that class can soften considerably but not eradicate. [7]

Discussion Questions======================

1. How do you respond to these excerpts from three very different thinkers?

2. Is Double Consciousness driven by class and economic power? How?

3. How can these thoughts be used in our schools?

W.E.B. Du Bois—Our Spiritual Strivings

W.E.B Du Bois writes in his essay, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”

He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Discussion Question======================

What are our “spiritual strivings” today?

Anna Julia Cooper—Healthy Conflict

Essay titled, “Has America a Race Problem? If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?” Written in 1892

All through God’s universe we see internal harmony and symmetry as the unvarying result of the equilibrium of opposing forces…the beautiful curves described by planets and suns in their courses are the resultant of conflicting forces. Could the centrifugal force for one instant triumph, or should the centripetal grow weary and give up the struggle, an immeasurable disaster would ensue—Earth, Moon, Sun would go spinning off at a tangent or must fall helplessly into its master sphere. The acid counterbalances and keeps in order the alkali; the negative, the positive electrode. A proper equilibrium between a most inflammable explosive and supporter of combustion, gives us water, the bland fluid that we cannot dispense with. Nay, the very air we breathe, which seems so peaceful, is rendered innocuous only by the constant conflict of opposing gases. Were the fiery, never resting, all corroding oxygen to gain the mastery we should be burnt to cinders into a trice. With a sluggish, inert nitrogen triumphant, we should die of inanition…Progressive peace in a nation is the result of conflict; and conflict, such as is healthy, stimulating, and progressive, is produced through the coexistence of radically opposing or racially different elements.[8]

Discussion Questions======================

1. What is the difference between confict that is “healthy, stimulating, and progressive” and unhealthy conflict?

2. How can we as diversity practitioners manage the tension created by our work?

Langston Hughes

I, Too

By Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They tell me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed ---

I, too, am America.

Color

by Langston Hughes

Wear it like a banner

For the proud,

Not like a shroud

The Story of Doc

This story is included to give you an idea of the dialogue that can be generated when discussing Double Consciousness. I asked a good friend, an African-American PhD student, about her perspective on “double consciousness.” Together we read Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask;” afterwards, she told the following story.

My family has some land in East Texas, where I grew up. Well I actually grew up in Houston, but we spent the weekends in the country at Momma Sadie’s house in the country.

In one generation, we went from a family of sharecroppers to a family attending Ivy League schools – my cousin recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and here I am at Columbia. Momma Sadie had a ninth grade education. She wanted to keep going to school, but there were no schools. All those ideals about Horace Mann and the Common School[9], well you can forget that stuff. For a black girl in the South, there simply were no secondary level schools around her community for her to attend.

Let me tell you about the land. My grandfather was a very smart man. He saved money even though they were sharecroppers. He and Momma Sadie saved money to buy the land. By the time my daddy was about 10 they had their own land that they were sharecropping. They grew their own cotton, so they were not working for The Man anymore. They were good cottonpickers—ooh, I hate that word—so they hired themselves out after they’d worked their own land. That’s privatization and entrepreneurship! They were good, they were sooo good – they worked as a family, a great team! Momma Sadie would sing songs and recite poetry she learned as a school girl to keep the children entertained as they worked in the blistering hot sun, with bugs, and an occasional snake slithering by their feet.

Being black in the South, there were lots of times the storeowners and cotton bailers would try to give them the wrong price. Momma Sadie would take the receipt and come back to the farm with a devalued price for their cotton. Whenever this would occur Momma Sadie and Popa had devised a plan to get fair market value for the family’s work. She would go back to the white folk and make a scene that “my husband is going to get me” for bringing home less money and tell the store owner and cotton bailer that they were “good white folk” that should not steal from her family’s work in this way -- until they would change the price. About a week later, Grandpa would go down to the feed store and do the man-talk and apologize for his hysterical wife about how “we gotta keep the women under control.” He made it clear that his wife was acting on her own charge and to disassociate her behavior from his desire to be treated with dignity and fairness for the work his family performed. Rather than make a scene about the fact that they had been overcharged for supplies or underpaid for their cotton, he made it sort of a man thing, like his woman had messed up. That way it got them the right price and kept him alive. Now that’s a story! That’s a mask! He put her up to it and it was all very strategic. They were getting over on the white folk trying to get over on them!

Now lets fast forward to my father, Doc…

You look at Doc now, he is a professor, but he picked cotton as a boy, adolescent, and college student during summer breaks. Growing up in the 1950s, people think about bobby socks and sock hops, but my dad was on a buckboard -- board on the back of a pick-up truck. He wasn’t riding around in a convertible Chevrolet, stopping at the drive-in for a chocolate malt, he was working hard pulling a six foot-long cotton sack.

Here’s how Doc got his education. The cotton crop comes in twice a year – late Spring (around May) and early Fall (about October). School started in September, so he and his siblings would stop by and pick up their books and then they wouldn’t go back to school until the end of October. They would be working the cotton fields. Once it got to be wintertime, they would go to school and they could go all the way through the winter, but by spring it was time to work the fields again. To study, the older kids helped the younger ones, and believe it or not, everybody in the family is now in education. We’ve got biology teachers, English teachers, librarians, mathematics professors, dieticians, home economics teachers, six siblings with Master degrees, and two with Ph.D.’s. So Doc went to school, graduated from Prairie View A&M University, was president of his high school class, all while missing three months of every school year. And they still got called “cotton pickers.”

After school or working in the cotton field every day, Doc would go in the woods and hunt for rabbit, squirrel, ‘coon. That was the meat for that night’s dinner. That’s the framework. In talking about the mask, that was it. They needed some meat, so he hunted. They worked the land.

So the story of 1989. Doc now has twenty-something years as a professor at a major university, he’s got his Ph.D., and the land means a lot to everyone. My grandfather, before he died, made my father promise to take care of the land. So there is the backdrop to this story.

So Doc cleared the land, chopped tree stumps, moved brush, and started buying cattle to turn the former cotton fields into a ranch farm. There is this humungous sprawling pecan tree that is, like, the most beautiful thing in the world, and the cows sit under it and eat the sweet nuts. Cows have a sweet tooth you know. There is a lot of history to this land.

So the story I want to tell was during a school break, I think it was Thanksgiving break, while I was in college. It must have been in 1989 and I was an engineering major, heavy into electromagnetic theory, differential equations, Calculus I, II and III, and my math professor dad was like, THERE. And with all I knew and all I was learning, I still knew that he knew more than I did! This brother was deep!

So we were going to East Texas to do work on the farm that particular week, as he usually did several weekends during the month. He stopped in town at the feed store on the way to visit the land. I was excited to stop at the feed store because they always have some babies, you know, baby chickens, baby rabbits. We drive up in this old pickup truck that was all about work, there’s nothing stylish about this pickup truck. This is very important to projecting a lowly image in the East Texas community versus driving the other vehicle, the Lincoln Continental or even buying a brand new pickup truck for farm work. And we had just completed the October cut of the hay so we wanted to get some fertilizer on the hayfield soon after the cut. He went into the feed store to order the hayfield fertilizer, some salt/mineral blocks for the cows, and some de-worming medicine for the cattle to get them in the best health for the upcoming winter. So we had probably 100 head of cattle, numerous acres of ground to fertilize, we had a lot of land and anyone could drive up there and see it. And we were going to spend some money. Dad was probably going to spend several thousand dollars at the feed store.

So Doc goes up to ask this gentleman, this white guy who was probably 30 years older than my father and was very much a part of the Jim Crow South in Texas, during the days of “separate but equal,” and I’m over looking at the baby chicks and watching him as he goes through the process of asking for things. He’s back talking, mumbling, saying “Yassah, Yah,” small talking, but small talking from a perspective that is definitely lowering his station. So I just remember being in the corner watching this man, my father, just looking at him and reeling, like “What is he doing?” He’s got the overalls, the sportsman’s jacket, his ragamuffin shoes, but still, yeah, I just saw him doing this pat-and-shuffle routine while he wrote the big check. My dad probably ordered $2000 worth of stuff. He’s paying this man $2000 and pat-and-shuffling around while doing it!

When we got out to the car, I just remember being so upset and like, “What are you doing?” And I was thinking, “You are Doctor F, what are you doing?” And that’s when I got schooled about the importance of the mask.

His main line was, “It’s just not worth it. Momma Sadie is still alive and lives around here. You do not want to appear to be uppity.” You see, Daddy was acceptable in white folk’s eyes because he worked at the colored college, so he was not above himself. He felt like it was not above the white folk to hurt Momma Sadie (or at least be silent while overt racists hurt her), so he didn’t want to go up there flexing, showing off. They could easily torch the land and shoot each one of the cows if they thought you were being uppity, and Doc was not going to allow that to happen.

So it was worth the mask. It is not just the money, it was a promise to his father, his promise to take care of the land, his connection to his mother, and he was not going to let someone hurt that promise and destroy the dream because he was being an uppity nigger, that wasn’t going to happen. Doc said he knows who he is.

That is The Story of Doc, and that was the end of my age of innocence. I knew the mask existed and was not a relic of the past. But a viable tool used to nurture your loved ones and to protect the priceless symbols of a beautiful legacy.

My family is blessed.

Bibliography

Mark Twain said, “Education is wasted on the young.” If you have not read Native Son since high school, when it is age-inappropriate and most of us lacked the life’s experience to appreciate it’s power, read it again! Similarly, check out The Soul’s of Black Folk; W.E.B Du Bois is a giant.

Worley, Demetrice A. and Perry Jr., Jesse: African American Literature: An Anthology of Non-Fiction, Fiction, Poetry and Drama, copyright 1993. 1995 printing by National Textbook Company, division of NTC Publishing Group.

Mark H. Tashjian

Head of Middle School

Collegiate School

260 West End Avenue

New York, NY 10024

mtashjian@collegiateschool.org

[7] The Content of our Character, first published in Harpers in June 1988:

[8] The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, p. 121-122, in her essay, “Has America a Race Problem?”

[9] Horace Mann espoused the belief that the American public education system could be the great equalizer among classes by providing a common experience – the so-called common school – for all, regardless of socioeconomic status