**Links to**: [[The Souls of Black Folk]], [[Du Bois]], [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], [[Polycomputation]], [[Marx]], [[Toward a Global Idea of Race]], [[Schematism]], [[09 C is for Communism, and Constraint|09 C is for Communism, and Constraint]], [[Active inference]], [[08 Active ignorance]], etc.
>“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.” Du Bois, _[[The Souls of Black Folk]]_.
Double (triple, quadruple, etc.) consciousness can be multiple things. For our intents and purposes here, it is **at least** this:
- The injustice of the extra effort that seeing things from multiple perspectives demands;
- The injustice of those actively ignorant of this fact, those _without_ double consciousness exploiting this phenomenon off of others (a.k.a. “[[Business as usual]]”, [[Affect alien]], and other presentations);
- The necessary possibility that actively ignorant positions may awaken to polycompute new perspectives.
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intro quote continues: “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. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”