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Bryce Aston Professor Wolfson ENGL 346-02 4 June 2018 How Racism Went Underground When W.E.B Du Bois wrote “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” from The Souls of Black Folks, he may not have known that one phrase would become a universal descriptor for the experience of many marginalized communities. “Double consciousness” has become a nearly ubiquitous term for the awareness many marginalized individuals have of how they are perceived by their oppressors. It is that nagging feeling people of color, women, transgender people, and every other oppressed group have when they think, ‘Did you treat me that way because you had to - or because of who I am?’ Du Bois may have hoped that this experience of having a double identity as an American but also as an oppressed person - would not persist in the future. If he could have pictured today’s world, maybe he would have hoped that Black Americans wouldn’t have to wonder if their white doctors ignored their Black child’s dangerous health problems because they were Black. But as is seen in “What Does It Mean To Die?”, an essay written by Rachel Aviv, Du Bois’ hopes would have been disappointed. Aviv’s piece describes the experiences of Jahi McMath and her family. Jahi, a 13-year-old Black girl, went to the hospital to get her tonsils removed. After surgery, she had complications that the doctors ignored, in spite of her family’s calls for help. To this day, Jahi remains in a coma, considered dead by the state of California which her family fled to be legally allowed to keep her on life support. Just as Du Bois was, the family in Aviv’s piece is treated as lesser, as inferior, as not worth a white person’s time or
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concern, and they are forced, just as Du Bois was, to consider the role their race played in their treatment. In their respective pieces, Du Bois and Aviv plant two different pins on the timeline of American racism. In comparing their descriptions of Black Americans’ double consciousness and the context in which each piece takes place, it becomes clear that while the internal experience of racism has not changed for Black Americans, the external culture of supposed tolerance and subtler forms of racism in today’s society allow for new forms of mistreatment and abuse for Black Americans. In comparing these two pieces, it is vital to consider the setting of both parties’ experience of double consciousness and racism. Jahi’s initial surgery and subsequent declaration of brain death took place in the Oakland Children’s Hospital. Oakland, a city considered progressive, in one of the most progressive areas of California. Oakland, a city with a large Black population. Even in this city, Jahi’s mother, Nailah, immediately thought of race when she saw her daughter being ignored by white doctors. Even a good 140 years apart, Du Bois and Nailah shared the experience of racism in a progressive community - ‘progressive’ just meant different things in different times. Du Bois too lived in the traditionally abolitionist North during Reconstruction and then Jim Crow. He lived in Massachusetts, where supposedly his Black life meant more than in the South. Regardless, he experienced racism. That both a young Du Bois in the late 1800s and an older Nailah in the early 2010s first thought ‘race’ when being shunned by white people in progressive communities shows that racism follows no politics. It shows that double consciousness is a tool that every Black American uses, no matter where they’re from or when they experience it.
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Even with those 140 years of supposed progress between them, even with their difference in age at the time of the incident, the McMath family and Du Bois’ experience of double consciousness paints not just the portrait of two points in American history, but two points in the universal Black American experience. Du Bois’ experience is that of the initial racialization, of the moment of realizing your place as an oppressed person at a young age. As Du Bois puts it, “Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (Du Bois). Du Bois’ experience illustrates the disheartening awakening shared almost universally among Black children. His first realization of this duality - of his identity not only as an American but as a Black American - is reflected also in Jahi’s mother’s reaction to her treatment. As Jahi was hemorrhaging and doctors were ignoring her family, her mother Nailah was thinking of her daughter not only as a little girl, as a patient, but as a Black little girl. A Black patient, with white doctors. “‘Nobody was listening to us,’” Aviv recalled Nailah saying, “‘and I can’t prove it, but I really feel in my heart: if Jahi was a little white girl, I feel we would have gotten a little more help and attention’” (Aviv). These two interactions - Du Bois’ realization of race and Nailah’s reckoning with racist neglect - are startlingly similar in their basis. Du Bois, a little boy who should have been thinking about anything but race, was suddenly confronted by the ugly dissonance of his two identities as a Black American. Nailah, a mother who should have been thinking only of her daughter, was suddenly confronted with the terrifying thought that her daughter’s dual identities would be the death of her. One-hundred-forty years apart in radically different societies, Nailah and Du Bois faced the same beast. The fundamentality of their reactions displays how double consciousness, how the constant assessment of their race as a
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tangible presence in their day-to-day life, has become a basic building block of the Black American experience. While their methods are different, Du Bois and the Black Americans in Aviv’s piece show resistance to racist narratives and the stereotypes they perceive white people forcing them into. In Du Bois’ piece, he follows up his realization of race by explaining how it motivated him to excel: “I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky … That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads” (Du Bois). Du Bois uses his awareness of his assumed inferiority to motivate himself to excel above his white peers, almost in spite. Because he learns how to see what his white peers see, he is able in turn to do everything he can to defy that expectation. Similarly, the Black Americans in Aviv’s piece strive to reject the perception of their peers. Jahi’s family uses social media and legal help to fight against the doctors’ insistences that they take Jahi off life support. They created a movement of Black supporters who saw what they saw, the dual reality of Jahi’s situation as a Black girl being treated by white doctors. On social media, Aviv said one supporter wrote “‘They either wanna see us dead or in jail they don’t wana see us alive’” (Aviv). Nailah’s mother told Aviv that she wonders, “‘If the hospital had been more compassionate, would we have fought so much?’” (Aviv). This preponderous reflects the similarity between Du Bois’ and the McMaths’ reaction to their dual identities. When Du Bois knows he is being looked down on, he fights to get ahead. When the McMaths know Jahi is being neglected, they fight to keep her safe. Across generations, Black Americans’ fight for excellence or for their lives is in part facilitated and fueled by their ability to identify how white people see them.
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For all the universality of double consciousness, the most glaring difference between Du Bois’ experience and that described in Aviv’s piece is the society they lived in. Du Bois was born five years after slavery was abolished, but he lived through the Jim Crow era and died two years before he had the right to vote. Jahi and her family live in a post-Obama America, a country that tries to brag of being ‘post-racial’ and ‘color-blind.’ Obviously, Du Bois suffered racism. So did the McMaths. The difference is where racism exists in their society, and the abuses it allows. In Du Bois’ world, racism was out in the open, dangerous and proud and uncontained. He suffered, but there was forward momentum because there was acknowledgement of the fight. Nailah’s world, our world is trickier. Racism went underground - maybe not so much since the election of 2016, but bear with me. And racism that people pretend they don’t see - that’s insidious. How can you ask for reparations if no one will agree that you’ve been wronged? Nailah believes her daughter is in a coma because of racism, but has been unable to receive any compensation. Racism has gone underground, and it’s not easy to correct something when people refuse to acknowledge its existence.
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Works Cited Aviv, Rachel. “What Does It Mean to Die?” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2018, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903. Print.