Double Consciousness and the Veil

W.E.B. Du Bois came up with the concepts of the veil and double consciousness in his book In the Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois says on page 326 in our textbook Digging into Literature, “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like [them perhaps] in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” This is the pivotal moment. It was here when he noticed that he was not the same as the people around him because he was being seen as someone that he was not and viewed in a negative light. He also brings up a veil which is what  makes it so people don’t see others for what they truly are, but instead see a different version.  Du Bois’s double consciousness is when you are able to see yourself as others see you and the way that the other people see you is not equal to them. With that being said, the veil comes between us and who we are trying to see and at the moment, double consciousness is noticed within the person hidden behind the veil. Both double consciousness and instances of the veil are seen in the essays Black Men and Public Space by Brent Staples and Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin and play a role in how the main character acts.

Brent Staples is like any other graduate student: intelligent, looking forward to a good career, and climbing his way up in society by earning degrees. There is, however, one thing that makes Staples stand out as a menace to society- he is black. He has no criminal record to validate the assumption that he is out to get people yet women still clench their purses and men lock their car doors when he walks past. This here is a prime example of the veil being in place because the people that he passes assume he is less than them and view him differently than how he views himself. Staples showcases this phenomenon in his essay Black Men and Public Space by giving instances of the veil, people not seeing him for who he is, and double consciousness, being seen in different versions of himself. The essay actually starts out with an instance of double consciousness when the lady in the alley picked up the pace to a running speed because she saw a big black man walking close behind her. Staples was obviously meaning no harm to the girl and was just walking; however, she is not in this moment seeing him as an upstanding citizen but a threat to her safety. What I find ironic is he comes from an affluent neighborhood in an otherwise impoverished area. Perhaps the lady in the street thought that he couldn’t possibly have come from the wealthy area and he must be from the not-so-good part of town. He says, in fact, that “in the echoes of a terrified woman’s footfall” he realized that he was being stereotyped. The veil comes up here since he sees himself as he truly is yet he also can see the fictitious version of himself that the frightened lady is running from. Whether he was being viewed as a mugger or a rapist, it was not him. He even goes as far to say that he is scarcely able to cut a raw chicken let alone hurt another human being, yet women in particular would flee the scene when he’d be in close proximity. This is an example of the veil because he doesn’t view himself as harmful and actually he sees himself as the exact opposite. Since people are not be able to see past the veil, they only view him as someone less than equal to them and stereotypes him as a “bad guy.” 

James Baldwin traveled to a small, mountain village in Switzerland with a population of only around six hundred people. There are not many things open in this town when it is not summer and they have tourists filling the streets. Even with the few hundred tourists that visit this village, there had never been a Negro man or woman show up until Baldwin arrived. In his essay, Baldwin looks at double consciousness and the veil from the perspective of a true anomaly- a person with black skin in a village of people whom had never encountered anyone that was not white. He says before his trip he was warned that he would be a “sight” for the village. Coming from a place where the people were diverse, he couldn’t possibly imagine an entire town of people that had never see an African American man and assumed that the “sight” would be him since he was a city boy in a rural area. This shows double consciousness because he thought that this was because he was a city a boy in a rural village. What he didn’t realize is that the villagers didn’t care that he was from a city; instead they saw him as a sight because he was not the same skin color as them. He uses the term “white wilderness” to describe the town where he stood apart from everyone. The children call him “Neger” and shout it to him when he walks by. This is both an example of the veil because for him, the children are only seeing him from the outside, and also double consciousness because he notices how the children are viewing him as a lesser version of himself. They aren’t looking at his personality or intelligence or anything besides his skin color and making assumptions based on that. Everyone in the town knows his name yet it is rarely used and this is like them saying they really don’t care to learn his name because they know his skin color and can call him that since that is what is truly important about him.  Baldwin says “The children who shout Neger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me.” While he doesn’t directly say why it sounds echoes inside of him, I would assume it is because he wants them to know that there is more to him than the color of his skin.

After looking at what both authors experienced, it is clear to see that even now, the concept of the veil and double consciousness still exist. What I found most interesting between the two is that once they saw the veil between them and the people on the other side, they altered their own actions. Staples talks about how he learned to smother the rage from so often being mistaken for a criminal and took precautions to seem less threatening. Especially when he wasn’t dressed in business attire from work, he would do his best to not follow what one might consider “too close” behind and he whistles Beethoven and Vivaldi so that people walking by know he is calm, educated, and not going to harm them in any way. He even mentions that on the rare occasion in which he is pulled over, he always acts calm and extremely congenial when face to face with the officer. Similarly, Baldwin was raised to be a likable person since trying “to be pleasant at all times was a great part of the American Negro's education that took place before they would go to school”. If the child understood that he had to be amiable in order for people to like him back and not be place judgement.

            The concept of the veil and double consciousness are prevalent in the essays Black Men and Public Space by Brent Staples and Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin. The people in the essays experience things unfairly and are driven to change how they act to accommodate the prejudice and fears that the people around them hold. Staples experiences double consciousness when he hears the clicks of cars locking as he walks past and is screened out by individuals such as policemen and bouncers whose job it is to pick out troublesome-looking individuals. Baldwin gets more of a taste of the veil when he is in the village in Switzerland and people don’t call him by his name or believe that he is a writer from America. They not only assume that he is from Africa since he is black, but they also call him Neger since that is the color of his skin. I would get annoyed if someone replaced my name with white because I’m not just white. I am so much more than that and I wouldn’t want people judging me solely off my skin tone. What can be seen when comparing the essays is that double consciousness and the veil go hand in hand. The veil is noticed when an instance of double consciousness occurs and this is because we can go without noticing ourselves being different from the people around us, but when someone acts differently around you and doesn’t see you for who you really are and for all of you, that is when the veil is noticed between you.