Ernest Allen

Ever Feeling One's Twoness: "Double Ideals" and "Double Consciousness" in the Souls of Black Folk

In his The Souls of Black Folk published at the turn of the century, W.E.B. Du Bois posited the existence of a duality within African-American life. Since the 1960s in particular it has become de rigueur for academicians and activists alike, in the face of their own apparent confirmations of Du Bois’ observations at the empirical level, to either quote, paraphrase, or in some way make reference to those marvelously crafted lines of his 1903 work:

NOTES ON THE CONCEPT OF INTEGRATION

Abstract INTEGRATION was one of those enigmatic notions that crept into the vocabulary of the African American liberation struggle of the twentieth century, which then seemingly turned into a palimpsest, blotting out any trace of its historical origins. A term that “everyone” apparently understood but which most failed to interrogate, integration was commonly perceived as the “inverse” of segregation—which was only true insofar one was willing to reduce each term to a spatial metaphor, with segregation indicating societal “exclusion” and integration signifying “inclusion.” This makeshift conceptual simplification was frequently patched over by the drafting of desegregation as an intermediate term standing for the inversion of segregation, with integration now elevated to a more or less utopian concept of how a society sans racial distinctions ought to appear. The purpose of this essay is to trace the Great Depression origins of integration nomenclature, review the sharpening of its parameters in a long-forgotten “integration versus separation” debate, and provide a baseline argument for a more extensive set of questions and answers to come.

African American Faculty Speak Out

The following papers were delivered at an African American Faculty Speak Out, sponsored by the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, on the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on November 13, 1991. The participants were: Ernest Allen, Jr., Afro-American Studies; John H. Bracey, Jr., Afro-American Studies; Vicki Crawford, Womens Studies; John Higginson, History; Joy James, Afro-American; Esther Terry, Afro-American Studies; E. Francis White, History, Hampshire College; John Wideman, English.