Double-Consciousness: The Du Boisian Hermeneutic

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois was among the first scholars to understand the role that double-consciousness plays in the formation of a hermeneutical process interpreting and shaping worldviews among people of color. When interpreting biblical texts, Du Boisian interpreters, informed by double-consciousness, understand the tensions between how the text looks through the eyes of the dominant community (whether in biblical times or today) and how it looks through the eyes of the community that has been marginalized by the dominant group. Double-consciousness, or " listening against our hearing, " when mobilized in biblical interpretation by persons of color or those interpreting from positions of social dominance, can help the interpreter to read texts as instruments of liberation and in ways that have the potential to re-humanize biblical interpretation. Several elements of a Du Boisian hermeneutic are identified: double voice, psychospiritual awareness, dialectical tension, and extended metaphor. The twentieth century began with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), written by an unnoticed intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois. For more than a century now, this publication has shaped public racial conversation and debate in social, political and religious spheres. Du Bois declared that " The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men… " 1