California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: January 2, 2002
Latest update: January 2, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org.

"More than Just One Consciousness"

On December 26, 2002, Serena Thomas wrote:

Subject: Re: A few questions about DuBois

HI it's Serena again. I just wanted to clarify something you said in your reply to me. You had said that you saw "more than just one consciousness, that of seeing yourself through the eyes of others. You said you saw "a very real consciousness, one that cannot be avoided and that asserts itself " as a consciousness that manifested itself."

So my confusion is that, when "you see yourself through the eyes of the other" is that the "real consciousness" that you speak of. The only consciousness that the black person knows of because he has no real self-consciousness. The dominating consciousness from the other affects and consumes him completely. Because of this, a sense of twoness comes into play and this sense of twoness, being an American and Black, are the Double Consiousness which Dubois speaks of. Does this seem to make sense? I'm still stuck on "seeing yourself through the eyes of the other', it just doesn't make sense to me how it fits in to this sense of twoness Dubois talks about. Thank you so much again.

On wednesday, Janurary 2, 2002, jeanne responded:

being patronized. intuition not accepted in academia, but not to be ignored either. Just know. intuition. can be wrong. earth is flat example. want to plant my feet and be secure in a place. but from Mars different problem. they are both true at one and the same time. not linear. no one to one correspondence. instead they are interdependent with their context.

denial works to let us feel comfortable by removing dissonance. but it's not really real. real consciousness is about about what you just know about "me." And DuBois knew who he was. The little white girl who treated him as a black boy simply brought a new perspective of reality. the real "me" comes from personal experience. the reflected "me" is the perspective of others. So conscience, like self, is not a sculpture or a painting or a figure of something that is . . . it is an ever shifting awareness that reflects its many perspectives.

Sorry, Serena, but I managed to accidentally erase the whole file. I'll rewrite it tomorrow. jeanne