popular american culture discussion 1

Read:

Pilgrim Foreword and Chapter One

https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=883 (The pages to the forward and chapter one are found at the bottom of the page on this link)

Discussion Prompt:

1. Pilgrim writes in Chapter One, “All groups tell stories, but some groups have the power to impose their stories on others, to label others, stigmatize others, paint others as undesirables, and to have these social labels presented as scientific fact, God’s will, or wholesome entertainment” (8). These stories, told by whites about blacks in America, are the basis of what W.E.B. Dubois called “double consciousness.” Quoting and paraphrasing from Pilgrim, please write about how the two quotes below relate to Pilgrim’s Intro and Chapter One:

“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 two-ness, 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. The history of the American Negro is the history o9f this strife- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face” (2-3). – WEB DuBois

“Double consciousness is knowing the particularity of the white world in the face of its enforced claim to universality. Double consciousness is knowing the history offered up to black people—its many interpretations and echoes of white superiority and black inferiority, of white heroism and black cowardice, and even the temporal and geographical location of history’s beginning as a step off of the African continent—is a falsehood that blacks are forced to treat as truth in so many countless ways. Double consciousness, in other words, is knowing a lie while living its contradiction.” – Steve Biko

 

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