From Double Consciousness to Racialized Intersubjectivity
Du Bois and the Unequal Conditions of Recognition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24239790 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Li-Fu Chang (0009-0003-8135-9524, Department of Sociology University at Albany State University of New York Albany New York USA) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-20 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociology Lens (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2832-5796 • E-ISSN: 2832-580X |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/johs.70093 |
| OpenAlex | W7223057828 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
How do racialized actors become recognizable as legitimate participants in social interaction? This article develops the concept of racialized intersubjectivity to explain how racial domination structures the conditions under which recognition becomes possible. Bringing Du Bois into dialog with Mead, Blumer, and Goffman, I argue that interaction does not necessarily begin from symmetrical conditions of recognition. Du Bois's analyses of the color line, the veil, and double consciousness reveal how racial domination produces asymmetrical perspective‐taking and unequal burdens of recognition. Building on this insight, racialized intersubjectivity identifies three analytically distinct but interconnected conditions of recognition: intelligibility, credibility, and moral standing. These conditions shape the terms on which actors become understandable, believable, and morally legitimate participants in interaction. Rather than determining interactional outcomes, racial hierarchy structures the presumptions from which encounters begin, and actors may reproduce, negotiate, contest, or transform through interaction. By reconstructing Du Bois as a theorist of asymmetrical recognition, the article offers a corrective to classical interactionist accounts of role‐taking, meaning‐making, and interactional order and treats intersubjectivity not as a universal premise of social interaction but as a historically structured and relationally unequal accomplishment.
Blumer · Color line · Credibility · Double consciousness · Erving Goffman · intelligibility · interactional order · interactionist theory · Mead · moral status · Perspective-taking · racial domination · Racial hierarchy · recognition · veil · W. E. B. Du Bois · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society
Making ethnicity visible
Du Bois's contested legacy
The Epistemology of Resistance
Settler Sociology
White Fragility at the European Borders
Genetic Anti‐Blackness
Colonial Scholars and Anti‐Colonial Agents
The Crisis of the Emancipation? The 1900 Paris Exposition and Du Bois’s Negotiation with Imperial Episteme
Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position
A Global Phenomenology of Whiteness
The Scholar Denied
Integrity and Disrespect
Early Remnants of Global Historical Sociology
The Interaction Order
The Interaction Order Sui Generis
On the Coloniality of Being
Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness
| Highly cited | No |
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