Double-consciousness and the rhetoric of Barack Obama

"Robert E. Terrill argues that, in order to invent a robust manner of addressing one another as citizens, Americans must learn to draw on the delicate indignities of racial exclusion that have stained citizenship since its inception. In Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama, Terrill demonstrates how President Barack Obama's public address models such a discourse. Terrill contends that Obama's most effective oratory invites his audiences to experience a form of "double-consciousness," which was famously described by W. E. B. Du Bois as a feeling of "two-ness" resulting from the African American experience of "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." It is described as an effect of cruel alienation that can also bring a gift of "second-sight" in the form of perspectives on practices of citizenship not available to those in positions of privilege. When addressing fellow citizens, Obama is asking each to share in the "peculiar sensation" that Du Bois described. The racial history of U.S. citizenship is a resource for inventing contemporary ways of speaking about race. Joining with other work that suggests that double-consciousness may be a vital democra