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Double-Consciousness Is Like A Person Staring At A Television

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Double-consciousness is like a person staring at a television screen, that person judging the actor and predicting each and every move. The actor need to unearth twoness because he or she have a true self they identify with, and a second form of consciousness that they display, because it is what others who view them expect. Authors like Nella Larsen, Sylvia Plath, and Chang-rae Lee experience their twoness through race and/or gender, and relates them to themselves. They use Du Bois’s double-consciousness in their works to exemplify their own personal struggle. The characters in their works tend to be the best kinds of actors because they are able to act by switching personas to correlate to different people and cultures. For instance, …show more content…

Clare states, “I’ve often wondered why more colored girls … never ‘passed’ over. It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do. If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.” (25). Much like the earlier statement from Irene, blacks have an easier time to pass in white society because that kind of society is always pressured on blacks. White society is like a template on how to live a decent life and many people of color tend to follow it. With a As for Irene, despite her passing color she chooses not to. And in a moment of weakness Irene “was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same.” (98) the realization of her skin finally struck her, that Irene had twoness. She easily identifies with both, but rather she is tired of the burden of being black. She can receive criticism from both parties and it dwells on her. In any case, she struggles between two worlds of black and white, much like Henry Park in Native Speaker, who struggles between the Korean and American world. Henry Park struggles with his identity as a Korean man living in America, and he is forced to act upon both roles as a Korean-American. Despite Du Bois referring to African-American when he said double-consciousness, it also can relate to people of other races and ethnicities. Park is a spy, which makes him a brilliant actor in the sense of switching between different

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