Souls of Black Folk: Thoughts Part I

In Bonnie TuSmith's MultiEthnic Literature class, I played with the rhetoric of Otherness, but I played alone. No one else quite had the skills or knowledge I had to do this sort of work, and my words seemed new and wise. I cannot expect this at Purdue, however; here, some things are a given.
Sure, I could point out DuBois's structure: How you must always begin a race-theory text with a narrative about your first moment of feeling Othered. Because it gives you ethos to continue your argument, because retelling a moment of trauma or betrayal is one way to work through it, because that is the moment when Hegel/Husserl/Heidegger's lovely White Ontonlogy fails and we have to point that out. Because it's good for his "Gentle Reader" who is most certainly a white person dependent on Others for identity, and retelling that moment of Othering defamiliarizes us all: With whom am I to identify? My standard WhiteMale gaze for Burke's consubstantiation is gone. The world tilts as I read.
A description, then, of the feeling of Otherness, a feeling which is nearly impossible to describe in the first place. "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" (Ch 1). The sentence is full of commas and dashes and semicolons, dancing around the thing he can't seem to say. He makes up a word: "two-ness" and emphasizes this multiplicity by multiplying his clauses. Too much. Two is too much for one neat sentence.
He speaks for his race throughout, without the hesitations and hedgings we're used to: "The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self." and " He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face." He names his desires as the desires of the whole, to simplify matters--to unify his radical argument.
But is this "critical race theory"? No, it's the rhetoric of Otherness. I have no theory, and I'm not being "critical" in the sense that I am attempting to change the system. I'm not advocating, I'm not giving agency--I'm just noting things. Who's going to listen to a white girl from Ohio anyway? How could I possibly have the ethos to be "ethical"?
Of course, I can always try to figure out a Burkeian approach to agency for the Other. Is consubstantiation really possible? Do we even really want that?