First before describing the dichotomy between the inflective and reflective selves we must understand what they are. The inflective self is the person that one sees themselves as. It dictates numerous traits that we project to the world including but not limited to self-confidence, pride, intro/extroversion, speech, and personality. The reflective self is the person that the world sees you as, usually based on a few basic traits such as race, creed, nationality, orientation, functionality, and sex. However other factors do play a role: body type, physical attributes (hair color, eye color, muscular strength, mental prowess, etc.). These are the factors of traditional stereotypes. They are completely independent of the person themselves and are assigned frequently without first meeting a person that fits a particular category.
Trouble can occur, however, at the metaphorical meeting place of the two half selves, human consciousness. If inflective and reflective self can come together be contained as a single entity, that is the differences between what one believes they are and what the world sees them as are close enough for conflict to become negligible or in the least manageable, then the person will be in harmony with the status quo. However, if the differences between the inflective and reflective are too vast to be reconciled or negated, then the person involved will be unsatisfied with their position in society, and in serious cases attain a sort of double-consciousness whereby both factors, the inflective and reflective will continuously vie for the advantage.
As I mentioned briefly before, there are two particular groups where this dichotomy between the inflective and reflective are seemingly irreconcilable, that is African Americans and the working class. Both of these groups have experienced and still experience discrimination and degradation from the reflective world. African Americans double-consciousness can find its roots in slavery (particularly American slavery for this example). Of course no African American alive today was ever a slave him or herself. Rather the stigma wrought from generations of bigotry and intolerance, of mistreatment and unabashed hate, and of the proliferation of stereotypical ideas centuries old have brought down on the African American psyche as a whole a pall, a shadow covering them from birth out of from under which they must crawl to be successful even in a nation where all are purported to be equal.
"...The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 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. One ever feels his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." (Du Bois, 195)
The double-consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks of is one that is brought upon African Americans by stereotypes and manifested in our actions. It can be seen in our television shows, our movies, our music, our art, our culture, our religion. Four hundred years ago, Europeans justified slavery because by Christianizing them they were saving their souls; their bodies were dispensable in exchange for eternal bliss. Today remnants remain of this and other logical presumptions. In this country they are on average paid 18% less on average than Caucasians. Poverty rate for African Americans is 13.2%, that is 7.7% higher than it is for Caucasians (1). African Americans are the “red-shirts" (2) of our movies, particularly horror movies. There is no debate that they are better off now than they were pre-1865 (3) or even prior to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's. Truthfully, African-Americans are better off with each and every day that passes and each and ever racist that pushes up daisies But the problems brought about by slavery have yet to be solved, and so too the double-consciousness of African-Americans has yet to be resolved.
In the case of the working class, we have a separate but closely related problem. Unlike the dichotomy between African American inflective selves and reflective selves, the cause for working class inflective and reflective halve differentiation is difficult to pin down. At best we can offer a few examples of the suppression of the working class. In the United States, this is easier because most of us came from different countries at some point or another in our history and equally so most of us started off as a member of the working poor or as a subsistence farmer. In addition, one can pick out various “waves” of immigration from other countries to the United States. The English came first, but they are the trend-setter not an example.
The Germans came next and examples of bias against them were prevalent. “It is an old tradition in New York city that German immigrants, unlike the children of other lands, no sooner set foot upon the American shores than they piously turn to hottest labor for a livelihood, eschewing politics as they would gambling and other kindred vices...” (4) This quote, though as part of an article actually promoting German involvement in politics in 1872, shows quite a bias still, stereotyping Germans into the working poor.
The Chinese came as well. Senate Republican John H. Mitchell had this to say on the Senate floor about Chinese immigration: “The Pacific States and Territories were more interested than any other section of our country in this new evil, threatening imminent and dangerous to the social, moral and industrial interests of that section. He depicted the evils which had come upon the Pacific Coast through the influx of Chinese, and said there would be no stop to this resistless flow of these people. ...Fifty millions could be spared and not missed, a greater number the the population of our whole country. ...Crush out this viper which is gnawing at [the nation's] vitals.” (5) This excerpt featured in an article from the Boston Globe dated May 17th 1876 shows the obvious and blatant bias against the admission of Chinese immigrants into the United States.
...And the Irish came to America too. “...During the last three months, some twelve thousand arrests were made in [New York City]. Of these, eight thousand were Irish.... The proportion of foreign criminals is as five to one in the prison which law-abiding citizens are so heavily taxed to support. New York... has been... a house of refuge to all the down-trodden wretches of the world. Escaped convicts and men who had not the remotest claim to our sympathy.” (6) And they too were discriminated against for being “lawless” and “violent”, “the downtrodden wretches of the world.”
As one can see, nearly all immigrant populations have been discriminated against at one point or another. In addition, most of these people then begin their lives in this country as part of the working poor. Unfortunately (though not coldly so), immigrants do not solely make up this pool of working class citizens. Many people native to this land of “equality” and “justice” are forced to work on subsistence wages, a pay rate at which you are just barely making ends meet, and not in a preferable manner. The working poor has its roots in immigrant labor and the prejudices that many in our nation have propagated over the centuries have transformed them from prejudices of ethnicity (which are still prejudices nonetheless) into prejudices of class. They have transformed a bigotry of a race to a bigotry of a socio-economic position, the working class position.
Today, one need not be prejudicial against race to be prejudicial against the poor. They are now an entity to themselves in this country; yet also, the poor and working classes today remain labeled, quite unfairly, as being migrant workers and immigrants. In the majority sense, this is completely unfounded and untrue.
An interesting look at the topic of working class comes from Barbara Ehrenreich, a PhD holder in cellular biology. In 2000, she undertook an experiment to see if she could live working for minimum wage. She took a series of jobs in three different cities. As a maid in Maine, she made this observation: “'We are nothing to these people,' she said. 'We're just maids.' Nor are we much of anything to anyone else. Even convenience store clerks, who are $6-an-hour gals themselves, seem to look down on us.” (7) This is the reflective self of a working class person in our country today. They are looked down upon or even ignored. They are little more than scum in the eyes of many Americans, both rich and middle class, because of prejudices set down from centuries ago.
Now that we have a sense of the identities forced upon the working poor and African Americans and have touched on the history behind such manifestations, we can look at its affects on the inflective self. The inflective self, or inner self, is how we each as people look at ourselves. When those views are positive and in concordance with how society sees us, we are happy and content with our lives. When those views are negated by a society that sees us as sub-par or unequal in some way, we become unhappy, depressed even.
For the working class person, there is a risk that the inflective self will not be lived up to by the actual living self. Feelings of self-worthlessness can attack even the strongest willed individuals over time. People of this class work hard; this is no misconception. Many have to work two and three jobs just to make ends meet. In addition, society sees them in a negative light. They are “nothing” to them. They are “invisible” to society because we choose to ignore that which causes us guilt. This ignorance bores into the psyche of the working poor leaving them with one of two results. Either they accept their position as all too many do. Or they continuously fight their reflective image. This is the double-consciousness, where one believes they are something that society believes they are not. And, they must fight society to retain some semblance of who they really are, lest they doom themselves to a life of miserable and passive acceptance of everything society wants to be true.
For African Americans the dichotomy of which we've spoken can be doubly difficult to overcome. Not only do they have to contend with racism, but many (far more than the overall U.S. average) have to deal with classism and classist bigotry too, just as the working poor must. This leads to an even greater risk of a double-consciousness and it's resultant effects on one's emotional state. One of the best examples of this dual dichotomy, that of the assault of class and race reflective bigotry on the psyche of African Americans, comes again from Barbara Ehrenreich. Actually it is a continuation of the previous quote:
"...I don't look so good by the end of the day and probably smell like eau de toilet and sweat, but it's the brilliant green-and-yellow uniform that gives me away, like prison clothes on a fugitive. Maybe, it occurs to me, I'm getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black." (Nickeled and Dimed, 100)
These examples, those of race and class double-consciousness, are but two of innumerable cases where such an occurrence can run rampant on the human mind. It is caused by bigotry and stereotypes. As we have seen its effects are long-lasting. Even one hundred and fifty years later African Americans are still vastly more susceptible to the reflective self than the average person. And, unfortunately this susceptibility is cyclical. The more you are trapped by it, the more it traps you. We must learn to break this circle of susceptibility not just in the cases of the working poor and African Americans but in life in general. We must understand the bigotry and stereotypes have consequences and that they will greatly and adversely affect our society for decades and even centuries to come if we do not consciously try to stop them. The dark stain on our nation may have grayed over the past decades and centuries but it's yet to be completely removed. This is the what we must do if we truly want to live in a country and speak of a country where all are created equal.
Endnotes.
1Based on data collected in 2005 by the U.S. Census Bureau.
2“Red-shirt” is a term given to the random character that would accompany the landing crew on the original Star Trek series when they came upon a new planet. They would inevitably be the first, if not only, to die. It is a reference to the color uniform shirt they wore.
3Slaves in the south were freed in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln under his executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation, however the Thirteenth Amendment freed the remainder of slaves (in Kentucky and Delaware) in 1865 formally abolishing the practice.
4“Germans in Politics.” Boston Daily Globe; November 11, 1872.
5“The Chinese Problem.” Boston Daily Globe, May 17th 1876. pp. 5.
6“Foreign Criminals in New-York.” The New York Times. February 22nd 1858. p. 4.
7Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickeled and Dimed. New York: Owl Books, 2001. p. 100.
Bibliography
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Strivings of the Negro People In Atlantic Monthly 80:194-198 (August 1897). Boston: Atlantic Monthly Co., 1897. p. 195.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickeled and Dimed. New York: Owl Books, 2001. p. 100.
“Foreign Criminals in New-York.” The New York Times. February 22nd 1858.
“Germans in Politics.” Boston Daily Globe, November 11, 1872.
Median Earnings in the last 12 Months, (In 2005 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars). U.S. Census Bureau, 2005. Accessed 12 March 2007.
“The Chinese Problem.” Boston Daily Globe, May 17th 1876. pp. 5.
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