Frederick Douglass is one of the outstanding figures of American history. Full stop. Yet he is too often seen more narrowly as a key figure in the Black US history – important but still on the margins of America’s political thinkers.
A Google search reveals 13 million sites relevant to Douglass’s life and work, as well as numerous books and articles on the same. Nevertheless, Douglass remains relatively under-recognised. Hence, this fine new volume on Douglass’s political philosophy is a welcome and innovative addition.
It is also very timely – when race is again at the very top of the political agenda, even if submerged in the coded language and politics of election fraud and gerrymandering, or the politics of abortion, the unequal and continuing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and rising levels of income and political inequality.
Ironically, it is Douglass’s favoured political party (the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln), that, under Donald Trump’s incendiary spell, is the standard bearer of the return of racist politics and theories including the Great Replacement theory. The work, ideas and political strategies of Frederick Douglass, Nick Bromell shows, were always and everywhere linked to practical politics, tactics and alliance-building strategies.
Douglass’s ideas are relevant today and should be studied and taken seriously by scholars, students, citizens and activists who want an approach that marries theory and practice to promote radical change in the United States (and, arguably, elsewhere too).
Bromell establishes the main lines of Douglass’s original contributions to political philosophy as rooted in his experience of enslavement but also as a fugitive from bondage as well as a free man. He used this philosophy to “promote Black political solidarity, to contest white racism, and to transform the nation’s understanding of democracy and democratic citizenship”.
Douglass’s project was nothing less than to reconstitute the US political system on multiracialism that would require decentring of whiteness and white power. Why? Because as it stood, America’s public philosophy could not explain why Americans were entitled to full citizenship, or suggest why any citizen would unite to form a political community. Nor did the existing philosophy empower or encourage citizens to unite against injustice.
These issues arose from the shortcomings and omissions of the Founding Fathers’ famous Declaration of Independence which failed to define who counted as a “man” and who did not. Thomas Jefferson et al took their own human-ness for granted and therefore counted as men – but what about those without such (white, elite) privilege? And why is every man so entitled? The Declaration was silent.
Secondly, where did natural rights liberalism stand on forming a political community beyond self-interest? What were the sources of community and solidarity according to the Declaration? Again, silence, and hence, citizens pragmatically sought to supplement sources of solidarity in racism, nationalism, and gender. This brought into the light the ghost in the American machine.
Finally, Douglass provided a theory of active citizenship that had to win and maintain rights and freedoms and not just be “endowed” with them from on high, as the founders had stated. But this, for Douglass, was a quiescent notion of citizenship, especially in the face of oppression, a notion that was either indifferent or resistant to expanding rights to excluded citizens. Rights endowed by elites could be taken away by elites.
Douglass’s philosophy effectively laid bare for all who would see that the surface of the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights could seem open and democratic yet obscure anything approaching the basis of rights, of social solidarity against elite power, or the idea of an active citizenry defending and expanding democracy.
Hence, defeating slavery required more than abolition but a redefinition of politics and refounding of the entire political order to defeat white racism and establish a multiracial democracy. His personal experience of enslavement, as a fugitive, and a free man, were the sources of this new public philosophy, an innovation that has stood the test of time.
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Frederick Douglass was born enslaved (around 1817-18), escaped North to freedom, and went on to become a leading abolitionist, opponent of Northern racism, supporter of women’s voting rights, a leading author, editor, activist and political philosopher. He was even nominated to run for the vice presidency of the United States.
His public speeches drew large crowds, yet he was also physically assaulted on several occasions by white supremacists, but never cowed by them. Indeed, he outwitted and outfought them time and again. But almost everywhere in the United States, he had first to demonstrate to white audiences that he was indeed a human being, a man, with legitimate rights and freedoms. And above all, deserving of the dignity inherent in all human beings. He wanted to be seen.
When Douglass visited Britain and Ireland (in 1845) for example – he was treated for perhaps the first time in his life as a man and not as a Black man. He was elated with his reception wherever he spoke, and his British well-wishers even clubbed together to buy his freedom lest he be re-enslaved upon returning home.
Douglass expressed his astonishment thus:
“Eleven days and a half gone, and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlor—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended…. I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, ‘We don’t allow niggers in here!‘”
Douglass saw and condemned the utter poverty and famine that British colonial rule caused and presided over in Ireland and shared platforms with Irish nationalists, and was dubbed the Black American McConnell by the great Irish freedom fighter Daniel McConnell himself.
Even more profoundly, however, Douglass’s thinking was forever affected: he saw through the dark veil of race not as something natural and immutable, but as actively constructed, and therefore, changeable by human action and education. He saw a way through the walls and dark hard borderlines of white racism which helped him move towards a philosophy that was, ultimately, beyond race and rooted in humanity and dignity for all, rooted in self-respect, and therefore, respect for all.
It is this legacy that shines brightest from the many sources of enlightenment in Bromell’s carefully crafted study of one of America’s greatest public intellectuals, philosophers and activists.
‘The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,’ Nick Bromell, Duke University Press, 2021.
This is why, in an otherwise outstanding analysis, the subtitle of Bromell’s book, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, raises a few issues of interest. I can understand that the subtitle confers an award of originality to the thought of Douglass as a Black man, formerly enslaved who, as a free man, crafted a system of thought, analysis and political action.
For some, the subtitle plays well into recognition of a great achievement of an African-American as an African American. And who can fundamentally challenge the need for such recognition given American history’s brutalities and white supremacy? And especially given that white supremacy remains alive and well and increasingly mainstreamed in the Trump-dominated far-right Republican Party?
Yet, it also further necessarily reinforces the racialisations of American life, further embedding and legitimising race as the core division – as opposed to or complementary to class and gender, for example – of American society and history. Be it as it may – Frederick Douglass might well have challenged the Black characterisation of his political thought or, more likely, at least held both views in tension, as was his way and a mark of his political and philosophical sophistication. In the end, and on reflection, Bromell’s book more than adequately expresses that tension of holding two views that would appear contradictory.
Douglass’s was a heroic and courageous life of struggle, with struggle as the essential source of the realisation of freedom, rights and human dignity, of the very meaning of freedom actually. Without struggle, rights are mere paper. To be alive rights must be exercised, lived, renewed and manifested – democracy and freedom are not permanent or guaranteed by virtue of a written constitution or laws and, therefore, to be taken for granted. They must be lived and fought for by all – including whites upon whom liberty and rights appeared to be bestowed merely by virtue of their whiteness. His humane philosophy extended even to his enslavers – who are also enslaved within their own system of oppression.
But, the source of the manifestations of dignity lay within each person – to realise their human dignity one had to come to that position via struggle for dignity; and to the recognition that every human being was equal in their essence.
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Racism as a construction
In a very moving moment in Bromell’s study, Douglass speaks to the making of a brutal racist from one who was previously humane towards him when he was enslaved. Race and racism, Black and White identities, were a construction, not embedded in human nature. He describes how the new wife of his owner, a Mrs Auld, initially treated him as a human being and with respect, even teaching Douglass to read and write.
But though her husband forbade this progressive approach, Mrs Auld “lacked the depravity” required to dehumanise Douglass. She had to learn it, indicating her gradual corruption by “the fatal poison of irresponsible power”. As her husband prevailed, Mrs Auld learned first to deny Douglass access to books, and when he persisted in reading, to beat him with “utmost fury”, battling both him and her own conscience which knew she was wrong.
Beating Douglass was also suppressing that part of herself that recognised the harm she was doing to a fellow human being. She had constructed and became incarcerated in her own racist prison.
It was that construction of racialised identities that had made the American constitution and laws. Douglass’s outrage at this state is famously expressed in a speech he delivered on July 4, 1852, one of the most powerful and well known. “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?…What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim” – You profess to believe, “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” “and hath commanded all men everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own”.
One of the most interesting things that Bromell brings out in his book is that Douglass’s philosophy was never one-sided, narrow or dogmatic. His approach was incisively analytical and held what might appear to be rival approaches or viewpoints in constructive tension. So, while he fought against white racists – physically and intellectually – and upheld the view of whites’ guilt, he did not succumb to the narrow confines of Black nationalism.
Interestingly, he also believed that to be free, Blacks had to organise themselves, separately from whites, at least for a time, because the poison of racism was too destructive to allow for multiracial organisations, even if that was the end goal of radical political change. Tactical separation, alliance building with whites, women, and others, within a constitution that could accommodate change and indeed was the inspiration for such radical transformations.
That stance put him at odds with many – black and white – at the time and indeed since then. Most importantly, it places Douglass’s thought in an intellectual movement that, while recognising race as the San Andreas fault in US society and history, rejects the idea that race is the only or even most significant core source of division, one that virtually unlikely ever to be overcome. It is rooted in the educability of white racists and the potential for united human progress. It challenges the claims of white racist theories in particular, and may explain why racial segregation is a preferred option of such racists. For keeping races apart is a way of reinforcing difference and preventing the recognition of Blacks’ essential humanity.
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In his speeches to white Americans, he frequently spoke in starkest terms of what it is to be enslaved, what it means in practice, what it feels like to be so brutalised and demeaned. “The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! That gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.”
By such means he tried both, and simultaneously, to show how far from innocent white Northern experience the Black enslaved were, and how the suffering of those so oppressed was so human as to build a bridge towards the whites’ conscience.
Bromell points out, citing Angela Davis’s insight, that Douglass advanced a radical analysis of freedom in the context of enslavement – as it worked upon both enslaved and enslaver. The enslaved are aware that for them “freedom is not a fact… is not a given, but rather something to be fought for… [T]he slavemaster… experiences his freedom as inalienable and thus as a fact”.
However, the enslaver remains unaware that “he too has been enslaved by his own system”. And, even more, whites’ freedom was contingent too – on more powerful whites seeking to concentrate their own domination at the expense of the mass of white Americans. It is, therefore, our duty to exercise freedom in practice, rather than revere it in laws and documents that cannot guarantee rights and freedoms, because politics and life is a struggle for power and dignity.
To Douglass, human dignity came before rights; it was the bedrock of a decent, humane and liberal society. Yet, to that end the means would necessarily have to be violent, or at least as violent as the circumstances required. By this Douglass meant defensive violence – against aggression, in self-defence. There could be “no peace without justice, and hence the sword”. His was a fighting, struggling, activist philosophy against the status quo.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.” And “if there is no struggle, there is no progress”.
In the end, Douglass was asserting only his right, and rights of oppressed Black Americans, to be treated as human, in a white Christian republic, summed up in these heart-rending words: “Am I a man?” Was this not the question asked by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. a century later? Was it not the plaintive cry in his dying moments of George Floyd, as police extinguished his last breath?
Bromell’s careful academic study of the sources in enslavement and in fugitive freedom of Douglass’s thought and politics is a work of effective and rigorous scholarship, ultimately original and persuasive in its principal claim of locating in the life and work of Douglass an original and still-relevant public political philosophy that, though using the conventional language of natural rights liberalism extended and indeed broke with its inherent limitations to fashion a philosophy of unity, solidarity, struggles against all forms of oppression and injustice in a democratic republic.
But the book is a lot more than what to many might appear a dry academic text: it powerfully conveys in Douglass’s own words the cry of the oppressed, articulated by one whose ideas were rooted in enslavement, in his life as a fugitive, and one who drew from his own struggles to develop, against all odds, a humane philosophy that looked at race and racism as essentially constructed, and therefore, conquerable through popular struggle.
Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics at City, University of London, and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author of several books including Foundations of the American Century. His Twitter handle is @USEmpire.
