The Double Truth, Ruth: Do the Right Thing and the Culture of Ambiguity

In Of Our Spiritual Strivings, famous first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois ascribes to African-American consciousness what he perceives to be fundamental two-ness. This double-consciousness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring one dark body (3), is an effect of contradictory positioning of African-American culture within dominant social order of Americanism (4). On one hand, American democratic capitalism promotes to its ethnic constituents its promise of economic opportunity, material satisfaction, and social justice. On other, it consistently fails to grant black Americans full and equal access to socioeconomic structures upon which fruits of this promise depend. As Du Bois describes it, this political condition, consequence of pressures exterior to black community, creates corresponding interior dilemma for African-Americans who achieve authority American culture despite its institutionalized racism. Which of two competing allegiances does one serve? One's loyalty to black community, which would benefit profoundly from one's acquired expertise engaging white America? Or one's duty to one's own future, ironically linked to esteem of majority culture violently inimical to minority community of which one is part? In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, composed some ten years after publication of The Souls of Black Folk, James Weldon Johnson likewise identifies a sort of dual personality which every coloured man has in proportion to his intellectuality, dualism which persists both in freemasonry of his own race and in presence of white men (2122). And like Du Bois, Johnson's hero feels dichotomy at core of his ambition: Was it more desire to help those I considered my people, or more desire to distinguish myself . . .? (147). Du Bois calls this dilemma the waste of double aims, seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals (5) which can never be reconciled. The powerfully unitary pull of responsibility to community and responsibility to self, when configured as oppositional by racist symbolic order, must inevitably become self-destructive. Thus, sublated this polarized crisis of responsibility is an equivalently polarized crisis of identity. Cornel West has argued that it is precisely this perceived crisis of identity, this of which led anxiety-ridden, middle-class Black such as Du Bois and Johnson to construe African-American cultural experience terms of simplistic binary oppositions that forced black attempts at personal and political liberation to remain inscribed within very logic that dehumanized them (72). The implication of West's critique is that cultural logic of double-consciousness, as it was promulgated by intellectuals of modern black diaspora and as it has been inherited by contemporary African-American culture, consigns that culture to an untenable role within American capitalist symbolic order. It dooms African-American subject to literally purgatory, eternally situated between oppositional terms of complex hierarchy of antinomies which by definition can never be resolved. This weft of irreconcilable binarisms is constituted by ideologies and oppositional counter-ideologies which govern subject's relation to hegemonic socioeconomic order, to strategies of resistance conceived to combat this order, to strategies of survival necessary when this resistance is compromised, and to subject's own evolving sense of identity, inextricable as it is from this intricate fabric of relations. Do Right Thing, produced 1989, is director Spike Lee's attempt to explore human particularity of this system of binarisms and culturally entrepreneurial situation of African-American subject within it. …