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Dueling consciousness is Kendi’s term for how people struggle to separate and choose between two competing concepts of race. For African American people, this often means getting caught between antiracism and assimilationism. For white American people, it’s common to get stuck between segregationism and assimilationism, which are both racist ideas.
Dueling Consciousness Quotes in How to Be an Antiracist
The How to Be an Antiracist quotes below are all either spoken by Dueling Consciousness or refer to Dueling Consciousness. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2: Dueling Consciousness
Quotes
History duels: the undeniable history of antiracist progress, the undeniable history of racist progress. Before and after the Civil War, before and after civil rights, before and after the first Black presidency, the White consciousness duels. The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.
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Dueling Consciousness Term Timeline in How to Be an Antiracist
The timeline below shows where the term Dueling Consciousness appears in How to Be an Antiracist. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: Dueling Consciousness
...they took middle-class corporate jobs and surrounded themselves with white people instead. They developed a “dueling consciousness”: they saw themselves both through their own eyes and through the gaze of mainstream...
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Kendi notes that white people also often suffer dueling consciousness: they get caught between segregationism and assimilationism, which are both racist ideas. Assimilationists want...
(full context)
Chapter 11: Black
...with the newspaper editor, who shuts down his column. As the antiracist voice in Kendi’s dueling consciousness starts winning out over the assimilationist one, he adds a major in African American...
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Chapter 12: Class
...neighborhood, Kendi considered urban poverty the most authentic form of Blackness. So his consciousness was dueling between “Black is Beautiful” and “Black is Misery.” He was really acting in a racist...
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