What is W. E. B. Du Bois's definition of black identity in The Souls of Black Folk and its implications?
Central to Du Bois's notion of black identity is what he calls the "double consciousness" of the black person. He defines it as follows in The Souls of Black Folk:
this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape...
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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.
In other words, blacks know that whites see them and define them differently than they see and define themselves. Behind what Du Bois calls the "veil" that starkly separates white from black culture, black people know they are worthy human beings. However, in front of whites they have to play a different, more servile role, because they know that whites think of them as inferior.
What black people long for is a society in which the people they know themselves truly to be could be reconciled with how the dominant society perceives them.
Du Bois worries that too much accommodation to a racist society will destroy the souls of black people by encouraging them to internalize the false idea they are inferior. He argues very strongly that black identity must be based on a struggle for complete equality with whites.