Book Review: Solution to Double Consciousness and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Abstract

The purpose of this book review is to examine The Autobiography of an ExColored Man by James Weldon Johnson through the lens of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1994). As a result, this review and analysis highlights the method James Weldon Johnson used to lift prejudiced readers’ veil and the veil of African Americans. Du Bois explains the African American veil as “second sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness...” and elaborates that “it is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Dubois, 1994, p.2). Even so, Dubois commendably recognizes that African Americans have achieved selfrealization and self-respect. He states how it is so: