Most White Americans in the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries never expected that the enslaved people trafficked to the British colonies and United States, or these peoples’ descendants,  would become part of American society. African-descended people on United States soil were generally denied opportunities to exercise the benefits of citizenship. The presumed democratic practices on which the country was founded were out of reach. The division between Black Americans and the White people who enslaved them was sharp. White people were privileged, free, and powerful. Black Americans were disadvantaged, restricted, and powerless. This acute division, known after Emancipation as “the color line,” made it almost impossible for most African Americans to move beyond the designated geographical, political, educational, psychological, and economic spaces assigned to them. In response, Black Americans developed strategies to cope with and resist these barriers.

Those with “skin privilege,” that is, those who were light enough to pass for White, sometimes did so. Darker-skinned Black Americans developed other strategies for dealing with racial limitations. Some resorted to wearing metaphorical masks. In the presence of White people, they pretended to agree with things they did not believe. The purpose of mask-wearing, as one character in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man affirmed, was to “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction.”[1] Wearing masks often enabled Black Americans to take insults from White people, smile, and keep a job that they desperately needed. Some even actively sought to flatter White people for access to jobs or other advantages for their families. While the strategy might have been effective, it took a psychological toll on those who performed in that manner, as Paul Laurence Dunbar makes clear in his poem “We Wear the Mask.” The “grinning and bearing it” posture that Black Americans adopted to endure racism could exhaust them spiritually. Their only outlet was to cry out to God.

The color line made Black people visibly invisible in their own country. White people often refused to recognize their humanity or grant them any semblance of equality. The mental burden of such treatment was tremendous. Black people constantly knew the psychological toll of being in, but rejected by, American society. Their precarious status—being susceptible to lynchings, burnings, whippings, firings, and displacement from their homes, among other negative outcomes—made them constantly aware of the power that White people had to control and/or take their lives.

They thus embraced the strategy of “double consciousness.” This strategy developed a constant vigilance of how White people viewed them, and filtered their actions through the lens of possible White rejection or violence. W. E. B. Du Bois articulated this concept of twoness—that is, he said, always viewing oneself through the eyes of White people—in his foundational 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. Ralph Ellison provides a wonderful example of this in his 1952 novel Invisible Man, when a young Black man contemplates a job interview. Initially eager, he modifies his behavior based on how he thinks his White interviewer might perceive him. “Mr. Bates might not wish to see a Negro the first thing in the morning. I turned and walked down the hall and looked out of the window. I would wait awhile. . . . My uncertainty grew. My appearance worried me. Mr. Bates might not like my suit, or the cut of my hair, and my chance of a job would be lost.”

The color line led to double consciousness, and both are the consequences of racism. Double consciousness converted social alienation into an opportunity for subversive resistance. Yet given the intense racial pressures that Black people withstood, it is a wonder, as some astute folk raconteur observed, that African Americans are not all crazy or dead.