Double consciousness is evident in Bigger’s thought that “He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.”
Native Son – 7
The Fire Next Time – 1
Baldwin says his father was “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people thought about him.” Is it double consciousness if you believe what other people think about you, or only if you know what they think but have a separate, doubled, since of self?
Enslaved black people who claimed they were content might have just been showing white people what they knew they wanted to see. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a duplicitous character named Bledsoe castigates the narrator for taking a white university donor to a poor, black section of a southern town, and says “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!” If Douglass is describing black people who had the same belief as Ellison’s character, this may explain why white people received reports that confirmed their beliefs about black peoples’ supposed acceptance of slavery.
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs refers sarcastically to the idea of enslaved peoples’ supposed contentment as she describes the tumult that passed through her town because of Nat Turner’s insurrection. Jacobs suggests that if white people truly believed their slaves were happy, they wouldn’t have been so worried about a revolt.