Eye To Eye
From Concept to Realization: the making of a song
The second single from Parallel World is called “Eye To Eye” and it’s a song about racial profiling. One of the main inspirations for the song was the incident in Central Park in May 2020 where a white woman named Amy Cooper tried to weaponize the police against black birdwatcher Christian Cooper. As a black person in North America, it can often feel like you are seen as guilty until proven innocent.
Every time I walk into a business, I notice the suspicion and apprehension emanating from the clerk as they track me with their eyes for the entire time I’m there. In the public sphere, I’m usually of two minds simultaneously: how I perceive myself and how I appear to others as a black man. W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term “double consciousness” in 1903’s The Souls of Black Folk to describe the curious duality of African-American life:
“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 feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.
After the paywall, I go to discuss how Desmond Cole, Dafonte Miller, Agent 728 and the Toronto Sun influenced the making of “Eye to Eye”.
