Klein’s doppelganger concept extends Du Bois’s double-consciousness into a theory of racial doubling

Evidence

All members of historically hated groups lug around versions of this invisible double, and some doublings are far more dangerous than others. To be Black in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1897, required a “double-consciousness,” a constant feeling of “two-ness,” which generated a longing “to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” one that did not require this partition. To this day, Blackness generates a double that is so treacherous to those it is projected upon, and so unremitting in its persistence through the centuries, that no activity is safe from being overtaken by the lethal racial double—not driving, not going for a run, not walking home from the store, not struggling with the lock on your own jammed front door. (“I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits / and facial tics,” wrote June Jordan in her 1976 poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.”) Facial recognition software, originally marketed as a way to remove these kinds of biased doublings from policing, has automated them instead, with artificial intelligence repeatedly misidentifying Black faces, often leading to wrongful arrests and upended lives. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 923

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how the doppelganger concept, previously personal, becomes a general structure of racialized projection across history.
• XREF: Du Bois’s double-consciousness is a canonical ancestor of every modern doubled-identity theory (Anzaldua, Fanon). — connects to: The racial gaze subjects the observed to a humiliating double-consciousness — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 878