In her On Being interview, Claudia Rankine shares a tender and difficult moment from her book Citizen. In the anecdote, a white woman mistakenly calls her black friend by her black housekeeper’s name. Rankine poses this question in the book:
“Do you feel hurt because it’s the ‘all black people look the same’ moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other?”
In her question, I hear echoes of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote of similar experiences of feeling “othered” over a century ago in his book The Souls of Black Folk:
“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.”
Walter Brueggemann talks about poets as prophets who can find language for the uncertainties of the present moment — and Du Bois certainly fits this description. He was the one to write, “The problem with the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” And his words have emboldened so many to voice their experiences living as people of color in America. This week’s On Beingfeatures three such individuals — Elizabeth Alexander, Arnold Rampersad, and the late Maya Angelou. I especially appreciate what Angelou recognized as Du Bois’s gift to the world: “For a black man at that time to teach and to learn and to study under those circumstances when people were being lynched — what Dr. Du Bois showed is that he had enormous courage … You can’t be consistently fair or kind or generous or forgiving — any of those — without courage.”
Du Bois’s legacy of courage — of claiming his own fullness and complexity — is certainly something we can carry with us into the present moment, 116 years after The Souls of Black Folk was first published.
Yours,
Kristin Lin
Editor, The On Being Project
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