Word: twoness
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...thus upon our lunchtime dialogue at Washington's Jefferson Hotel (named for that numinous slave-owning paradox) there descends the ancestral "twoness," something of the familiar racial veil W.E.B. DuBois wrote about...
...Mongolian, the 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 ... One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings ." Will DuBois' famous refrain--"the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line"--be just as valid in the twenty-first? I like to doubt...
Around the turn of the century, W.E.B. DuBois described the "twoness" felt by blacks, forced by segregation to see themselves both from the inside and from without, as they might appear to a hostile white world. Today the white world is less hostile. But achievement and a limited degree of acceptance have failed to remove all traces of ambiguity from the lives of the black middle class...
...Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois wrote of the "twoness" that blacks in the U.S. constantly confront. If "African American" wins wide usage, it may be a small step toward reconciling some of the conflicts and contradictions of black life in this nation...
...modern translation of the American spirit. The basic standard of success is the black person's ability to operate in both the black and white communities." Leon Chestang, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, believes that the black middle class is finally confronting and resolving its "twoness," that a new bicultural individual is emerging who can span the gulf between the races...