Nonhlanhla Ngubeni SOC 310: Theorizing Modernity from Below Reflexive Paper - Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity 10 July 2020 Department of Sociology Race, how it is constructed in our society and how this reflects the perception of how humanity should be defined is an issue that has been highly scrutinized by many post-colonial theorists. Steve Biko, being one, analyses this in Biko (1978/2017) through specific lenses. In this summary, I will be critically reflecting on his argument on the question of black humanity in post-colonial South Africa using the Biko (1978/2017) and Du Bois (1908/2012) texts. In Biko (1978/2017), he engages us with his argument that the white supremist notions and culture within South African society that problematise and dehumanise Black people, are conscious creations of the whites and need to be deconstructed and abolished in order for an egalitarian society to emerge, as he notes that “…the “Black Consciousness” approach would be irrelevant in a colourless and non-exploitative egalitarian society” (Biko 1978/2017:87) and that “[i]t is relevant here because [Blacks] believe that an anomalous situation is a deliberate creation of man” (Biko 1978/2017:87). Black Consciousness is the solution that Biko brings forth to solve the problem of the white gaze that seeks to subjugate Blacks under the ethnocentrism of whites seeking to disempower Blacks completely. It is a concept that speaks of the proverbial lifting of the veil that causes what Du Bois (1908/2012) calls double-consciousness (which is when one’s view of themselves is incongruent with the view of them imposed onto them by the white supremist narrative) within the Black subject. Biko describes it as “…an attitude of mind and a way of life” (Biko 1978/2017:91) with its essence being “…the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness of their skin - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude” (Biko 1978/2017:91- 92). This text is a form of critical social theory because it raises points that seek to force Blacks and whites alike to be aware of their positionality within the social, economic and political contexts of South Africa through the use of the racial lens. What Biko (1978/2017) aims to do is to challenge the pervasive colonial thought, that permeated into the post-colonial society, of an imagined supremacy of whites which relegates Blacks into a position of dispossession. According to Biko, this “…colour question in South African politics was originally introduced for economic reasons” (Biko 1978/2017:87-88), this then elucidates to us that it is precisely why whites would choose to remain ‘unaware’ of the overt and mostly covert racism and economic oppression that exists in South Africa because a capitalist societies’ valuation of power and success is based on economic freedom. Therefore, if you restrict and constrict the amount of economic freedom Blacks can achieve (within the constitutional bounds of democracy) then you have effectively left them powerless and in perpetual servitude to the white bourgeoises (who are the owners of the means of production). Biko elucidates this further when he states that “[t]he leaders of the white community had to create some kind of barrier between black and white so that the whites could enjoy privileges at the expense of