Double Consciousness and “My Other”

A few nights ago, I had a very particular dream. In this dream, I was homeless (I'm not sure why, but this was the case) and staying at a shelter for the night. I was rooming with another man - he was black, in his thirties, heavily bearded, and seemed to come from a lower socioeconomic status. My roommate and I did not interact too much; I did not know what we would talk about and he did not seem to be very articulate. Our room was small with one dresser, a single closet, and a bunk bed. Before I went to sleep, I went into the closet to grab one of my possessions and I found my roommate in the closet gorging on my things - I became enraged and started to beat him! My aggression was both simultaneously exhilarating and monstrous. As the beating progressed, I became more and more fearful that I would murder this man, but before that happened I woke up.

Naturally, I was disturbed by my dream. Why did I have this dream and what did it mean? Over the course of this week, I performed some psychoanalytical work on my dream and came to a startling conclusion: I was the homeless man! Recently, I have been attempting to reinvent myself and fundamentally change who I am. The man who I almost killed represented the part of me that I wanted to kill off - homeless, unmotivated, non-presentable, and not a risk-taker. The one aspect of this man's identity that truly frightened me was his blackness; why was he black and what does that say about me? In my environment (Princeton University) it is evident that blackness is an indicator of "otherness," but the question is how do I reconcile my blackness with my desire to be in the mainstream of campus culture? This is probably an unreasonable or invalid question, but is a prime example of the phenomenon that American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois coins as "double consciousness."

In his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois describes double consciousness as...

“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”

of a two-ness, of being "an American, a Negro; [...] two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"

I experience this double consciousness everyday and use it to my advantage. I view my time at Princeton University as a learning opportunity to acquire a certain type of cultural capital that is prevalent amongst this country's capitalist class - the politicians, intellectuals, and CEOs. It is my hope that by the time I graduate, that I'll have the ability to confidently operate in any environment or culture. Double Consciousness and being "the other" grants me a certain perspective unavailable to many of my peers and I need to utilize it to my advantage.

In conclusion, I once heard Dr. Cornel West say that black people are "the ultimate existentialists" because we are always reinventing who we are. Dr. West is right: everyday I am constantly reinventing and reimagining who I am.