From Double Consciousness to Racialized Intersubjectivity: Du Bois and the Unequal Conditions of Recognition

How do racialized actors become recognizable as legitimate participants in social interaction? This article develops the concept of racialized intersubjectivity to explain how racial domination structures the conditions under which recognition becomes possible. Bringing Du Bois into dialog with Mead, Blumer, and Goffman, I argue that interaction does not necessarily begin from symmetrical conditions of recognition. Du Bois's analyses of the color line, the veil, and double consciousness reveal how racial domination produces asymmetrical perspective‐taking and unequal burdens of recognition. Building on this insight, racialized intersubjectivity identifies three analytically distinct but interconnected conditions of recognition: intelligibility, credibility, and moral standing. These conditions shape the terms on which actors become understandable, believable, and morally legitimate participants in interaction. Rather than determining interactional outcomes, racial hierarchy structures the presumptions from which encounters begin, and actors may reproduce, negotiate, contest, or transform through interaction. By reconstructing Du Bois as a theorist of asymmetrical recognition, the article offers a corrective to classical interactionist accounts of role‐taking, meaning‐making, and interactional order and treats intersubjectivity not as a universal premise of social interaction but as a historically structured and relationally unequal accomplishment.