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Life
He coined 'double consciousness' — the sense of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others — and spent sixty years fighting the world that made it necessary.
He was born in Martinique, studied psychiatry in France, and spent his life analyzing what colonialism does to the mind — and what it takes to undo it.
Connection
W.E.B. Du Bois double consciousness and colonial psychology Frantz Fanon — Fanon cited Du Bois's concept of double consciousness as a predecessor to his own analysis of the colonized psyche — the internal split produced when the colonized person must see themselves through the colonizer's eyes. Both argued that this psychological damage precedes and shapes economic and political oppression.
Ideas
Words
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
“One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”
“The colonist makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his metropolis, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that metropolis.”
Key Moments
1895
First Black American PhD from Harvard
1903
The Souls of Black Folk published
1909
Co-founded the NAACP
1956
Joins the Algerian revolution
1961
The Wretched of the Earth dictated while dying
Works
The Souls of Black Folk
Black Reconstruction in America
The Wretched of the Earth