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The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois·1903·English

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The founding text of African-American philosophy. Du Bois introduces double consciousness — the sense of always looking at yourself through the eyes of others — and argues that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. Each chapter opens with a bar of slave music, placed beside lines from European poetry, enacting the double inheritance the book describes.

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 twoness — 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.

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Black Reconstruction in America

1935·English

A revisionist history of the Reconstruction era, arguing that Black workers and freedmen were active agents of democratic change after the Civil War — and that their exclusion from the historical record is itself an act of political suppression. Du Bois coined the term 'the wages of whiteness' to describe how poor white workers were compensated in status rather than wages for their racial loyalty.

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