W'E'B' DuBois

1
W.E.B. DuBois

• The Souls of Black Folks and issues in
  socialization

2
To begin recall socialization

• Interaction
• Significant others
• Generalized Other
• Looking glass (from Cooley)
• Internalizing societal norms
• Other?

3
Do these have anything to do with DuBois world?
A problem

• What is the veil?
• What is its effect?
• their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or
  into silent hatred of the pale world about them
  and mocking distrust of everything white or
  wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make
  me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

4
Effect of the veil

• born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight
  in this American world,a world which yields him
  no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see
  himself through the revelation of the other world

5
Another example Kent

• Hylan Lewis, Blackways of Kent
• Part of a trilogy, late 1940s, of York, SC
• Racial etiquette and rules
• Segregation, but only of white establishments
  activities
• Few black establishments (e.g., funeral parlor)
• Political, economic and law enforcement power all
  white
• Need of white sponsor or protector
• Black Kent existed in, but apart from, and below,
  white Kent
• No lynching, but some other cross-racial violence
  by police and at least one mob
• Dual vision of whites some trusted individuals
  but white folks is white folks

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Black culture in Kent

• Two categories
• Respectables
• Unrespectables
• Based on
• Heavy drinking
• Premarital or extramarital sex
• Not employed regularly
• Fighting
• Police records
• Cooperating (too much) with the white
  establishment

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Tie Kent to DuBois Thesis

• Double self
• Double consciousness
• Double aims
• Lewis argues that general norms were the same in
  black and white Kent, but
• a. Could not be applied straightforwardly in
  black Kent
• b. There was resistance (mainly from the
  non-respectables) to cultural ideas that were too
  white

8
General Application

• Issue of stigma
• Any stigmatized individual or community
• This refers to a person or group whose members
• Look in the social looking glass
• Always fall short (at least to themselves)
• Can be based on anything
• Always a gap (a veil?) with the larger world

9
How to deal with

• Change self
• Disparage outside world
• Hide stigmatized aspects
• Self-hatred
• Build a community of like-people with a
  separate view of the world
• But there are limits
• More on this when we get to Erving Goffman