Name the two views
Separates how a person knows themselves from how institutions and dominant culture make them legible.
unofficial source-built lens · v1
W.E.B. Du Bois on double consciousness
Hold the tension between self-knowledge and being seen through a dominant gaze, using second sight without accepting the gaze as truth.
A lens never answers for you. It helps you see the question that your perspective alone might miss.
01 / attention
What this lens helps you notice.
These are the visible attention shifts projected into ask’s Question Genome.
Use second sight
Treats the contradiction as a source of perception about the system, not only as private confusion.
Refuse false unity
Asks what reconciliation would preserve dignity and plurality rather than demand assimilation.
02 / question moves
How it changes the next question.
The lens influences where ask looks. The question still belongs to you.
- 01Clarify the territory
How do you know yourself here, and how are you being made to see yourself?
Separates how a person knows themselves from how institutions and dominant culture make them legible.
- 02Test the frame
What does living inside both views reveal about the system around you?
Treats the contradiction as a source of perception about the system, not only as private confusion.
- 03Open a next move
What would wholeness require without surrendering difference?
Asks what reconciliation would preserve dignity and plurality rather than demand assimilation.
03 / genome projection
No mystery score.
The translation layer is inspectable: source patterns become attention territories, then question moves.
Named, linked, and open to inspection.
Name the two views · Use second sight · Refuse false unity
Three movements, each changed by the lens.
04 / boundaries
What this lens does not claim.
Trust begins where the interpretation stops pretending to be total.
- 01
This is a source-grounded interpretation, not a simulation of a person or a claim to know what they would say.
- 02
The lens changes what ask notices and tests; it does not supply an answer or override your judgment.
- 03
Sources are bounded and visible. Missing work, context, and disagreement remain part of the lens.
05 / source index
Inspect the material.
Every lens should show what shaped it, what is missing, and when it changed.
- S1Two Unreconciled Strivings ↗
Library of Congress
- S2W.E.B. Du Bois Papers ↗
University of Massachusetts Amherst
bring it into ask