sarah DuBois

DuBois has been my favorite reading so far. His writing and his approach hit the nuances of such a vast and complex network of issues that exist when one explores race in america. One of my favorite parts of our discussion in class was when we were trying to unpack his dialectic of the black man in america. The dialectic being american/black; internal/reflected. It was interpreted in a few different ways and Christina stated that what he had discovered was a “messy dialectic”. Attempting to understand which part of one’s own identity is an internal or self-created representation of one’s true self, or whether it is an identity that has been projected or reflected on to you by society, is a difficult duality to tease apart. I appreciate the messiness of this dialectic because when it comes to identity, nothing ever seems straight forward. The idea of intersectionality (which my computer refuses to recognize as a word) kept cropping up for me as I read DuBois and thought about what his approach would be today. His exclusion of women is glaring in his writing, but that exclusion existed in every facet of society at his time. Not that this excuses the misogyny, but it was not a part of discourse. I believe that if he were alive and working today, Dubois would be interested in the concept of intersectionality and the multi-consciousness it forces on individuals. The struggle of idenity would cease to look like a yin-yang and and take on a much more complex shape and dimension.