As a consequence of this historical significance of public expressiveness, resistance becomes the dominant idiom for reading and describing black culture. One result of this dominance is that the major concepts used to discuss black culture (for example, doubleness, signifying, the mask) are engaged largely for their capacity to support the idea of resistance. In this light, these concepts say less about the interior of black subjectivity, and leave us without a general concept that aims to describe or reference the inner life. Consider the example of doubleness, one of the central idioms of black cultural studies. In terms of articulations of doubleness, there is perhaps no concept more significant than that of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness. A term of art for the psychology of the African American codified in the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, double consciousness describes the experience of having two conflicting identities. In Du Bois’s formulation, this split identity is the definitive impact that oppression has on the black subject, who sees himself through the revelations of the dominant world. Double consciousness is based on the general notion that selfhood is achieved through interactions with other people, but when imagined as particular to black identity, the term suggests something more: it describes a black subject whose being is conscripted not only by race but also, especially, by a racist discourse. In short, double consciousness conceptualizes black subjectivity as conflict with whiteness and conceives agency only as/in resistance of the public discourse of black inferiority. Strikingly, in Du Bois’s enunciation, the black subject seems to possess no genuine interior and therefore, as much as double consciousness is a contemplative idiom, it is insufficient as a concept of interiority (it “yields no true self-consciousness” [11]). This implication is sustained in our contemporary engagement of the concept.8 Du Bois’s double consciousness is similar to Darlene Clark Hine’s notion of dissemblance, which Hine coined to characterize black women’s ambivalent relationship to public exposure. Hine argues that black women, in response to how they were negatively constructed in the social imagination as racial, gendered, and classed subjects, “developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives. The dynamics of dissemblance involved creating the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma” (915). She goes on to assert that “in the face of pervasive stereotypes . . . it was imperative that they collectively create alternative self-images” (916). Such use of duplicity as a politic of resistance has been well documented by Hine and others.9 While neither double consciousness nor dissemblance explicitly dismisses the idea of interiority, each nonetheless suggests that interiority is suppressed and disavowed because of the public dimensions of race and racism (and, in the case of dissemblance, gender and sexism). As concepts of doubleness, both idioms forego the vagaries of the inner life in favor of a notion of selfhood that is calibrated to the exterior world. The withholding or silence that is implied in both concepts celebrates a kind of artifice or performance, and reiterates the centrality of publicness in black cultural identity. The irony here is that, conceptually, rather than reinforce artifice as an essential practice, dissemblance and double consciousness seem primed to help us scrutinize the suppressed textualities of black identity, to touch greater depths of the subjectivities that are flattened by the broad sweep of racism. Yet, more often than not, what we learn from the use of these tropes is not the subtlety of the human subject, but rather the dynamism of concealment.10 These claims about the aesthetics of doubleness are evident in looking at Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask,” a remarkable work of signifying and concealment, and an example of another celebrated idiom of black culture—the idea of masking. First published in 1895, the poem is a technical marvel, sustaining perfect singular rhyme with every line echoing the same final assonance, except in three places—the repetition of the titular “mask” at the end of stanzas two and three, and the use of the word “subtleties” to end stanza one. What is striking about the rhythmic disruption that “subtleties” causes is that visually, the word seems to fit the rhyme scheme—it looks like it should rhyme with “lies,” “eyes,” or “cries.” This is a poetic sleight of hand with which Dunbar seems to play on the tendency of the mind to want to follow the poem’s sing-song rhythm (it is perfect iambic tetrameter, except for this disruption), to force “subtleties” to sound like the words that end the lines before it. Further evidence of the poem’s cunning is the slowly revealed truth that the near-perfect rhyme actually turns on the approximate rhyme between two sets of words that have the same long vowel sound but do not rhyme in their consonants: “lies” and “eyes,” on one hand; “guile” and “smile” on the other. The poem’s mask is not only its subject but its form (it even impersonates the sonnet, intentionally going one line too far in a deceptive act of formlessness), and the doubleness implied in Dunbar’s careful diction—cheeks, shades, grins, lies, guile, smile, hides, subtleties—is applicable also to his manipulation of the rhyme. Dunbar’s poem is brilliant in its technique and powerful in its general theme, but what is also notable is how little it says about the interiority of the masked subject. Other than bold declamations about “tortured souls” and “bleeding hearts,” one knows nothing about the “we” whose selves are masked, about the depth or quality of their desires or fears. (Part of this is effected by the use of the first-person plural, in the way the pronoun “we” flattens as much as it unifies.) We learn in depth about the aesthetic of the mask and its value as a ruse against oppression, about the masked persona’s awareness of audience and the perils of publicness, but nothing of the subject. Indeed, even as the poem suggests that there is agency in the act of withholding one’s true self from being revealed—a claim punctuated by repetition of the title in the poem’s last line—the agency does not allow the poem’s masked subject to express selfhood beyond the surface of a deceptive smile. There is little quality of an inner life to be found here; at best, one can infer that the wearer of the mask is either pained and rageful, or deceiving—but nothing else. This does not diminish the brilliance of Dunbar’s poem, which is peerless for its marriage of form and content, and which, like Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, imagines doubleness as a site of agency rather than only subjection. Nevertheless, the poem evidences that an aesthetic of guile is an inept means for rendering the inner life. Dunbar’s poem could have used the trope of masking to tell us something about the edge and pasture of one human’s experience, a telling that would have expanded the archive of black subjectivity; instead the poem defers to a broader, less intimate view and characterizes a subjectivity that in its sketchiness feels caricatured.11 The limitations of masking and doubleness are consequences of the way these terms have become part of a larger aesthetic of black resistance. That is, though both are used to support the idea of resistance, the problem is not with the idioms or even with the idea of expressiveness; it is instead the difficulty with the assumption that all black expressiveness is necessarily public. This assumption limits black expression to the discourse of resistance, and without other concepts with which to understand expressiveness, resistance becomes the lingua franca of black culture. It is in this regard that the notion of black culture as expressive is an empty assessment, one that is limited in its meaningfulness. And in the face of the strong relationship between publicness, expressiveness and resistance, black cultural studies lacks a metaphor for characterizing the inner life, a metaphor capable of noticing the beauty and intimacy of Smith and Carlos.
As a consequence of this historical significance of public expressiveness, resistance becomes the dominant idiom for reading and describing black culture. . In this light, these concepts say less about the interior of black subjectivity, and leave us without a general concept that aims to describe or reference the inner life double consciousness describes the experience of having two conflicting identities. it describes a black subject whose being is conscripted not only by race but also, especially, by a racist discourse double consciousness conceptualizes black subjectivity as conflict with whiteness and conceives agency only as/in resistance of the public discourse of black inferiority. in Du Bois’s enunciation, the black subject seems to possess no genuine interior and therefore, as much as double consciousness is a contemplative idiom, it is insufficient as a concept of interiority double consciousness suggests that interiority is suppressed and disavowed because of the public dimensions of race and racism both idioms forego the vagaries of the inner life in favor of a notion of selfhood that is calibrated to the exterior world. The withholding or silence that is implied in both concepts celebrates a kind of artifice or performance, and reiterates the centrality of publicness in black cultural identity what we learn from the use of these tropes is not the subtlety of the human subject, but rather the dynamism of concealment We learn in depth about the aesthetic of the mask and its value as a ruse against oppression, about the masked persona’s awareness of audience and the perils of publicness, but nothing of the subject. the agency does not allow the poem’s masked subject to express selfhood beyond the surface of a deceptive smile. There is little quality of an inner life to be found here; at best, one can infer that the wearer of the mask is either pained and rageful, or deceiving—but nothing else the poem evidences that an aesthetic of guile is an inept means for rendering the inner life. though both are used to support the idea of resistance, the problem is instead the difficulty with the assumption that all black expressiveness is necessarily public. This assumption limits black expression to the discourse of resistance, and without other concepts with which to understand expressiveness, resistance becomes the lingua franca of black culture. It is in this regard that the notion of black culture as expressive is an empty assessment, one that is limited in its meaningfulness.