Dueling Black Identities

Winning the War Within

By: Sondai Lester

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Sondai Lester's latest publication examines the dueling identities that Black people contend with as a part of daily life—one debilitating and one powerful and creative. For those raising Black youth, the book offers strategies to enable the powerful and healthy identity endowed at birth to prevail and thrive.

The author contemplates a contemporary application of W. E. B. Dubois’ 1903 idea of double consciousness. Black people wrestle with two minds, two identities, two self-perceptions. One wins, one loses. One has been forged and reinforced by 400 years of race-based oppression within a white power system. The other identity of wholeness, capability, and human equality is gradually suppressed and denied from the moment a child enters the world.

Dueling Black Identities builds on ideas from Sondai’s previous two publications, with Black identity, a critical link to the struggle for self-determination, as their common thread. Who Dropped the Ball on Our Kids?, Connections Remembered: African Origin of Humanity and Civilization and this publication are tools for resistance.

The book explores the nature of this Black identity dilemma, the identity formation process for Black youth, the modern whiteness movement to constrict Blacks to their caste-defined station, the escapist behaviors that undermine Black collective action, and strategies to win the war within.

The family, school, and community must coalesce to create and deliver a developmental process to confront and eliminate this identity duality in Black children. African-centered pedagogy and nurturing Black children’s capacity for “free” thinking are essential to reconstituting healthy identities and positioning us to wage the struggle to bring about a self-determining destiny.