Double-consciousness names the psychological cost of racial hierarchy

Evidence

This American world … yields [the Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 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. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 769

Categorization

• DEFINE: The canonical definition of double-consciousness, worth keeping verbatim.
• XREF: connects to: The racial gaze subjects the observed to a humiliating double-consciousness — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 878