Being seen as tribe member, as problem

Being a problem is a strange experience,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in the 19th century, and it’s still so. “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.”

While the African-American experience is indubitably unique, too many other groups of Americans have been violently awakened in recent years to what it’s like to experience the double consciousness Du Bois described.

It’s a dull headache, punctuated by sharp pangs of awareness, while continually registering how you are perceived as a sort of overlay upon what you are perceiving. An incessant recognition that, however you see yourself, you may be seen merely as a member of your tribe.

A question endlessly begged and never entirely answered, a dark veil between you and the world.

In the past several years, many queer people felt that double consciousness anew, after 49 people were murdered inside of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on Latin Night. Sikhs felt it after six people were murdered in a gurdwara in Wisconsin. Jews felt it after nine people were murdered inside of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, followed by murders in Jersey City and Monsey. Latinos, after 23 people were murdered in a Walmart in El Paso. And now, Asians — after eight people, including six Asian women, were murdered in Atlanta this week.

In some cases, the murderer’s motive, if that matters, wasn’t entirely clear or turned out to be different than circumstances and early reporting suggested. But in each case, people who had good reason to suspect that their kind had been targeted, felt that double consciousness that’s inescapable when considering that people who could have been our parents or siblings or children, or us, had been cut down right here in America because they were of our tribe.

Suddenly, we were each reminded that people like us are someone else’s “problem,” demanding a fatal solution.

And that list of mass murders leaves aside the Charleston church slaughter, and whatever other American horrors I forgot or never hear about, or the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque massacre that reminded

Muslims, once again, of their tenuous status in the West, and which the El Paso murderer cited as an inspiration.

And it leaves aside acts of violent hatred that didn’t capture national attention, but shape the lives of the people and communities impacted — including a rolling mini-pogrom of violence in New York directed at Orthodox Jews in particular, and a sharp nationwide rise in attacks on Asians that roughly aligns with the pandemic, and then Trump throwing around the term “China virus.” Or, for that matter, police violence against Blacks, that’s anything but new, but is now the subject of sustained national attention.

It’s a grim sort of consolation, but the one good that could possibly come from all this evil, would be that members of different groups violently shocked into this double consciousness find the sincere empathy for each other implicit in having to always be “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

We might strive to lift each other’s veils, so that instead of fitting into “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” we could model a world of tolerance, and even love — where people can finally put down the burden of their double consciousnesses and, without letting go of the clashing cultures that shape us, find our better and truer selves.

I don’t know if that would do anything to make any group of people less of “a problem” to people who murderously see them that way.

I do know — and wish that the press racing to report new details after each new massacre would learn — that the less time spent centering and amplifying those people’s murderous complaints, the better. That all sorts of troubled people end up magnetized by those complaints as they get broadcast, and then act out violence that they may not have committed otherwise, or tying the violence they would have committed in any case to that supposed cause.

Du Bois, as his essay on the “Strivings of the Negro People” draws to a close, echoes two lines of the poet Alfred Tennyson to detail what exactly it is that his people were pressing on in the dogged hope of achieving, and which remains a fine goal for all of us in the 21st century:

“(N)ot a hope of nauseating patronage, not a hope of reception into charmed social circles… but the hope of a higher synthesis of civilization and humanity, a true progress, with which the chorus ‘Peace, good will to men,’