Subjectivity Struggles: W. E. B. Du Bois's Contribution to Radical Interactionism
2021; Emerald Publishing Limited; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1108/s0163-239620210000052002
ISSN0163-2396
Autores Tópico(s)Critical Realism in Sociology
ResumoAbstract The essay explores the profound nature and consequences of subjectivity struggles in everyday life. W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness and its constituent concepts of the veil, twoness, and second sight illuminate the process of racialized self-formation. Racialized self-formation contributes to understanding the cultural reproduction of domination and subjugation, the two primary concerns of radical interactionists. Double consciousness, long ignored by symbolic interactionists, cannot be neglected by radical interactionists if they are to articulate a comprehensive account of self-formation in a white-supremacist culture. Reflections on racialization, meritocracy, and subjectivity struggles in contemporary everyday life conclude the essay. Keywords Double consciousness The veil Du Bois Racialization Subjectivity Superiority delusions Citation Musolf, G.R. (2021), "Subjectivity Struggles: W. E. B. Du Bois's Contribution to Radical Interactionism", Denzin, N.K., Salvo, J. and Chen, S.-L.S. (Ed.) Radical Interactionism and Critiques of Contemporary Culture (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 52), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 19-33. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620210000052002 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited Introduction Subjectivity constitutes actors' understanding, interpretation, and lived experience of everyday life. It is a socially and culturally constructed state of consciousness. Subjectivity influences behavior, thoughts, identity, and emotions. Actors' language and conceptual frameworks, and the minded processes they employ, are formative in constructing subjectivity. The two fundamental minded processes actors use, according to symbolic interactionism, are role-taking and defining the situation. Language and conceptual frameworks are internalized through the process of learning from and socialization to culture, subcultures, and significant and reference others. Actors, possessing agency, also contribute to this process, accepting and rejecting aspects of the normative order. Actors make culture, engage in role-making, and contribute to self-formation. Everyone's subjectivity emerges through this dialectical process, an ongoing, lifelong process in which selves and cultures continuously evolve. Subjectivity or states of consciousness that sociologists find problematic are ones that have been maliciously constructed to produce internalizations of inferiority. Such internalizations arise from role-taking and defining the situation from the ruling class's perspective, incorporating their language and conceptual frameworks. Critical scholars have put forward a number of theoretical constructs to describe this process: ideology, discursive practices, hegemony, ideological state apparatus, epistemological imperialism, false consciousness, symbolic violence, colonization of the mind, racialization, and, in the case I am interested in expounding on here, double consciousness. These concepts explain in various ways how the ruling class induces thinking disorders in the oppressed that result in a subjectivity of inferiority. Language has the power to create reality and dominate consciousness. As the Muses in Hesiod's Theogony stated, we “speak many false things as though they were true.” And as Socrates revealed about sophists, they have the persuasive power to “make the weaker argument defeat the stronger.” Language and representations enchant and enthrall. Oppressors can weaponize words so as to legitimize, justify, and mystify, as is the case in the ideologies of white and male supremacy. In fact, divesting a population of its language is a domination strategy, systematically practiced against Native Americans (Heller and McElhinny 2017, p. 28). The critical scholars who advanced the above concepts were all seeking to reveal processes by which the ruling class socializes the oppressed to accept “superiority delusions” (Musolf, 2012). Oppressors believe in their representations of superiority, whether self-manufactured or fabricated by merchants as commodities to enhance ruling class domination. Unfortunately, many oppressed also believe in the superiority of their oppressors as well as their oppressors' representations of them as inferior or the other. Thus, oppressor and oppressed may achieve intersubjectivity, a shared understanding of the social world, both accepting the validity of ruling class ideology and representations and both agreeing that the world is a meritocracy and that people receive their just rewards. Many oppressed accept the oppressors' charge that they are exclusively blameworthy for their social status. After all, as the ideology reiterates, the United States is a country of equality of opportunity. Disadvantaged origins are disregarded as mobility barriers and discounted as disabling achievement. One's destination depends solely on the merit and hard work of the individual. Oppressors strut a looking-glass self that emerges from representations of superiority, and the oppressed present a looking-glass self that emerges from representations of inferiority, empowering for the oppressor and debilitating for the oppressed. Besides unmasking the torment and mythology that superiority delusions foment, what inspires sociologists to attend to such states of mind? Sociologists abhor such mentalities because they believe language and conceptual frameworks manufactured by those with malign intent produce thinking disorders that lead to behaviors that reproduce inequality. Inequality is the major concern of sociologists. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci, Michael Buroway's (1979) pregnant phrase, “the manufacture of consent,” gives birth to the social purpose that superiority delusions play in reproducing inequality. White supremacists, male supremacists, and other oppressors find it in their social interest to furnish the language that the oppressed draw on to understand and interpret everyday life. Oppressors achieve this goal by socializing and educating the marginalized to role-take and define situations from the oppressors' perspective, so that the oppressed reproduce their own inequality. A ruling class needs to harvest subservient subjectivities as part of a strategy to maintain legitimation, power, prestige, privilege, domination, and subjugation. A working class that is dependent on ruling class conceptual frameworks and that role-takes and defines situations from an oppressors' ideology is doomed to reproduce its own domination and subjugation. Domination and subjugation in everyday life, and the way they are reconstituted, is radical interactionism's major area of conceptual clarification and research focus (Athens, 2015). Subjectivity Disorders Subjectivity struggles emerge from conflict between oppressors and oppressed. All of the concepts brought forth above provide illustrations of how subjectivity is distorted through various processes of representation and language, revealing the effort the ruling class devotes to constructing and reproducing subjectivities that help perpetuate their power. These well-known and extensively studied concepts percolate through the common language of sociology. Ideology is considered the paragon example of a thinking disorder that distorts an oppressed population's understanding and interpretation of the world. Ideology is usually thought of as a conceptual framework that justifies and legitimizes ruling class power. Hegemony has the same goal, only the cultural practices it explores are more extensive and subtle in socializing oppressed populations that the way everyday life is institutionalized is the natural, right, God-given, and immutable way that life should proceed. Ideology, ideological state apparatus, and hegemony maintain power in the hands of the ruling class through conceptual frameworks that legitimize inequality embedded in social structure and culture. False consciousness, symbolic violence, epistemological imperialism, racialization, and colonization of the mind are concepts that illustrate how the ruling class manipulates minded processes to manufacture a subjectivity of inferiority, of constituting the other. Sociologists who write on these concepts usually remark on how actors are unwittingly complicit in their own construction of such a mentality. Actors imprisoned in and afflicted by language and representations that sustain superiority delusions are not likely to oppose oppressive social structure and culture. Superiority delusions are false positives for oppressors and false negatives for the subjugated. For the marginalized, belief in superiority delusions is tantamount to a mobility extinction event. However, the oppressed possess agency and the ability to overcome epistemological imperialism and to achieve epistemological emancipation. Agency Those who are subjugated need to eliminate language and representations based on the inferiority of class, race, and gender. They should acquire language and representations grounded in the universal concepts of equality and human rights. The oppressed exercise agency when they develop states of consciousness that exemplify Durkheim's notion of moral individualism, that all categories of people, and all individuals, are equal in their human rights, dignity, respect, responsibilities, and opportunities. Human beings are sacred objects. The deconstruction and unmasking of language, conceptual frameworks, and minded processes of negation need to be supplanted with ones that construct humane and life-affirming subjectivities. If this emancipatory process is to grow beyond a personal one, it necessitates solidarity and collective action to ensure that a social structure and a culture exist and are continuously improved upon, so that life-affirming language about and representations of others who share one's social identity are readily available to all from which to role-take and learn. Actors emancipated by language that unmasks superiority delusions are more likely to resist oppressive social structure and culture, not only individually but also in solidarity with others through organizing protest and engaging in collective action to bring about transformation. Structure and Agency Complementarity Good sociology incorporates both nomothetic generalities and idiographic lived experiences, is sensitive to the ecological fallacy and essentialism, and constructs theory that employs both structure and agency. For example, as anomie increases in society, suicide rates escalate. A culture without civil religion – unifying narratives and rituals – diminishes solidarity and creates divisiveness and polarization. But not everyone who confronts such a culture commits suicide; indeed, most do not. To understand the complexity of individuals and their behavior, both the social surround that envelops individuals and their interpretation of and meanings they ascribe to that social surround must be taken into account. It is imperative to understand how individuals enmeshed in a culture riven with moral tribalism and ideological warfare, unregulated desires, and attenuated commitment to rituals at the national, family, and relationship levels define the situation. The same is true for attempts to comprehend the lives of racialized others. Du Bois employs structure and agency in his portrait of the racialized other by underscoring both the structure of racism and the mentality it engenders. Turning Points: The Project of Political Emancipation The road to emancipation entails endless transformation. A project of political emancipation began with malformed notions of democracy and human rights in fifth century bc Greece. Those ideals continue to transform the Western world. Incessant interrogation of self and political systems arose, especially received wisdom: the normative, the sacred, and the established. Aeschylus's themes in his trilogy, Oresteia, dramatize the importance of interrogation as a way of political life (Musolf, 2014). Scholars of theoretical rationality since then have worked to universalize conceptualizations of democracy and human rights. The project of political emancipation is an unending journey. New forms of social consciousness, fresh ways to expand human rights and even the rights of other species, and brave new worlds of social justice that we cannot yet imagine await. Social structure and culture are far more egalitarian, and human rights are increasingly more universal, today than they were when the project of political emancipation began. Struggles punctuated by setbacks and turning points define the political landscape. In the United States, the standard bearers of political emancipation – the end of slavery and Jim Crow, the rise of the New Deal and feminism, and the constitutional legalization of same-sex marriage – are turning points. Many other turning points have changed history. Max Weber argued that ideas are transformative. Durkheim argued that moral individualism, the idea of the individual as a sacred object, has transformed our political system so that constitutional, social, cultural, and behavioral norms have been institutionalized that embody it. Progressives and radicals have advanced the idea that individuals deserve subjectivities and identities free from malicious construction; that desire is far from achieved. W. E. B. Du Bois's social theory has made a contribution toward that potential turning point through his formation of the concept of “double consciousness.” This concept enhances our understanding of how subjectivities of inferiority are constituted by domination and subjugation; hence, it contributes to the perspective of radical interactionism. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) This essay lacks the space to present a biography of Du Bois or to delineate the social context of the times that influenced his writings. It is limited, instead, to exploring Du Bois's concept of double consciousness expounded in The Souls of Black Folk, originally published in 1903. Inferences from the concept will allow me to reflect on the repercussions of racialization, meritocracy, and the subjectivity struggles embedded in self-formation, consequences of living life in a social structure and culture in which the color line still dominates. Lewis (2009, p. 4) has magnificently argued that Du Bois's writings catapulted him to be [t]he premier architect of the civil rights movement in the United States …, the first to grasp the international implications of the struggle for racial justice … [and the first to discern] that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. Racist ideologies, bigotry, exploitation, and Jim Crow sucked the lifeblood from the souls of black folk; their blood itself was spilled by beatings, rape, and lynching. Lemert (1994) has noted the disgraceful history of sociological thought that has ignored the work of Du Bois and his exclusion from the canon of leading sociologists. Sociologists excluded Du Bois since they themselves were infected with the culture of racism. In addition to Lemert, many other scholars, far too numerous to cite, also have worked on establishing Du Bois's richly deserved place in the sociological pantheon. Lemert (1994), Rawls (2000), and Itzigsohn and Brown (2015) have noted Du Bois's neglect by symbolic interactionists, especially disconcerting from those whose aim is the understanding of the process of self-formation. Du Bois's focus on self-formation is illuminated by the fact that he (along with George Herbert Mead) was a student of William James at Harvard University. The above scholars argue that inattention to Du Bois's work on double consciousness impairs social thought on the process of self-formation, the social construction of a subjectivity of inferiority, and the cultural reproduction of domination and subjugation, all concerns crucial to radical interactionists. Racialization Du Bois was interested in the effects racialization had on self-formation. Racialization is the process of constructing an identity of inferiority in African Americans that comes to be accepted by African Americans and whites. It is a process – mutates mutandis – that is applicable to all marginalized or oppressed groups. Racialization is a meaning-making process of arbitrarily singling out observable physical features, phenotypes, and ranking them in terms of moral worthiness (Omi and Winant, 1994). Racialization is the social practice oppressors deploy in a variety of ways to manufacture and merchandise stereotypes, representations, and essentialism – a culture of morally ranked physical differences – and harness them to justify discrimination, scapegoating, displacement, and violence. The racialized are represented as the counternormative other, as a negation of the good, a threat to purity, and of endangering the just and meritorious with contagion. Racialized identities lead oppressors, and many oppressed, to engage in social practices that reproduce inequality. However, racialized subjects possess their own biography and history. Lumping together those who are racialized as experiencing identical lives exemplifies reductionism. Just as there is no archetypal or homogenized woman, there is no archetypal or homogenized racialized other. We all make our own history, even if we share wretched situations. Individuals draw on agency to resist, subvert, overcome, and transform. Reforms, revolts, and revolutions crop up, mostly when oppressors least expect them, as in the case of the Civil Rights movement. African Americans had been defined by sociologists in the 1950s as having come to accept the racist order and the idea that they would perpetually accommodate themselves to that grotesquery (McKee 1993). Even the oppressed have agency and eventually, enough is enough. Double Consciousness As traditionally theorized, “sociology's self-theory” has been “defiantly ahistorical” (Lemert, 1994, p. 390), presenting a “White Universal perspective” (p. 391). According to Itzigsohn and Brown (2015), the classical theorists of the self – James, Cooley, and Mead – ignored, for the most part, the devastating effects to one's self-formation engendered in a culture that perpetuates racializing as a prevalent social practice. 1 Lemert proposes that by incorporating Du Bois's concept of double consciousness into the canon of self-formation theory, sociologists will have a more comprehensive understanding of self-formation in a racist culture. For radical interactionists, this means that Mead's concepts of role-taking, self-objectification, the generalized other, I and me, and play and game stages, along with Cooley's notion of the looking-glass self need to be grounded in the processes and effects of racialization on self-formation. The same can be said of the process of sexism on women's self-formation. “There is no universal Self. There are only selves” (Lemert, 1994, p. 390). Selves are internally multiple, conflicting, contradictory, and historically and culturally different. Itzigsohn and Brown (2015, p. 233) argue that what is missing in the work of classical theorists of self-formation is “the limits to communication and to mutual recognition under conditions of racialization.” I agree and would add that racialization destroys solidarity, the feeling of community, communion, connection, and togetherness that arises from a unifying national project of inclusive rituals. The racialized cannot feel solidarity with those who dehumanize them. The cultural crime of racializing only abets divisiveness, polarization, and estrangement. Racialization also engenders an identity struggle within the consciousness of African Americans, engendering a double consciousness. Du Bois's classic statement on double consciousness, to which I will refer in the following analysis, is: [T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, 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. 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. (Du Bois, 1903, p. 2) The concept of double consciousness has three component parts: the veil, twoness, and second sight. 2 The Veil The veil is a metaphor for the color line separating the social worlds of whites, who racialize, and blacks, who are racialized. The color line is supported by institutional racism and a culture of racist ideologies that socializes individuals to racist beliefs and contributes to discriminatory social practices. Jim Crow and apartheid were the literal illustrations of the color line. Those who have the power to racialize have no need to recognize, or to communicate with, the racialized; the racialized are enslaved, dehumanized, scorned, and ordered about, a source of surplus value, invisible; in general, they are commodities of exploitation. The veil blocks whites from taking the role of African Americans, a fundamental necessity for communication and recognition. Role-taking refusal occurs early. Du Bois recounts an incident from childhood when a white girl refuses him recognition and communication. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards – ten cents a package – and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon 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, 1903, p. 2) Unfortunately, many racialized subjects internalize superiority delusions propagated by a dominant white-supremacist culture. Whites, of course, believe these superiority delusions about African Americans to justify dehumanization. African Americans' acceptance of them constitutes internalized racism, damaging self-esteem. Role-taking from the perspective of the oppressor is offset by role-taking from one's community; nevertheless, it leads to a twoness. 3 Twoness Actors role-take from significant others, referent others, and a variety of others in constructing a looking-glass image of themselves. They also role-take from the generalized other. The generalized other is suffused with the ideas of a white-supremacist ruling class; that is to say, a dominant ideology and value system that is racialized. The dominant ideology legitimizes racial subjugation. If African Americans role-take from this racialized generalized other, it contributes to the classical problem of false consciousness. Du Bois clearly recognized that racist incidents, such as the one he experienced with the girl and the visiting cards, can ignite in African Americans a refusal to role-take from the white-supremacist culture, strengthening the veil between whites and African Americans. 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 and great wandering shadows. (p. 2) Du Bois also recognized that all actors, including the oppressed, possess agency. They can defy the dominant ideology and engage in resistance. After the interaction with the girl, Du Bois states that: “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” (p. 2). Twoness illustrates that role-taking from a racialized generalized other can lead to an identity of inferiority; however, African Americans who role-take from the generalized other of their own communities can acquire nurturance, solidarity, and a looking-glass self that is based on pride rather than mortification. It is this role-taking from diametrically opposed generalized others that leads African Americans to have a double consciousness, two ways of viewing the world and themselves. Second Sight Itzigsohn and Brown (2015, p. 236) argue that second sight arises when African Americans refuse to role-take from the white-supremacist culture, thereby “neutralizing” it. After neutralizing a racist culture, second sight or critical consciousness, and identity transformation are possible. Du Bois gives an example of a child transforming its identity through role-taking refusal, of holding the white world in contempt, a process that led to a “self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect…. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (Du Bois, 1903, p. 5). The “gift” of second sight is a simultaneous process of acquiring a consciousness of oppression and a language of resistance. It is analogous to the process of the working class acquiring class consciousness or feminists engaging in consciousness raising. Second sight is a revelation, a “satori,” a coming to see what has always existed but remained invisible because one did not have a language through which to see it. Du Bois describes that process in his story “Of the Coming of John” 4 : He had left his … thought-world and come back to a world of motion and men. He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered how he had seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. (Du Bois, 1903, p. 144; emphasis GRM) Richard Rorty (1991) in an article titled, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” has described this process more eloquently than anyone I know. Injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer them, until somebody invents a previously unplayed role. Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy – even to themselves – if they describe themselves as oppressed. (p. 232; emphasis in original) Anne Forer Pyne invented a previously unplayed role by her coining of the phrase and advocating for the practice of “consciousness raising” so that women could name the unnamed, cultivate solidarity, and launch second-wave feminism (Cowley, 2018). A language of resistance empowers. It includes but is not limited to identity transformation, consciousness raising, counterhegemonic narratives, and deconstructing and reconstructing epistemology, ontology, meaning, and visions of emancipatory progress. If a reconstructed identity and a critical consciousness or language of resistance are connected to solidarity with other African Americans suffering in their community, or in the diaspora around the world, as Du Bois advocated through support for Pan-Africanism, that process has the possibility to engender movements for emancipation. Second sight is revolutionary. Conclusion The concept of double consciousness and its component parts of the veil, twoness, and second sight is profoundly important to self-formation theory, especially to radical interactionists who address the social and cultural reproduction of domination and subjugation. Understanding the effect of racialization on self-formation improves our hopes for transforming social policy and practice to reduce racialization and inequality. White-supremacist culture has intentionally concocted supremacy delusions to besiege the lives of African Americans. African Americans role-take from two conflicting looking-glass perspectives. One looking-glass is the viewpoint of superiority delusions that entails internalizing racism. The other looking-glass is the standpoint of the African American community in which members find solace, solidarity, shared humanity, and empathy. These two social mirrors engender a double consciousness in African Americans, two diametrically opposed sources of self-formation. Dehumanized images of African Americans and ideologies of inferiority justify inequality. White supremacy is the seminary of racialization. Oppression and resistance to it are the sources of subjectivity struggles in everyday life. The oppressed, through role-taking from the perspective of the oppressor, can know what the oppressor thinks; however, they do not have to accept it. Such refusal is the best way to begin the minded process of reconstructing individual and group identity (Musolf 2012). Oppressors refusing to role-take from the point of view of the oppressed walls off oppressors' communication and recognition of the marginalized, fostering dehumanization. Oppressors, however, hardly care if they dehumanize those they subjugate. Emancipation arises when the oppressed refuse to role-take from the perspective of their oppressors – the racialized generalized other, bringing about critical consciousness or second sight, identity transformation, solidarity with other Africans through pan-Africanism, and the possibility to put all of this to good use through resistance and social transformation. Meritocracy, Racialization, and Subjectivity Struggles The quest to facilitate success in one's children leads to the search for advantages to bestow
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