Essay Number 2 finished

This time for my course, AMST2601: American Foundations.  This question was posed:

W E B Dubois

Writing in the late nineteenth century, W.E.B. Du Bois famously coined the term “double consciousness” to describe the experience of being both black and American:

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 two-ness— 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 (The Souls of Black Folk)

Does this concept capture African American experiences in the past? Does it still apply to the present?

And I started my answer with these words:

Drawing on predominantly personal narratives of African-American experience, this essay argues that the “peculiar sensation” of double consciousness has been and remains characteristic of Black history in the United States.  Questions of identity are central to understanding experiences as diverse as those of Harriet Jacobs in the 1800s and Barack Obama today. But, as their different personal histories illustrate, and the debates within the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate, identity politics is not sufficient as a narrative through which to read African-American circumstances in past or contemporary America.  

Ended up with just under the 1,500 word limit (excluding 500 words of quotes).  I'm less than wholly confident about the outcome but we'll see.

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