Triple Consciousness

I enter this conversation as a graduate student in a transdisciplinary digital rhetoric PhD program in a theoretically oriented department in the American South. My background is highly international in terms of my place of birth, the countries in which I have studied, and the development of my scholarship. In this conversation about the possibilities for graduate study in digital humanities, I present my nontraditional experience of encountering digital graduate learning environments while navigating racial (mis)recognitions, linguistic and cultural complexities, and growing pedagogical awareness. I begin by exploring my first experiences of racialization in the United States, my experience of both double and triple consciousness in American graduate programs, and the effects that these have had on my development as a writer, scholar, and activist.

The English language saved my life when, orphaned at age twelve, I taught myself how to read and write. I used an English dictionary, National Geographic magazine, and a Sesotho dictionary, uttering words I hoped would be heard in my forgotten Kingdom of Lesotho, Southern Africa. My village chief recognized my natural ability in English and depended on me to translate to U.S. Peace Corps volunteers. Eventually, this led me to the United States. From the genesis of my arrival, I faced many culture shocks and language barriers and struggled to comprehend my new American identity. Though I had come from a rich cultural background and wholeheartedly knew myself, the conundrum I faced was that while operating in and navigating America, I was constantly being mislabeled and miscategorized.

I arrived in Los Angeles, California, in 2006 and then moved to San Diego with my adoptive mother, whom I met in my village while she was a Peace Corps volunteer. There was a bicycle in the garage, which I was granted permission to ride once I proved that I was capable. When he worked in the South African Dutch (Boer) mines, my father had managed to buy me a bicycle before he died. While riding this bike in the streets of Vista, California, a white man decided to spark a conversation with me. I was fifteen years old, with a wide African smile, and a white woman had just assisted in being the vehicle to my better life in America and had saved my life; thus, my approach to white Americans was one full of joy. The entitled white man, standing amid his yard holding tree pruning scissors and with gloves on, shouted what initiated the first labeling of me in America by uttering, “Hey n__, are you lost?” I pulled the brakes on my bike, unbuckled my helmet, and responded, “No, n__, I am not lost; I am riding my new bicycle.” Surprisingly, he got angry. His skin changed color, turning pink around the ears. I had experience with Boers, having grown up during the years of the apartheid regime, and knew they used to beat my people. I thus knew that my exchange with this white man was not as pleasant as I thought. I rode my bicycle home to ask my parent about this encounter. You can imagine how catatonic my adoptive mother became when I asked, “What is a n__?” While still in the village, she had prepared me for what I should expect in America. Unfortunately, during our “So, when we get to America” conversations during supper in the village, she had not versed me well on being called the n-word. This time, however, I was in a particular American town, where my mother had lived the majority of her life but before me did not host an African son. This labeling marked the first moment of my racial consciousness as a Black American and as the Other. My hyperawareness of myself as an outsider had begun.

A decade into my transition to American life, still dealing with my identity as an African, an American, and a scholar and having begun to teach, I took on leadership roles in my city, Long Beach, California. I became a youth mentor and an advisory board member of a nonprofit organization, the California Conference for Equality and Justice, whose mission is to eliminate bias, bigotry, and racism through education, conflict resolution, and advocacy. I facilitated school groups and community groups, making a difference by bringing restorative justice to schools and practicing it in communities. It was during this work that, as an African, American, scholar, and community leader, I dealt with some of the subliminal tensions around labels and identity among Black people in America as they relate to belonging. The African American group that I was leading commented, during their discussion about using the n-word and regarding a critical comment made by Bill Cosby, that I did not fit in. They desired to exile me from the discussion because I was African; they felt I did not have their shared understanding of the word. This was my second time dealing with an identity conflict, yet this time it was delivered by Black people.

In Southern Africa, there exists a word that is similar to the n-word: “kaffir.” Unlike the n-word in America, the k-word in South Africa is banned and forbidden to all. Black Africans do not use it between one another, and when used by a Boer to a Black African, it is a crime, punishable in a court of law and physically by the subject being called thus. The court will usually rule in favor of the victim, citing self-defense, if the insulted retaliates physically. My African American group desired to exile me from our racial group discussion because I opposed the use of the n-word among Black Americans—just as I would oppose the use of the k-word in South Africa. For cultural context, the word is best described by Mark Mathabane in Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa. Mathabane powerfully elucidates how much has been written and spoken about the politics of apartheid: the forced removals of Black communities from their ancestral lands, the Influx Control and Pass laws that mandated where Black people could live, work, raise families, and be buried; the migrant labor systems that forced Black men to live apart from their families in the ghettos as the authorities sought to create a so-called white South Africa; and the brutal suppression of the Black majority as it agitated for equal rights. My opposition to the n-word arose because I comprehended its impact but had come from a place where a parallel word was banned and its use was a criminal offense. This experience showed me that though I feel connected to both lands and racial histories, the view of these Black Americans that I am literally both an “African and American” contains within it an ironic misrecognition.

Within my graduate school career, my double consciousness became transmogrified into a triple consciousness. I began navigating my scholarship as an African and an American citizen and as an African scholar as opposed to merely a Black scholar. During the latter stages of my MFA career, while I was teaching a fiction seminar and a rhetoric and composition course, I took a graduate seminar that focused on Black writers. This marked the third time that I was, once again, labeled differently by a white superior; on this occasion, it was a white female professor from the American South, where, as she said, “They do things a bit differently.” She assigned the class thirteen books of her choosing, all written by Black writers, because there were only thirteen students in the course. She wrote our names and the title of the book we were to present on. I was the only Black student in the course. Without prior consultation, I was shocked on a rainy Tuesday afternoon to read the sheet of paper, from which I learned which title was assigned to me: “Sethunya—Our Nig.” I still wonder if this professor failed to recognize the problematic nature of assigning the only Black student in the class a book written by a Black writer, titled with a controversial derogatory label, without prior discussion with me. Her “doing things differently in the South” alluded, it transpired, to her sense of authority. She was dissatisfied with me questioning her choices and taking issue with them.

The Black-authored novel Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson paints a significant picture of what it was like to be Black in a white American world—excluded, alienated, challenged by racial prejudice, targeted, denied rights, and ill-treated. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is an excellent text that illuminates this novel and examines the concepts that Wilson was trying to exemplify and challenge. In his book, Du Bois describes the concepts of the veil and double consciousness. Though he sets these terms apart, their meanings and usage are deeply intertwined. Du Bois transmits the struggle of Black people who felt they could not express themselves, something accentuated by a lack of words and the pain they endured. He succinctly explores what it meant to be Black in America during the era of slavery and the civil rights movement and what it meant in the twentieth century. In his articulation of the concept of “the veil,” he refers to it in three ways. First, the veil suggests the literal darker skin of Black people, which is a physical demarcation of difference from whiteness. Second, the veil suggests white people’s inability to see Black people as “true” Americans. Finally, the veil refers to Black people’s lack of clarity in being able to see themselves outside of what white America describes and prescribes for them. Du Bois describes the life-altering moment that every socially aware African American has experienced—the realization that being Black is a problem—and demonstrates this by sharing his own youthful experience of being rejected, due to his skin color, by a white girl whom he liked: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from others; or like [them perhaps] in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows” (Du Bois, 29). In my experience of triple consciousness, I am not necessarily a problem. Perhaps I may be “extra work” for my white professors who may now have to delve into Sub-Saharan African history and scholarship within and for my work. However, I do, like Du Bois, face the veil that reminds me of how I am not a “true American” and “not fully Black American,” which I find ironic, given that the label “African and American” describes me well.

Du Bois makes us comprehend that white people’s view of Black people is obstructed by this not-so-invisible veil that hangs between the races. He attests to the fact that although the veil shades the view of both Blacks and whites, Black people have traditionally had a better understanding of whites than the reverse, due to the “two-ness” lived and felt by Black Americans. In other words, upon realizing what being Black in America has meant both historically and in the present, Du Bois argued that Black people have long known how to operate in two Americas—one that is white and one that is Black. This phenomenon intriguingly describes “double consciousness,” or the awareness of the two-ness of being an “American and an African American” and the largely unconscious and almost instinctive movement between these two identities, as needed. Using Du Bois’s concepts of the veil and “second sight,” a vision that yields him no true self-consciousness but lets him see himself through the revelation of another’s perspective, we can better comprehend this struggle with identity, fitting in, being accepted, and being treated as true Americans, and more fundamentally human beings. In tracing my own triple consciousness, I have observed how my knowledge and acknowledgment of my “belonging to Africa” can frustrate those in authority.

My triple consciousness is the basis for all I do in my digital rhetoric graduate program. In line with Emanuel Levinas and Toni Morrison’s theorizing of the relationship between the self and the Other, I find myself often “othered” within my involvement at my university. I am a Black man, a Black man with locked hair (i.e., dreadlocks), and a Black man with an accent from Africa. When I teach, I embody the roles of the American and the African, something I have come to appreciate through my relationships with students. I am an American and am recognized through that lens because I teach in American institutions and follow the western curriculum with which my students are familiar. However, when I attempt to collaborate in research projects with fellow PhD candidates, I am the Other and set in opposition to favored research topics. Additionally, for example, when I am observed teaching, my teaching philosophy and pedagogical approaches generate caution to some observers because I resist colonial residues and use decolonial rhetoric at an institution that was once a slave plantation. In my capacity as the assistant director of the University Writing Lab, where I am the only PhD candidate employed, I find that some students make appointments with me with preconceived notions, both good and bad. International students schedule their appointments seeing opportunity and abundance in my views because I am the only Black employee at the lab and an international student as well. I have also noticed from reserved attitudes and pondering questions that when white, especially southern, students arrive at the lab, having scheduled appointments with me as the only graduate-level writing consultant, they are at first frustrated. In this case, then, being the Other puts limitations on my positionality. I am a walking digital rhetoric subject on the website of my university. My image, description, and appearance either invites or uninvites others based on their racially and geographically biased judgments.

In addition to my coursework and teaching, I have grounded myself in a solid foundation of literary research and literacy pedagogy, and I have explored the residues of marginalization in the education systems of Southern Africa that survive to this day, long after the plague of apartheid. Committed to remedying this injustice, I joined hands with my past high school students and established a college-level African Book Club. In the African Book Club, I use digital technologies to assist ambitious youth in Lesotho, nurturing their literacy skills and encouraging them to read diverse and challenging texts. I still teach composition and creative writing in Lesotho, using the African Book Club website. Seasonally, I supervise writing contests that enable young African writers to exercise their skills with creative essays that propose sustainable and developmental approaches to benefit the country. Through these digitally mediated efforts, I hold the responsibility of ensuring that while I code-switch from being a Black American scholar, I focus my attention on being an African scholar. From a distance, I continue to support my African people during such catastrophes as the HIV epidemic and the Covid-19 pandemic by providing lifesaving information on proper health and body care, all while dismantling the plague of disinformation that, unfortunately, misguides my people into unhealthy routines or health practices that further endanger their lives. In this work, my triple consciousness persists in the sense that now, during my PhD journey, my people mistake me for a medical doctor who is not arrogant or white and can perform circumcisions and other medical procedures.

My triple consciousness also inflects my PhD work by leading me to police myself in a manner that often exacerbates my anxiety. In the present moment, we are often, as we should be, engaged in conversations regarding racial violence and police brutality. We are now recognizing that in numerous ways, university departments have not directly attended to racism, and key Black authors have not been adequately included in our scholarship. Although I appreciate the dialogue when I converse with peers and professors in academic settings, my embodied experience continues to be that of an outcast. When I participate in groups in which Black bodies are limited, I still find myself limiting what I say in terms of racial discussions. Though I have lived in America now since 2006, my voice is welcomed in academic spaces, but comments continue to be made that remind me that though my skin may be Black, my input is not seen as representing the Black American experience. In a university seminar during a discussion about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “Paranoid Style of American Policing,” in which he discusses tasering, killing, and beating as forms of “keeping the peace” in communities, I was still asked, “But how is that for Africa?” even though my input came from thirteen years of American citizenship and life as a Black civilian. I speak in a way that polices myself, so as not to cause discomfort to my American-born brothers and sisters.

In my experience as a PhD student, I have found that for some professors, I pose more work for them, because to help me they must first do their homework on African epistemological thought. Although I enjoy and comprehend the value of speaking to the ongoing discourse within western academic fields, my purpose is to also make a difference in the far-off land from which I originate, where there are limited academic opportunities and few who have received the life-changing opportunities from which I benefited. I often find myself struggling with genuflecting to American scholars instead of anchoring myself deeply in the work of researchers outside the United States with the potential to improve the lives of people living in destitute situations across the globe. I write and publish from the position of an African who aims to make a difference in the lives of the forgotten, and I approach situations in America in a manner similar to the way my heroes Nelson Mandela and Bob Marley navigated adversities. However, I teach from the position of an African-and-American. I teach with the sensitivity that if I push the envelope a little too far or outright reject policies and behaviors that echo the institution’s past associations with slavery and plantations, I may get booted off campus or perhaps be left out of discussions for disturbing the “peace.” I say this because I produced a digital rhetoric piece that pointed out how my institution was misusing its technologies in the guise of advocacy, activism, and social justice, using a staged and carefully choreographed racial justice event on campus as a case study. Following the publication of this multimedia piece, I experienced a backlash from university members, especially alumni with long-established ties to the university and its conflicted racist history. I nevertheless remain hopeful and grateful to be involved in this learning opportunity. My triple consciousness simultaneously puts me in the spotlight and yet provides me with shade and relief.