I was 19, a sophomore at Columbia, and The Souls of Black Folk was required reading in my Contemporary Civilization class. I read the first two pages and decided on the spot that this one book was going to earn me half my participation grade. It was the first time I had the nuanced language for my own identity and experience in so many aspects of my life. Du Bois opens with the question nobody asks him out loud: “How does it feel to be a problem?” A page later he names what it does to you.
“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 twoness,—an American, a Black person; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Of course, parts of the Black American experience are far heavier than anything else I mention in this essay but it is hard for me not to see the similarities when other people have to live with a professional version of double consciousness. I caught myself using the phrase twice this month with other investors, so I figured I should write it down.
Here’s the version I keep hearing and interpreting. Seed and early-stage investors now carry two souls in one fund.
