February 09, 2005
31Days: Twice as Good
"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 twoness,--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."
I wonder. When W. E. B. Du Bois published these words in Souls of Black Folk in 1903, I wonder if he anticipated that they'd be some of the most frequently quoted words of any African American scholar.
I feel as if I have always known this quote--I have no memory of ever hearing it for the first time, although there must, of course, have been a first time. I think, maybe, it's because this is such a pervasive message given to many middle class African American children by the people responsible for instilling a sense of pride and purpose--so that by the time I read it or heard it for the first time attributed to Du Bois, I just thought "Yeah, duh."
Those people in my life, those keepers, those nurturers--they always seemed to deliver the message--
No, actually I'm gonna stop there and reframe.
I have always interpreted a certain message from those people in my life. I don't think anyone ever told me directly (although I have heard anecdotal reports from friends who do remember receiving the explicit message.) The message, for me, is one neverending and neverbeginning stream. In this stream flows certain Black history and family stories: W. E. B. was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard he studied abroad and was the best and brightest wherever he went Martin King went off to college as a teenager and was reading while still in the womb (flowflowflow...) your grandmother's mother's second cousin was the first African American Catholic bishop Marian Anderson was the best opera singer in the world and was in demand all over Europe and sang for kings and queens (flowflowflow...)
This message involves "being the best"--But unlike other messages of being the best, in this version you must be the best while also being two things at once. And, ergo, if you have to be the best while also being two things at once, then you must be twice as good as someone trying to be the best while only being one thing.
Traditionally, celebrating Black History Month means celebrating stories full of this message--"the first," "the best," "the brightest," "the only"... Some people I've spoken with have started to wonder if this is a good thing, if it wouldn't be more cause for celebration when it's OK for Black people to be "average." Honestly, I'm starting to wonder the same thing.
I'll leave my reflections there for now. For today's links, I offer the following:
(1) W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~du_bois/
(2) W.E.B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute http://www.dubois.gse.upenn.edu/
Established in 1998 at the University of Pennsylvania, the W.E.B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute is a multidisciplinary academic enterprise. Its members represent the twelve schools of the University of Pennsylvania and continue the tradition of "engaged scholarship" in the pursuit of urban issues and themes raised by W.E.B. Du Bois in his landmark study, "The Philadelphia Negro." The Institute serves as a vehicle for dialog and collaborative interdisciplinary research.
(3) The Two Nations of Black America
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/etc/gates.html
Explore the whole site. Especially instructive are the archived comments on the discussion board. Henry Louis Gates begins his essay: "Six black men, each intellectually superior in their own way, graduate from Yale College in the Class of 1966. Each had managed, through some luck and a lot of pluck, to penetrate the iron-clad barriers that have kept the number of blacks matriculating at Yale to a fixed number for the past several decades. When I entered Yale in 1968, ninety six black men and women entered with me, the largest group of Afro-Americans ever to arrive on Yale's Old Campus at one time."
(4) I don't have a link for this, but catch in reruns one of my favorite episodes of The Bill Cosby Show. (Move along if you've Googled "Cosby" and are looking for a scandal discussion, move along.) It's the one where Theo says he doesn't need to go to college because he just wants to be "regular folks." Then Cosby uses Monopoly money to show him how difficult it will be to be "just regular folks." One of the best scenes in TV history, if you ask me. And part of this message I've been talking about.
(5) Check out this interview of one African American super achiever, Patricia Williams on yet another Black (superduper) high achiever Secretary of State, Rice. Excerpt:
"Now, I don't know Rice as a person -- she has been very effective at keeping her life private. But the myth of Condoleezza Rice's life is so akin to what so many of us at a certain age survived, lived, how we constructed ourselves, how we wanted to appear to the public, how we watched the borders of who we were. We were the same kind of achievers. When I hear about the lessons she went to, I think of all the Saturday lessons I went to --swimming, piano. We had to be really well scrubbed. The message you got from your parents was that you might be the first black person a white person had ever seen; you had this whole burden of race on your shoulders. She evokes that feeling in me more than any other public figure."
(6) Finally, one African American woman, a 1994 Brown University grad, has found a solution to the hard labor of working and living the double shift. If you're not already familiar, explore the site linked to in the previous sentence first before you read about it here and here and listen here: 
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