NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN RESISTANCE

     1.   U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf, 206.

     2.   See George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny (Wesleyan, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).

     3.   Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853), in Great Short Works of Herman Melville (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 39–74.

     4.   See Plato, The Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2004); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

     5.   Much of this literature is historical. Among others, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). An early pioneer of this in the history of slavery was Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; New York: International Publishers, 1983); Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

     6.   G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans., A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111–118; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 469–500. For Thoreau, see Nancy L. Rosenblum, “Thoreau’s Democratic Individualism,” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 15–38; for Mahatma Gandhi, see The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); for King, see Martin Luther King Jr., “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), in A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986), 293.

     7.   See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).

     8.   See Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 51–75.

     9.   Michel Foucault, “Power and Sex,” in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 123.

   10.   Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles from the Rural South to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2005); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

   11.   Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 100–112.

   12.   Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).

   13.   Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

   14.   See Jeffrey B. Ferguson, “Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance,” Raritan 28, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 4–32.

   15.   Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 102.

   16.   In his critique of Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), Charles Mills wonders whether it makes sense to transform what Roberts calls “flight,” or what could also broadly be labeled resistance, into a distinct genre of political thought and practice because it can be said to exist everywhere. Charles Mills, “Review of Freedom as Marronage, by Neil Roberts,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy—Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française 23, no. 2 (2015): 145–149.

   17.   Political resistance movements are unlike what we might describe as cultural resistance movements, which would find exemplary expression in James Baldwin’s and Ralph Ellison’s essays or in the work of the various writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, such as Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Cane, and Langston Hughes. Of course, I acknowledge the contested nature of the term “political” and agree with the argument of the political theorist Jacques Rancière that politics is foundationally defined through disagreement and contestation. While I do take this expansive definition seriously, I also try to isolate, in the broadest sense, how a study of resistance that centers on traditional political goods associated with government and collective life is distinct from one that focuses on culture, even though the two are often difficult to disentangle. On this understanding of the “political,” see Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Anne Norton, Ninety-Five Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).

   18.   See Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” (1964), in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, ed. Devon Carbado and Don Weise (San Francisco: Cleis, 2004), 116–129.

   19.   Loïc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (London: Polity, 2009).

   20.   For a short philosophical analysis of radicalism, which, admittedly, is as amorphous as the idea of resistance, see Paul McLaughlin, Radicalism: A Philosophical Study (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

   21.   For the best book on the political thought of civil rights, see Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Other important books on King include Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); and George M. Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 97–130.

   22.   See in particular “The American Dream,” “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” “Where Do We Go From Here?,” “A Time To Break the Silence,” “The Drum Major Instinct,” “Black Power Defined,” and “A Testament of Hope,” in A Testament of Hope.

   23.   Historians have vigorously debated the meaning of the so-called long civil rights movement, which arguably began as early as black workers’ struggles in the 1930s and 1940s and extended past King with the rise of the Black Nationalism and encompassed the democratic struggles waged by black activists such as Hamer, Baker, and Forman and Robert Moses. For what has become a classic statement on the long civil rights movement, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–1263. For one of the most important accounts of the tradition of democratic organizing in Mississippi, of which Baker and Forman were crucial, see Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995).

   24.   For such sociological interpretations, which largely though not exclusively center on the civil rights movement, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, and How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1978), 181–264; Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Also see Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1986).

   25.   See, in particular, Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 265–394.

   26.   John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2004); Joseph Luders, The Civil Rights Movement and the Logic of Social Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

   27.   Here I am thinking of the work of Neil Roberts, who has argued that resistance breeds a political theory of freedom. He has shown that Frederick Douglass and Angela Davis (as well as the Afro-Caribbean intellectual Edouard Glissant) creolize standard views of freedom—which, in their haste to debate the merits of positive or negative liberty, miss the understanding of freedom as flight, as continuing and ongoing struggle. I extend Roberts’s focus by showing how African American resisters fundamentally altered time-honored American understandings of various political ideas. See Roberts, Freedom as Marronage. More broadly, however, this book contributes to the burgeoning field of theorizing the relationship between race and political theory. This literature includes Lawrie Balfour, Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Shulman, American Prophecy; Stephen H. Marshall, The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship After Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Alex Zamalin, African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Dubois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2005); Eddie Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

   28.   For historical studies of black nationalism, see Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon, 1972); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2006). For a study of black nationalism that details how it has always been a historically evolving rather than timeless ideology and political practice responsive to currents in American politics, see Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a study of the core categories of black political thought—black disillusioned liberal, socialist, Marxist, conservative, radical egalitarian, and black feminist, see Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). For a study of the black radical orientations—“black prophetic” and “black heretic”—see Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003). For black Marxism see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

   29.   Historians might be leery of any book that seeks to place political ideas in a historical context. After all, this historical contextualization, which spans almost two hundred years, does not do justice to the specific nuances of the historical changes of political parties and electoral alignments, the American judiciary, public norms of citizenship, and voting patterns. Situating resistance historically, however, is more about showing how resistance ideas were responses to particular intellectual debates within a specific historical milieu. In every case, the ideas of African American resistance motivate the choice of historical contextualization.

   30.   For the relationship between political theory and political vision, which informs my own understanding of political theory, see Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). In a certain sense, however, my historical orientation is also partially indebted to the so-called Cambridge school of political theory of historical contextualism. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Finally, it should be noted that this book is squarely in the tradition of political theory rather than political philosophy, with a specific concern with the ways in which black political thought can help energize contemporary citizenship. Political theorists begin with and try to scrutinize the fact of politics—as it is and has existed historically—while political philosophers are interested in comprehensive and rigorous analysis of the conceptual validity and normative viability of certain political claims. Particularly, this book continues a project that has used African American political thought to refine, complicate, and enlarge thinking about democratic citizenship. See, in particular, Allen, Talking to Strangers; Turner, Awakening to Race; and Nick Bromell, The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). While my book is informed by many of their important insights, it differs in its focus both on relatively neglected figures and on specifically showing how they expand thinking in the American tradition.

   31.   Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1991); Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

   32.   In this sense, liberalism is found in everything from the founding debates between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the scope of government power and the nature of political representation, to slaveholders and abolitionists debating the constitutionality and morality of slavery, to Gilded Age individualists and Progressives debating the role of government in social life, to Cold War conservatives and social liberals debating the value of democracy. One can certainly argue that liberalism is a contested tradition or that there is no such thing as a singular liberal tradition—only multiple liberalisms. But proponents of the liberal-tradition thesis insist that, compared to its Western European counterpart, there is a surprising lack of political imagination in the United States, which is centered on Lockean liberalism. For a brief survey of the complexity of liberalism, see Michael Freeden, Liberalism: A Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

   33.   See Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Michael Rogin, “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988).

   34.   For the argument that civic republicanism was central to the American Revolution, see Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

   35.   The canonical view of power in the American tradition, which views it from an institutional perspective, is expressed by thinkers as diverse as Alexander Hamilton in his defense of a unitary executive in “Federalist no. 70” (1788), in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 344; slaveholders such as John C. Calhoun in his defense of a so-called concurrent majority, in which all vested social interests have veto power over major political decisions, in A Disquisition on Government: And Selections from the Discourse (1848; Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1995); Progressives such as Herbert Croly in his defense of a strong regulatory government in The Promise of American Life (1909; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014); and conservatives such as William F. Buckley in God and Man at Yale (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1951), which expresses his view linking religion and political rule.

   36.   In this way Walker, Douglass, Wells, Newton, and Davis implicitly rejected the view of the American pluralist tradition that tried to create false equivalencies within it, arguing that power occurs when different groups, irrespective of the magnitude of their resources, exercise their collective voice and interests. For the pluralist tradition, see James Madison, “Federalist no. 10” (1787), in The Federalist, 40–46; Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961).

   37.   For American social democratic thought, see Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 2003); John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, Ohio: Swallow, 1991); and Jane Addams, The Jane Addams Reader, ed. Jean Belthke Elshtain (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

   38.   For surveys of the American tradition that capture this point, see Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Harper Collins, 1984).

   39.   For the civic republican view of community, see John Adams, Revolutionary Writings, 1775–1783, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2011); Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995). For American individualism, see William Graham Sumner, On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner, ed. Robert C. Bannister (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” (1841), in Nature and Selected Essays, 175–204; Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). For communitarianism, see Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, and Ann Swidler, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

   40.   See Abraham Lincoln, “First Lincoln-Douglass Debate, Ottawa, Illinois” (1858), in Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Roy P. Basler (New York: Library of America, 1989), 512.

   41.   A notable defender of this view is the American philosopher John Rawls, who argues that the appropriate way to think about justice is for rational subjects to go behind a “veil of ignorance” in the “original position.” See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1971).

   42.   This is the approach that Harold Cruse takes in his famous study The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967; New York: NYRB, 2005).

   43.   See Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 10. See also Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

   44.   For a survey of major currents in democratic theory, see Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

   45.   For recent discussions about the idea of “the people” in democracy, see Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: Norton, 1988); and Bruce Ackerman, We The People, vol. 1: Foundations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For an important discussion about how this works for black politics, through the example of W. E. B. Du Bois’s political thought, see Melvin Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (2012): 188–203.

   46.   African American resisters provide a rich empirical case study of Michael Hanchard’s important thesis that black political thought provides important resources for political theory because of its unique and sustained concern with racism, oppression, and colonization. See Michael Hanchard, “Contours of Black Political Thought: An Introduction and Perspective,” Political Theory 38, no. 4 (2010): 512.

   47.   African American resisters are implicitly in dialogue with care theorists, such as Joan C. Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2013), and those concerned with global responsibility, such as Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).

   48.   African American resisters are important interlocutors for thinkers concerned with the normative requirements and conditions for democracy. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Amy Gutmann and Denis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1996).

   49.   For the radical democratic position, see Frank, Constituent Moments; for the liberal-constitutional perspective see Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

   50.   For some of the most recent debates about the nature of black politics, see Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois; Shelby, We Who Are Dark; Glaude, In a Shade of Blue.

   51.   These resisters call into question liberal discourses that still dominate American politics and culture, discourses of paternalism, law and order, safety and bodily security, and those that champion the adequacy of housing policy and systems of crime and punishment. In this way they partake in ongoing conversations about the relationship between liberalism and democracy. For a discussion of this in the American context, see Norton, Alternative Americas. For a conceptual study of British liberalism and the politics of empire, see Uday S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); for liberal social-contract theory and exclusion, see Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).

   52.   The work of these African American resisters deepens a burgeoning literature on “affect” theory. For a good survey of the field, see Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

   53.   For a survey of this turn to mourning, see David Eng and Davis Kazanjin, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); and Butler, Precarious Life.

   54.   For studies that address racially based income inequality, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2006). For racially based education inequalities, see Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the politics of postracialism see Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in America (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Racial injustice today no longer explicitly centers as much on the political problem of de jure segregation, legal discrimination, and social humiliation that King and the civil rights movement’s political theory, for example, sought to address. For King, the question was, quite broadly, how to create a society where black Americans are not discriminated against and can reap the fruits of the American dream, with all its promises of economic upward mobility and political voice. Today, the question is: How do we address the vast racial structural and socioeconomic disparity—from jobs to income to life expectancy—that continues to create a system in which black citizens are marginalized?

   55.   For this interpretation of Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison see Zamalin, African American Political Thought and American Culture.

   56.   For the idea of nonviolent coalition building, see Rustin, “From Protest to Politics.” For the vitality of difference politics, see Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 2007).

   57.   I am thinking of figures such as the black separatist Martin Delany, the black feminist Maria Stewart, the black communist Hubert Harrison, and Malcolm X. For the best examination of Delany, see Shelby, We Who Are Dark, 24–59. For Stewart, see Valerie C. Cooper, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). For Harrison see Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). For Malcolm X, see Saladin Ambar, Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Radical Politics in a Global Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

   58.   Their arguments are neither policy focused—those that advocate sentencing reforms, greater leniency toward nonviolent offenders, fewer privatized prisons, and more humane prison conditions—nor those that are diagnostic and explanatory, which try to account for the rise of mass incarceration over the past forty years and ask whether it is inherently racist. For the policy argument, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). For the critical-diagnostic interpretation, see Loïc J. D. Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007).

   59.   In doing this, these resisting figures deepen contemporary thinking about the politics of policing, which has been receiving increased interest as of late from political theorists. But rather than focus on policy they provide an alternative political theory and set of normative values that would address the inequalities that arise from policing practices. For political theorists who have tackled contemporary policing policy, see Bernard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). For a sociological interpretation, see David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

   60.   The classic, even if now dated, book on de facto segregation is still Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a more recent study, see Adrienne Brown and Valerie Smith, Race and Real Estate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

   61.   For thinking centered on agonistic forms of communication, see William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (New York: Verso, 2013); and Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000).

1. DAVID WALKER, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AND THE ABOLITIONIST DEMOCRATIC VISION

     1.   See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; New York: International Publishers, 1983); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles from the Rural South to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2005). David Brion Davis in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) does an excellent job of placing U.S. slave revolts in a global context, especially in relation to rebellions in the Caribbean around the same time.

     2.   Eric J. Sundquist reports that rumors soon spread that Turner’s body was boiled and was used as an oil, which became known as “Nat’s Grease.” See Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1993), 82.

     3.   For what still remains one of the best accounts of the rebellion, see Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (New York: Dover, 2006).

     4.   Political freedom, Hannah Arendt believed, constituted the genius of the American Revolution, as opposed to the French Revolution, which was concerned with social equality. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 49–106.

     5.   For an excellent account of the historiography of American slavery, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003).

     6.   Although unified by the goal of abolishing slavery, the ideas of various abolitionists were complex and diverse. Some abolitionists were more conservative; others were more radical. Some cared deeply about a robust vision of equality; others did not. My aim in this chapter is less to identify the political commitments of various strains of abolitionism and more to highlight a unique line of political-theoretical reasoning that emerges from two important black abolitionists. Focusing on the political ideas of black abolitionists in particular is especially important given that abolitionism was, in the popular American imagination, usually connected to white figures like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown. For an account of the complex ideas about the meaning of abolitionism, see Andrew Delbanco, The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1–56. For a wonderful history that illustrates the complexity as well as the exchanges between white abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith and John Brown and black abolitionists such as James McCune Smith and Douglass, while examining the way these figures tried to force Americans to think about slavery from the perspective of the slave, see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

     7.   For the best account of this in Walker, see Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (State College, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1996). For one of the best accounts of Douglass’s political thought, especially focusing on his “Fourth of July” speech, see Charles Mills, “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent,’ ” in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. Bill Lawson and Frank Kirkland (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 104–105. In particular, Mills asserts that Douglass’s four theses are that (1) natural law is a moral and jurisprudence issue; (2) the original intent of the founders is crucial, and so is the Constitution’s antiracism and anti–white supremacy; (3) there is inconsistency between founding principles and racial inequality; and (4) one should maintain optimism that blacks will be accepted.

     8.   To be sure, during the 1850s, Douglass seemed to become disillusioned with moral suasion and became increasingly willing to defend violent resistance. For this interpretation, see Frank M. Kirkland, “Enslavement, Moral Suasion, and Struggles for Recognition: Frederick Douglass’s Answer to the Question—‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ” in Lawson and Kirkland, Frederick Douglass, 243–310.

     9.   Mia Bay argues that Walker was one of the first Afrocentrists. She asserts: “In addition to endorsing the Egyptian ancestry and Hamitic descent of the black race, Walker raised another subject that would loom large in nineteenth-century black ethnology, namely, the racial character of white people.” Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas About White People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35.

   10.   Bernard R. Boxill asserts: “In fact Douglass’s opposition to black emigrationism went deeper. Although he agreed with its view that citizenship was vitally important in the modern world, he believed that its pessimism about the prospects for black citizenship in the US stemmed from a misunderstanding of the nature of national feeling.” Bernard R. Boxill, “Douglass Against the Emigrationists,” in Lawson and Kirkland, Frederick Douglass, 22.

   11.   For an analysis of the African American prophetic tradition, in which Walker could be placed, see George M. Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

   12.   There is speculation that Walker himself may have been involved. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 30.

   13.   The historian John Stauffer notes that the Missouri Compromise “was a crucial turning point that destroyed the successes of the early abolition movement.” This was because “the Missouri Compromise marked the beginning of a transformation in American society. It pointed to signs of a new era in reform, including a shift in visions of citizenship and community and in definitions of national and cultural boundaries. This transformation took many forms: the emergence of a national market economy; rapid westward expansion, which became the battleground of slavery; and a blurring of God’s law and national law.” See John Stauffer, “Fighting the Devil With His Own Fire,” in Delbanco, The Abolitionist Imagination, 71–72.

   14.   David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, 45. Available from the University Library of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html.

   15.   Ibid., 49.

   16.   Thomas Jefferson, “Declaration of Independence” (1776), http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html.

   17.   Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Paine: Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28.

   18.   This is Stephen Marshall’s insightful observation. Stephen H. Marshall, The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 28–29.

   19.   This is Melvin Rogers’s astute argument. He notes, referring to Walker: “His use of key terms—citizen and appeal—exemplify the ways blacks constituted themselves as political actors at the very moment their ability to do so was called into question or denied. The use of those terms, I contend, brings into sharp relief a presupposition of democratic politics—namely, that ordinary individuals are capable of judging their social world—to which he means to awaken his audience, especially his African American audience.” Melvin Rogers, “David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal,” Political Theory 43, no. 2 (2015): 209.

   20.   Walker, Appeal, 5. In this way, we can also say that Walker was something of a protoanarchist—almost a century before it would grip the imagination of some Americans in the early twentieth century—by calling black Americans to do what its most influential theorist, Emma Goldman, said was its hallmark: “[it] urges [us] to think, to analyze, to investigate every proposition.” Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kate Shulman (Amherst, Mass.: Humanity, 1996), 63–64.

   21.   In this sense, Walker wanted to tell black readers what Kant had answered in his 1784 essay, “What Is Enlightenment?”: “Have courage to use your own understanding!” Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. Walker’s own view that black people should be granted the intellectual and moral authority to judge political problems, despite not being granted the political authority to do this in politics or society, must have come from his acquaintance with the black lumber workers of his childhood; the closely knit black community in Boston, filled with artisans and literate small-shop owners; and his knowledge of the maroon colonies—runaway slaves who lived autonomously. For a more systematic development of Walker’s idea of judgment in the Appeal, especially in relation to larger discussions about black politics and democratic theory, see Rogers, “David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal.”

   22.   Walker, Appeal, 6.

   23.   Ibid., 13.

   24.   Ibid., 33.

   25.   Ibid., 81–82.

   26.   Ibid., 14.

   27.   This term comes from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

   28.   Walker, Appeal, 19.

   29.   Walker commentators such as Stephen Marshall and Eddie Glaude are right to read the Appeal as foundationally a Christian text, one that used messianic religion to instill hope for liberation in black people. But at the same time, as I show, the religiously infused language of morality itself did powerful work in the text. See Marshall, The City on the Hill from Below, 26–56; and Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 34–43.

   30.   Walker, Appeal, 19–20.

   31.   Walker thus followed the example set forth by St. Paul, who roamed the streets of what he saw as a corrupt Roman Empire while reciting Jesus’s ethical teaching, and anticipated Thoreau, who, decades after the Appeal was published, refused to pay poll taxes as a protest against U.S. imperialism and slavery. See Paul, “The Epistle of Paul, Apostle to Romans,” in The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 189–205; Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in The Higher Law: Henry David Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 63–90.

   32.   Walker, Appeal, 86.

   33.   The most obvious characteristic of cynicism—a systematic philosophical doctrine that was born in ancient Greece—is its defensive emotional posture. A cynic is someone who is preemptively skeptical or dismissive of what appears before them. For a good, though not exhaustive, introduction to the philosophy of cynicism, see William Desmond, Cynics (New York: Routledge, 2014).

   34.   Walker, Appeal, 4.

   35.   See “Brutus no. 2,” in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. Herbert J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1:373. For the definitive, even if brief, text on Anti-Federalist political thought, see Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

   36.   Walker, Appeal, 56.

   37.   Ibid., 58.

   38.   This position was made most famous by the political scientist Louis Hartz in his 1955 classic The Liberal Tradition in America. Hartz was wrong to see American slavery as an aberration in the family of American liberalism that fell into the dustbin of history only seventy-five years after the ratification of the Constitution—as if white supremacy and racism died after the Civil War ended. But Hartz was nonetheless astute to draw attention to the way slavery was often justified in liberal terms. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (1955; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1991), 8, 145–172. For a speech that expresses the slaveholder view, see John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837,” in Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, ed. Richard R. Cralle (New York: Appleton, 1853), 625–633.

   39.   Walker, Appeal, 17. Also see Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Boston: Lily and Wait, 1832), esp. “Query XIV,” 135–156.

   40.   Walker, Appeal, 18.

   41.   James W. Ceaser makes a convincing case that there are two views of nature in Notes that characterize Jefferson’s thought. On the one hand, there is the modern notion of natural-rights thinking—from Hobbes to Locke—which views rights as inalienable, as being present from birth. On the other hand, there is the popular notion of nature developed by naturalists such as Linnaeus and Buffon, which tried to classify human beings on the basis of certain, hereditary traits. For Ceaser, Jefferson’s project was at once to “establish political regimes that recognize natural rights and that employ race as a fundamental criterion for defining the make-up of political communities.” James W. Ceaser, “Natural Rights and Scientific Racism,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Nature, ed. Thomas S. Engerman (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 167.

   42.   Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Samuel Kercheval,” in American Political Thought, ed. Theodore Lowi and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Norton, 2008), 373.

   43.   Walker thus anticipates agonistic democrats such as Connolly, Honig, and Mouffe.

   44.   Walker, Appeal, 17–18.

   45.   To be sure, later in this speech Lincoln would gesture toward the way slavery was at odds with the Declaration of Independence’s commitment to political equality, but this was only a gesture, not a call for abolishing slavery. Abraham Lincoln, “First Lincoln-Douglass Debate, Ottawa, Illinois” (1858), in Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Roy P. Basler (New York: Library of America, 1989), 495–535. It was also this aspect of Lincoln’s early thinking about slavery that embodied Madison’s question in “Federalist no. 10”—What is the best and most practical and pragmatic way to address a political problem and achieve political order, with all its competing violent minority or majority factions that threatened individual property rights, freedom, and personal security? See James Madison, “Federalist no. 10” (1787), in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40–46.

   46.   Walker, Appeal, 5. Walker could never completely render himself immune from the criticism that the fundamentalism integral to his assertions about the moral necessity of abolition could be at odds with the liberal idea of pluralism, which does not assume any substantive conception of the good. For an excellent survey and unique conceptualization of the relationship between liberalism and pluralism, see William A. Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

   47.   Walker, Appeal, 25.

   48.   The position of sentimentalism was most famously defended by David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hume, unlike Walker, was completely unconcerned with the problem of responding to slavery—and at times actually argued that what he called “the Negro race” lacked civilization and was “naturally inferior” to whites. For a discussion of this, see Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002), 15.

   49.   Walker, Appeal, 7.

   50.   Ibid., 8.

   51.   Compare Walker to Machiavelli, who turned to history in The Prince to remind rulers how remembering past moments of what he saw as the great political skill (virtu’) of individuals such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus would enable rulers to rule better in the present, but Walker did it to highlight exceptional brutality. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1995), 18.

   52.   Walker, Appeal, 9.

   53.   Good empirical evidence suggests that American black enslavement was historically unique not because of the extent or intensity of its domination but through the unique theory of racism that sought to justify it. See George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 49–96.

   54.   One of Walker’s protégés, the African American woman abolitionist Maria Stewart, was much better than him on gender, bringing to relief the way black patriarchy degraded black women. But her brand of exceptionalism, unlike Walker’s, centered on the special connection African Americans had to God. See Valerie C. Cooper, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 3.

   55.   Walker, Appeal, 3.

   56.   Ibid., 4.

   57.   See John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions,” in Speeches of John C. Calhoun, 225. For an excellent overview of proslavery ideology, see Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (Hanover, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

   58.   George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), 223.

   59.   Walker, Appeal, 31.

   60.   Ibid., 16.

   61.   Ibid., 12.

   62.   Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge, 2005), 105.

   63.   Hamilton, “Federalist no. 70,” in The Federalist, 342.

   64.   Ibid., 346.

   65.   Walker, Appeal, 22.

   66.   Ibid., 24.

   67.   Ibid., 25.

   68.   Ibid., 23.

   69.   Ibid., 26.

   70.   This point anticipates Foucault. See Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 51–75. In offering this interpretation of Walker’s insights about the consequences of ignorance, I deepen Marshall’s view that Walker’s idea of ignorance goes beyond liberal pluralists and humanists. For Marshall, in showing how ignorance forces one to misidentify one’s true interests, Walker believes its chief problem is not a paucity of intellectual resources necessary for personal growth and economic success. See Marshall, City on a Hill from Below, 40.

   71.   Walker, Appeal, 28.

   72.   Madison, “Federalist no. 10,” 45.

   73.   “To fight accusations of racism,” Mia Bay contends that “Walker himself drew on arguments of eighteenth century environmentalism, which were drawn from eighteenth century naturalism. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 36.

   74.   Marshall worries about this possibility in City on a Hill from Below, 56–57.

   75.   Walker, Appeal, 70.

   76.   Ibid., 30.

   77.   Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11–13. It should also be noted that the Federalist and Anti-Federalist views of human nature did not always help matters. Using an obviously convoluted logic, which assumed that human beings could be seen as property, slaveholders often justified slavery by saying it was in their self-interest to protect their property.

   78.   John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), 8–13.

   79.   However, Walker seemed at times to agree with Rousseau’s view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men” (1755), in Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1987), 28–29.

   80.   Walker, Appeal, 20.

   81.   Ibid., 21.

   82.   Ibid., 68–69.

   83.   Ibid., 45.

   84.   Sandra M. Gustafson argues that Walker critiqued American republicanism but also tried to propose a new “multiracial” republic—engaging America, rather than fleeing from it. Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 139.

   85.   Walker, Appeal, 34.

   86.   Garry Wills argues that happiness for Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence was much more about participation in collective life, rather than an individual pursuit. Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Mariner, 2002), 248–258.

   87.   Walker, Appeal, 34.

   88.   Indeed, as David Brion Davis writes, because of the fact that there weren’t even more slave revolts in the nineteenth century, many whites believed that “slaves were contended with their lot.” Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 206.

   89.   See John Adams, Revolutionary Writings, 1775–1783, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2011); and Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995).

   90.   See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 469–500.

   91.   Walker, Appeal, 35.

   92.   David Howard-Pitney contends that “it is ironic that this earliest expression of messianic black nationalism in America should have sprung up in such close proximity to Anglo-American nationalism … [this] signals their virtually complete acceptance of and incorporation into the national cultural norm of millennial faith in America’s promise.” David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 12.

   93.   Walker, Appeal, 62.

   94.   Ibid., 85.

   95.   For this argument, see Maxwell Burkey and Alex Zamalin, “Patriotism, Black Politics, and Racial Justice in America,” New Political Science 38, no. 3 (2016): 371–389. For another valuable critique of patriotism, see Steven Johnston, The Truth About Patriotism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). For those who find sustenance from patriotism for social justice, see Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

   96.   Stephen Kantrowitz argues that “Walker was a revolutionary of a different and arguably more terrifying kind than the one who generally haunted the imaginations of Southern state officials. Rather than seeking to overthrow the American republic, Walker sought to claim a place in it.” Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2013), 29.

   97.   Walker, Appeal, 5.

   98.   Ibid., 75.

   99.   See Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 115.

100.   Waldo E. Martin rightly contends that “the guiding assumption unifying Douglass’s thought was an inveterate belief in a universal and egalitarian brand of humanism. His seemingly innate commitment to the inviolability of freedom and the human spirit best exemplified this overarching assumption.” Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), ix. Peter C. Myers, in contrast, reads Douglass as a natural-rights theorist and believes that his argument lives on in contemporary black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter. Peter C. Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

101.   Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in The Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 171.

102.   Ibid., 189.

103.   Ibid., 107–124.

104.   Ibid., 238. My discussion deepens Buccola’s interpretation of what Douglass meant by slavery but more clearly than Buccola dramatizes the way such domination impacts slave agency. See Nicholas Buccola, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 14–28.

105.   The most famous of these was Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American and Institutional Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

106.   Jack Turner asserts that “there is a principle uniting Douglass’s self-reliant individualism and his insistence in the aftermath of the Civil War that the federal government was obligated to provide material assistance to freed people: liberal democratic governments must not only secure the rights of citizens against interference, but also ensure that the material rudiments of self-help are universally available.” Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 49.

107.   Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in The Higher Law: Henry David Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 65.

108.   My argument here deepens Eric Sundquist’s influential interpretation of My Bondage and My Freedom. He writes: “In revising his life story while immersing it rhetorically in the ideology of the Revolution, Douglass at once engaged the ancestral masters in struggle and made their language and principles his weapons of resistance.” But while Sundquist’s focus is primarily on Douglass’s cultural politics—he writes, for instance, “transfiguring his slave narrative into a text of revolution became an act in which Douglass’s literacy, the ability to command through manipulating the ‘signs of power’ in a public arena, was resurrection”—my approach is about the revolutionary way Douglass conceptualizes dignity. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 30, 124.

109.   Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 283.

110.   For this interpretation, see Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

111.   G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (1807; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 117.

112.   Compare this point with Bernard R. Boxill, who argues that “when Douglass claimed that a man without power was without ‘the essential dignity of humanity’ he was relying on the fact that a person’s power does not only depend on her ability to cause trouble, but also, and perhaps and more crucially, on her firm conviction that there is value in risking her life in fighting for her rights.” Boxill, “Douglass Against the Emigrationists,” 38. Also see Lewis R. Gordon, who argues that “the existential dimension of the situation was such that it collapsed reflective, conceptual reality. It broke through the saturated composition of skewed racist reality.” Lewis R. Gordon, “Douglass as an Existentialist,” in Frederick Douglass, 221.

113.   Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 269.

114.   Ibid., 274.

115.   Commentators such as Margaret Kohn, while astutely showing that Douglass draws on and complicates Hegel’s notion of the struggle for recognition and especially the productive political dimension of fear, miss the political centrality of anguish, or what we could also call despair. Margaret Kohn, “Frederick Douglass’s Master-Slave Dialectic,” Journal of Politics 67, no. 2 (2005): 497–514. Furthermore, by drawing attention to the way various emotions such as anguish and madness do political work, I am implicitly departing from Robert S. Levine’s interpretation of Douglass as solely advocating what he calls “temperate revolutionism.” In the Covey encounter, Levine sees a great deal of emotional restraint and control, which serve as a counterpoint to the white slaveholder’s emotionally driven violence toward slaves. Levine may be right to say that temperate revolutionism may be one motivation behind Douglass’s politics and his call for reform, but I do not believe this is the case in My Bondage and My Freedom—a text written in the 1850s, when Douglass explicitly turns away from a staunch defense of nonviolence. Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 101–130.

116.   For this distinction in Douglass’s thought see Nicholas Buccola, “The Essential Dignity of Man as Man,” American Political Thought 4, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 228–258.

117.   My suggestion is that Douglass offers a perspective on dignity that is traditionally overlooked by contemporary commentators: that the recognition of dignity depends on direct action. For contemporary theorists of dignity, see George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Michael Rosen, Dignity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). Furthermore, although Gooding-Williams correctly highlights the way dignity in My Bondage and My Freedom “expresses a slave’s struggle to constrain the power of arbitrary interference. It is a display to others of a slave’s ability to help himself, his ability to struggle,” he nonetheless does not sufficiently foreground Douglass’s insight that dignity is performative, opting instead to focus on the way dignity is necessary for self-respect and for the respect of others. See Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 181.

118.   Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 283.

119.   Ibid., 284.

120.   Ibid., 286.

121.   This interpretation is legitimate and should be acknowledged as reflecting something troubling about Douglass’s own thought. Neil Roberts, for instance, accuses Douglass of failing to see how his theory of freedom as flight actually undermines his own troubling masculinism. Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 84. I agree with Roberts, even though Levine astutely points out that one way to understand Douglass’s invocation of “man” is as a universal term meant to designate all of humanity—men and women—and the opposite of nonhuman, rather than as the antithesis of woman. See Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 130. Of course, Douglass’s own masculinism did not prevent him from supporting political equality for women. For this point see Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 136–164.

122.   There is still some debate about whether Douglass’s defense of violent slave resistance in “Is it Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” (1854) represented an irreversible turning point in his abolitionism, replacing the idea of nonviolence and moral suasion with violence. For a survey of this and an ultimate defense of the argument that there is a consistency between Douglass’s two positions, see Frank Kirkland, “Enslavement, Moral Suasion, and Struggles for Recognition,” in Lawson and Kirkland, Frederick Douglass, 246.

123.   Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 286.

124.   For the best account of Douglass’s unique theory of “comparative freedom” as part of the idea of freedom as marronage, see Roberts, Freedom as Marronage, 74–88.

125.   Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” (1841), in Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 2003), 178.

126.   For an argument that treats Emerson’s idea of self-reliance as political, see Jack Turner, “Self Reliance and Complicity: Emerson’s Ethics of Citizenship,” in A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 125–151.

127.   Compare my point with Nick Bromell, who argues that “for Emerson, what is ultimately at stake is personal integrity, the freedom to think for oneself in order to be who one is. For Douglass, what is at stake is the success of a struggle to achieve social conditions that make personal freedom possible in the first place. For Douglass knows from experience something Emerson could know only theoretically, if he knew it at all: the historical reality of unfreedom and the historical contingency of freedom. Thinking his way forward from this experience, he finds the tension between the universal and the contingent, the abstract and the particular, the eternal and the historical much more fraught than does Emerson.” Nick Bromell, “ ‘A Voice from the Enslaved’: The Origins of Frederick Douglass’s Political Philosophy of Democracy,” American Literary History 23, no. 4 (2011): 712.

128.   Gooding-Williams is right that one core dimension of Douglass’s thinking about freedom is non-domination. See Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois, 170.

129.   In this sense, Douglass’s goal was much broader than, as Nicholas Buccola points out, to “convince his fellow Americans to purge the narrowness and selfishness from their love of liberty. His aim, in short, was to persuade the American people to accept a new liberal creed that would replace narrowness with egalitarianism and selfishness with humanitarianism.” Buccola, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, 1.

130.   John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government: And Selections from the Discourse (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1995), 3.

131.   Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 285.

132.   This practice seems to anticipate what the political scientist Michael Hanchard, building on James Scott’s notion of “infrapolitics,” calls “quotidian politics.” Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizon in Black Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 55–64. For a textured interpretation of Douglass’s notion of solidarity, which my reading supports, see Gooding-Williams, who, contrasting Douglass with Du Bois, says that Douglass “lets us see that African American politics need not be the expression of an antecedently given, kinship and descent-based identity that the participants have in common. Indeed, he suggests that African American politics is possible where no such identity exists.” Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois, 187.

133.   Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 287.

134.   For an exploration of the link between black slavery and white freedom, through a case study of colonial Virginia, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975).

2. IDA B. WELLS, THE ANTILYNCHING MOVEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SEEING

     1.   Lynching is a term that evades as much definition as the connotations its powerful images conjure. Christopher Waldrep notes: “The word lynching cannot be defined. It is rhetoric, and because it is rhetoric, almost any act of violence can potentially be a ‘lynching.’ ” Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), xiii.

     2.   For the literature on lynching, which is mostly historical, see Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Amy Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993).

     3.   “If lynching was a national crime, it was also a southern obsession.” Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 1.

     4.   For Wells and gender, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 113–115. Also see Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), which partly focuses on the link between Wells’s antirape and antilynching crusades. For her status as truth teller, see Patricia A. Schechter, Ida. B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

     5.   For this argument see Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 47–68. Bogues asserts that for Wells “practical activity is critical practical activity, which confronts the ideas and practices of the old order. Wells-Barnett’s writings mark a different stage in the African-American tradition. Her essays on lynching are interventionist texts in which the issues about the referential functions of language are replaced with notions about language and writing as truth claims. If the slave narratives in their literary form were badges of reason, then Wells-Barnett’s writings were polemical and sociological excursions” (48). See also Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010).

     6.   Scholarly interpretations of lynching have largely failed to consider the way it presents a serious problem for politics. One camp has considered lynching’s causes, which range from way it provided working-class whites a way to instill fear in the black labor force to those that stress how it helped enforce white supremacy and American manhood in ways much more powerful than Jim Crow laws. Amy Wood argues: “It was the spectacle of lynching, rather than the violence itself, that wrought psychological damage, that enforced black acquiescence to white domination.” Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 2. See also Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching. Another camp has considered its cultural significance as a ritual that tapped into and reflected anxieties about interracial life and was part of a burgeoning visual culture in which witnessing became a key way of producing a sense of white community when such a community was being fractured internally. For this interpretation see Pfeifer, Rough Justice; and Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence. Tolnay and Beck argue: “We suspect that whites lynched African-Americans when they felt threatened in some way—economically, politically, or socially” (3).

     7.   Part of the goal of this chapter is to show political theorists how studying antilynching thinking can actually be fruitful for democratic life precisely because of what lynching reflects about democracy. For one of the few texts that tries to examine carefully what lynching, as a form of noncivil disobedience, can tell us about the rule of law, violence, and political action, see Jennet Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 62–90. Kirkpatrick is interested in understanding how we can conceptualize the way Southern lynch mobs’ sense of morality differed from the more traditional practices of civil disobedience like the civil rights movement. But my concern is to understand what conception of citizenship is most adequate for addressing the problem that lynching—or any form of vigilante violence—poses for and reflects about democracy.

     8.   The best way to understand Wells’s social predicament as a black woman is through what Patricia Hill Collins calls an “interlocking system of oppression,” where one is oppressed and marginalized in different ways through various aspects of their identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990). In that book, Collins, like many scholars, stays at the level of asserting that Wells was a critical public intellectual, but I aim throughout the chapter to clarify her unique political theoretical contributions.

     9.   Ida B. Wells, “Woman’s Mission” (1885), in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, ed. Mia Bay (New York: Penguin, 2014), 15.

   10.   Ibid., 14.

   11.   See Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and Other Essays, ed. Elizabeth Ann Bartlett (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).

   12.   Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America” (1900), in The Light of Truth, 401. Wells’s racist statement, in many ways, confirms Rogers Smith’s thesis that various elements of American political culture—liberal, civic republican, and racial ascriptivist—find their way into the thought of individual American thinkers. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

   13.   For this argument, see Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16.

   14.   Abraham Lincoln, “First Lincoln-Douglass Debate, Ottawa, Illinois” (1858), in Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Roy P. Basler (New York: Library of America, 1989), 512.

   15.   See Martin R. Delany, Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Booker T. Washington, “The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address,” in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 583–588. For Crummell’s political thought, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83–140.

   16.   Ida B. Wells, “The Requirements of Southern Journalism” (1893), in The Light of Truth, 92.

   17.   Ida B. Wells, “Booker T. Washington and His Critics” (1904), in The Light of Truth, 440.

   18.   Ida B. Wells, “Functions of Leadership,” in The Light of Truth, 8.

   19.   Wells, “The Requirements of Southern Journalism” (1893), 91.

   20.   Ibid., 89.

   21.   For a contemporary iteration of this problem of speaking for others, see Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20 (1992): 5–32.

   22.   William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (New York: Penguin, 2009), 4.

   23.   Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (1895), in The Light of Truth, 308.

   24.   Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1894), in The Light of Truth, 112. Wells counters understandings of publics that deemphasize emotion in favor of rationality. Wells shared Walker’s Humean view about the power of moral sentiment and Douglass’s view about the way it provided a sense of one’s own limitations and deepest commitments. For those contemporary theorists who take emotional life in politics seriously, see Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

   25.   Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1894), 113.

   26.   In their quasi-messianic mission of transforming humanity, Progressives saw government as the perfect tool for curbing sex work and alcohol addiction, for expanding women’s suffrage, and for dealing with poverty. For a history of the Progressive movement, see Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003). In his classic study, Robert H. Wiebe argued that Progressives responded to and sought to address the radical social disruptions caused in the aftermath of the Gilded Age, such as the urbanization of life, the nationalization of politics, and the industrialization of the American economy. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967).

   27.   For one of the classic texts on the Gilded Age, see Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age (New York: New York University Press, 1984).

   28.   William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1925), 20–21.

   29.   William Graham Sumner, “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over,” in War and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1911), 200.

   30.   Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” 105.

   31.   Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 75.

   32.   Wells, A Red Record, 256.

   33.   Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” 394.

   34.   Quoted in Ida B. Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It” (1901), in The Light of Truth, 409.

   35.   Ibid.

   36.   For the idea that the idea of the people in democracy is an open category, see Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). For the rich literature on the meaning of popular identity, see Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: Norton, 1988); Margaret Canovan, The People (New York: Polity, 2005); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005).

   37.   Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: MacMillan, 1897), 8.

   38.   Ida B. Wells, “Bishop Tanner’s ‘Ray of Light’ ” (1892), in The Light of Truth, 54.

   39.   In his now classic, even if outdated and contested study, of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century age of Populism, the historian Richard Hofstadter argued that this period was defined by conspiratorial and oppositional dichotomous thinking that centered not only on economic issues but on racial ones. A latent but no less significant strain of nativism existed throughout many Populist arguments. See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955).

   40.   The historian Michael Kazin captures this national mood, which also informed some Populist thinking. The Populists, Kazin writes, “spoke about the state as the creation and property of people like themselves. Greedy, tyrannical men had usurped that birthright.” Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 42.

   41.   Wells, A Red Record, 257.

   42.   Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 2014), 63–67.

   43.   John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), 63–64.

   44.   Wells, “Bishop Tanner’s ‘Ray of Light,’ ” 53.

   45.   Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 490.

   46.   Wells, Southern Horrors, 78.

   47.   Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” 111.

   48.   Wells, A Red Record, 307

   49.   For the history of the social thought of Progressivism, especially how it intersected with social science and social justice thinking, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

   50.   Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), in The Light of Truth, 58.

   51.   Wells, A Red Record, in The Light of Truth, 299–306.

   52.   Ibid., 281.

   53.   Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon, 1984).

   54.   William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism, in Writings, 1902–1910, 826.

   55.   In this way, Wells must have also understood what the German sociologist Max Weber argued in his lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” (1917), was the central limitation of scientific inquiry: science could at best explain the world but never specify the values for why the questions it raised in the first place where of normative importance. See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingston and eds. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004).

   56.   Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in The Light of Truth, 109.

   57.   Wells, A Red Record, 237.

   58.   Ibid., 97.

   59.   Wells, Southern Horrors, 68.

   60.   Wells, A Red Record, 228.

   61.   Ida B. Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900), in The Light of Truth, 365.

   62.   Wells, A Red Record, 265.

   63.   Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 387–388.

   64.   Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 418–419.

   65.   Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Dover, 2001), 112–113.

   66.   Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law in Georgia (1899), in The Light of Truth, 324–325.

   67.   This anecdote is told in David Levering Lewis’s seminal biography of Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Holt, 2009), 162–164.

   68.   See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

   69.   These arguments were being asserted in well-known publications like The Atlantic Monthly and by the American Economic Association. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 104.

   70.   Wells, A Red Record, 282.

   71.   Wells, “Bishop Tanner’s ‘Ray of Light,’ ” 53.

   72.   Of course, one could accuse Wells of problematically deploying the same human/animal binary that Sinclair used and worry about the moralistic way in which she assumed that lynching members of one’s own race was somehow more vicious than doing it to others. After all, violence is violence. For an examination and critique of how this human/animal binary functions in Western philosophy, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

   73.   Wells, A Red Record, 225.

   74.   Wells, Southern Horrors, 70–71.

   75.   For an account that argues that shame ought to be our favored normative response to the problem of racial injustice, see Christopher Lebron, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). As the discussion in this chapter shows, Wells both dramatized the value of shame for racial justice while also creatively stressing its limitations.

   76.   One can certainly argue that Wells’s feminism was especially evident through the way she brought into relief how lynching worked through a manipulation of black and women’s sexuality—an argument that scandalized many Progressives. Hazel Carby writes: “Wells’s analysis of lynching and her demystification of the political motivations behind the manipulation of both black male and white female sexuality led her into direct confrontation with individuals who considered themselves progressive.” Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 113.

   77.   Wells, Southern Horrors, 73.

   78.   Ibid., 71.

   79.   Wells shares Martha Nussbaum’s skepticism of the democratic value of shame for public life. But unlike Nussbaum, who worries about its moralism and wish to hide human vulnerability, Wells highlights how it precludes deliberative reflection in the first place. For Nussbaum’s critique, see her Hiding from the Law: Disgust, Shame, and Humanity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13.

   80.   Brundage writes that “the ‘unspeakable crime’—rape—gripped the imaginations of whites to a far greater extent than any other crime.” Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 58.

   81.   Wells, A Red Record, 225.

   82.   Ibid., 271.

   83.   Wells, Southern Horrors, 62.

   84.   Ibid., 63–64.

   85.   Willfully renouncing absolute fidelity to one’s race amounted to an early example of what some critics have recently identified as the process by which one becomes a “race traitor.” See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996).

   86.   The contemporary idea of the abolition of whiteness is detailed in Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 125–146.

   87.   Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 5.

   88.   Wells, A Red Record, 309.

   89.   In a sense, Wells’s activism anticipated what Cornel West would later call “tragicomic hope.” See Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 118.

   90.   Wells, A Red Record, 308.

3. HUEY NEWTON, THE BLACK PANTHERS, AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF AMERICA

     1.   For a general history of the Black Power moment, of which the Panthers were part, see Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2006).

     2.   This history is exquisitely detailed in Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 1–17.

     3.   Their arguments at times drew on Marx’s so-called early humanism as well as his scientific account of capitalism and arguments about socialism. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978). For a study of this postwar consumer culture, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).

     4.   Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” (1963), A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986), 217–221. For Baldwin’s influential discussion of love, see The Fire Next Time, in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America), 291–331.

     5.   See James Madison, “Federalist no. 10” (1787), in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40–46.

     6.   For this distinction in Kant’s thought, see Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 117–118.

     7.   If not completely dismissed out of hand as a culturally fashionable yet fringe movement lacking any serious political philosophy, the few serious studies of the Panthers have largely focused on the political utility of their arguments about American capitalism, colonialism, and black self-determination. For sociological and political interpretations, see Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. chap. 8; and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). For a historical interpretation, see Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour; and Judson Jeffries, ed., Black Power in the Belly of the Beast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For the best account of Newton’s political theory, which primarily places him in conversation with Hobbes and Locke and pan-African anticolonial movements, see Judson Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002).

     8.   King’s vision, before his more social-democratic turn in the late 1960s, was not the only part of civil rights political thought but represented its most politically mainstream and publicly visible articulation. It is this understanding of civil rights thought that informs the backdrop for this chapter’s discussion about the Panthers. For a history of the “long” civil rights movement, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–1263.

     9.   For a comprehensive history of the civil rights movement, see Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Norton, 1990).

   10.   This is clearly a simplified view of one core liberal project of modernity, of which there are many liberalisms and many modernities. My interpretation here is largely informed by Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance, and vol. 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

   11.   This is something that many African American intellectuals have struggled with. For a history of this, see Manning Marable, Black Leadership (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

   12.   One of the most notable was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965). For the politics of the “Moynihan Report,” see Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967). For a survey of how the report was itself part of a long history of pathologizing African Americans, see Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

   13.   Penny M. Von Eschen writes: “The sense that African Americans shared a common history with Africans and all peoples of African descent had long been an important part of African American thought, but the global dynamics unleashed by World War II brought it to the forefront of black American politics and animated political discourse at an unprecedented level.” For a history of black American anticolonialism, which preceded the Panthers, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 7.

   14.   Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1991), 3. See also Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998).

   15.   Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots” (1963), in African American Political Thought, vol. 2: Confrontation vs. Compromise: 1945 to the Present, ed. Marcus D. Pohlmann (New York: Routledge, 2003), 115–130.

   16.   Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 8, 1970,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories, 2002), 169.

   17.   Huey P. Newton, “Executive Mandate No. 1: May 2, 1967,” in To Die for the People: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Random House, 1972), 7.

   18.   For a history of the discourse of the American Revolution, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1992).

   19.   Huey P. Newton, “To the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention: September 5, 1970,” in To Die for the People, 158.

   20.   For a brief history of American public-housing politics and policy, see R. Allen Hays, The Federal Government and Urban Housing (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).

   21.   Huey P. Newton with J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1973), 42.

   22.   Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995).

   23.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 4.

   24.   Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2005), 4.

   25.   For Aristotle’s conception of the agora, see Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

   26.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 16.

   27.   See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), 443.

   28.   Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 247.

   29.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 11.

   30.   James Baldwin, “We Can Change This Country” (1963), in Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Vintage, 2010), 62.

   31.   Newton, “To the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention,” in To Die for the People, 158.

   32.   Ibid.

   33.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 180.

   34.   Ibid., 4.

   35.   This claim, of course, might be viewed as an oversimplification because, especially in the past thirty years, American political thinkers such as Judith Butler and Hannah Pitkin have emphasized the relationship between language and politics. Yet both drew on European sources: Butler draws on the work of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, while Pitkin draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Hannah Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). To put it in a different way, the pragmatic strain in American political thought, which emphasizes experience and practice, is much more prominent than the metaphysical one. Classic pragmatists include John Dewey, William James, and C. S. Pierce, but those who are concerned with what we might call pragmatic politics and who give language very little due include Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, John C. Calhoun, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Robert Dahl, to name only some of the most prominent.

   36.   See Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Robert (New York: Dover, 2004).

   37.   On this relationship, especially as it relates to politics, see Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice.

   38.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 163. Newton’s own words echoed Hobbes’s view that words in the state of nature should be taken as seriously as any actions. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88.

   39.   Newton’s point was also an implicit critique of Madison’s argument for elite rule. See “Federalist no. 10,” 40–46.

   40.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 166.

   41.   Plato, The Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2004), 51–52.

   42.   Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution: July 20, 1967,” in To Die for the People, 15.

   43.   For Lenin’s political thought, see Vladimir I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917), in Essential Works of Lenin, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Dover, 1987).

   44.   Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1971).

   45.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 168, 170.

   46.   Ibid., 168–170.

   47.   For Malcolm X’s political thought, see Robert Terrill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (London: Penguin, 2012).

   48.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 164.

   49.   See Arendt, The Human Condition, esp. chap. 2, 22–79. Also see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 49–106, 207–274. Not surprisingly, Arendt’s approval of civil rights protestors acting collectively was only matched by the scorn she felt about their focus on social equality—the right to be treated with dignity and respect in public schools, in public playgrounds, and on public transportation.

   50.   For a recent history of this, see Gordon K. Mantler, Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960–1974 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

   51.   Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” (1848), in American Political Thought, ed. Theodore Lowi and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Norton, 2008), 529–533. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” in Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 188–206.

   52.   Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, “The Ten-Point Program,” in To Die for the People, 3.

   53.   Ibid.

   54.   Ibid., 4.

   55.   Ibid.

   56.   Ibid., 4–5.

   57.   Ibid., 5.

   58.   Arendt, On Revolution, 49–106.

   59.   See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

   60.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 5.

   61.   See ibid., 69–76.

   62.   Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 238.

   63.   This position also bore similarities to Marx and Engels’s view of communist society. See Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 469–500.

   64.   Newton, “Revolutionary Suicide,” in Revolutionary Suicide.

   65.   See Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug” (1963), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 154.

   66.   To be sure, this aspiration was not fully realized in Newton’s life. Newton himself had a mixed position on marriage and family. On the one hand, he said that “As I grew older … I began to see that the bourgeois family can be an imprisoning, enslaving, and suffocating experience.… Marriage usually becomes one more imprisoning experience within the general prison of society.” On the other hand, he said: “These contradictions have been solved by the values of the Black Panther Party and by the Party’s communal life. The closeness of the group and the shared sense of purpose transform us into a harmonious, functioning body, working for the destruction of those conditions that make people suffer. Our unity has transformed us to the point where we have not compromised with the system; we have the closeness and love of family life, the will to live in spirit of cruel conditions.” Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 91, 96.

   67.   Ibid., 208.

   68.   See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin, 1993), 81–95.

   69.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 332.

   70.   James Baldwin’s biographer, James Campbell, recounts how King refused to let Baldwin participate in the 1963 March on Washington because he thought he would be best equipped to lead a “homosexual movement,” rather than a political one. See James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (New York: Viking, 1991), 176.

   71.   Huey P. Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements: August 15, 1970,” in To Die for the People, 154.

   72.   Ibid., 152–153.

   73.   Ibid., 152.

   74.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 275. For a political history of Karenga and US, see Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, The US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

   75.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 157.

   76.   Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Delta, 1991), 122–138.

   77.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 331.

   78.   Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kate Shulman (Amherst, Mass.: Humanity, 1996), 64.

   79.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 331.

   80.   Ibid.

   81.   Ralph Ellison, “Blues People” (1964), in Collected Essays, 286. This idea is more fully detailed in Alex Zamalin, African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 90–94.

   82.   For a sense of Panther projects throughout their communities, see Judson Jeffries, Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

   83.   Arendt, On Violence, 120.

   84.   Ibid., 142–155.

   85.   Arendt, The Human Condition, 204. For the canonical argument about appearance and politics, see Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1995), 49–51, 54–55.

   86.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 77.

   87.   Ibid., 112.

   88.   Quoted from Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 44–47.

   89.   For such a performative theory of rights in contemporary political theory, see Karen Zivi, Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

   90.   Martin Luther King Jr., “A Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in A Testament of Hope, 290.

   91.   James Baldwin, “The White Problem” (1964), in The Cross of Redemption, 97.

   92.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 121.

   93.   This resonated with earlier generations of civic republicans. See John Adams, Revolutionary Writings, 1775–1783, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2011); and Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995).

   94.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 122.

   95.   Ibid., 330.

   96.   My sense of these programs is based on Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire; and Jeffries, Comrades.

   97.   Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 188.

   98.   Frederick Douglass, “What Are the Colored People Doing for Themselves” (1848), in Political Thought in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 187–189.

   99.   Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 190.

100.   See Daniel Perlstein, “Black Panther Party Liberation Schools,” in Encyclopedia of African American Education, ed. Kofi Lomotey (New York: Sage, 2010), 100–102.

101.   John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

102.   For the black feminist argument about the “interlocking systems of oppression,” see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).

103.   This view is captured in Seneca’s famous text, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robert Campbell (New York: Penguin, 1969).

104.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 152

105.   Ibid., 249.

106.   Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 188–206.

107.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 4.

108.   Ibid., 260.

109.   See George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 49–97.

110.   James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 83.

111.   Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper and Row, 1940).

112.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 5.

113.   See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon, 1984).

114.   See William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (New York: Verso, 2013).

115.   Much of what the Panthers did with rage is also theoretically expressed in Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Anger,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing, 2003), 124–133.

116.   They anticipate contemporary radical geographers like David Harvey, Social Justice in the City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973); Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007).

117.   See Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

118.   This challenges the political theory of democratic proceduralism, most famously expressed by Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956).

119.   In doing this, the Panthers make vivid what the political theorist Clarissa Rile Hayward describes as a “de-facing” of power, revealing how it is dispersed through all sorts of institutions and everyday norms. See Clarissa Rile Hayward, De-Facing Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

120.   Here the Panthers anticipate radical democratic theorists who, like Alan Keenan, argue that democracy is an ongoing project that resists political closure. See Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

121.   They contribute to a growing literature that considers ethics, race, and democracy. See Jack Turner, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship After Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Zamalin, African American Political Thought.

122.   Although Nick Bromell doesn’t mention the Panthers in his discussion of rage and democracy, their practice deepens some of his arguments in The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

123.   Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 5.

124.   Ibid., 332.

4. ANGELA DAVIS, PRISON ABOLITION, AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CARCERAL STATE

     1.   See Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prison Population Counts,” http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=131.

     2.   Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

     3.   For a survey of this history as well as the way it is linked to the notion of racial formation, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014).

     4.   Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).

     5.   Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

     6.   For a discussion of the way the black middle class was instrumental in pushing for more punitive drug-sentencing laws, see Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015).

     7.   See Alexander, The New Jim Crow, and the literature on critical race studies, which finds an excellent survey in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

     8.   Loïc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (London: Polity, 2009).

     9.   W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26.

   10.   The Sentencing Project, “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections” (2014), http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Trends_in_Corrections_Fact_sheet.pdf.

   11.   Andrew Dilts, Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

   12.   For a historical overview of prisons in the United States, especially the way they interact with American political institutions, see Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

   13.   See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

   14.   Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States: And Its Application in France (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 79.

   15.   John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), 9.

   16.   For more on Davis’s life, see Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974).

   17.   See Neil Roberts’s interpretation of this dimension of Davis’s thought, which is part of his theory of what he calls “freedom as marronage.” Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 53–58.

   18.   For this point, see Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories, 2011).

   19.   For this, see Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983).

   20.   For a history of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

   21.   The history of this American culture of fear is captured well in Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

   22.   Gary S. Becker, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” Journal of Political Economy 76, no. 2 (1968): 176. For an interpretation and critique of the relationship between agency, free markets, and punishment, see Bernard E. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).

   23.   James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic Monthly 249, no. 3 (1982): 31.

   24.   Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 25.

   25.   Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995).

   26.   Angela Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (New York: Blackwell, 1998), 97.

   27.   Ibid.

   28.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 28–31.

   29.   Ibid., 31.

   30.   Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” 99.

   31.   John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1971), 11.

   32.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 28.

   33.   Ibid.

   34.   For a history of this retreat from race-conscious public policies, see Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1995).

   35.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 38.

   36.   Ironically, the prison was a place that, for all their talk of freedom and government nonintervention, neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol in the early 2000s believed needed to continue to exist. See Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942–2009 (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

   37.   Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 10–12.

   38.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 16–17.

   39.   Ibid., 88.

   40.   For the most intellectually rigorous philosophical defense of libertarianism, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

   41.   For a survey of the various causes and meanings of deindustrialization in America, see Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

   42.   Angela Davis, “Race, Crime, and Punishment,” in The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (San Francisco: City Lights, 2013), 55.

   43.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 83.

   44.   For an excellent collection of writings by black feminist authors including Audre Lorde, Michele Wallace, and Patricia Hill Collins, see Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, eds., The Black Feminist Reader (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).

   45.   For the way this division between public and private functions in liberal political thought, see Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 120.

   46.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 77–78.

   47.   Angela Davis, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” in The Meaning of Freedom, 51.

   48.   Baldwin’s view on racial innocence is made clear in the first essay of The Fire Next Time, in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America), 291–294.

   49.   Davis, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” 50.

   50.   Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, and Ann Swidler, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 143.

   51.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 112.

   52.   Angela Davis, “Unfinished Lecture on Liberation – II” (1969), in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 55.

   53.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 16.

   54.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men” (1755), in Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1987), 25.

   55.   Angela Davis, “Racism: Then and Now,” in The Meaning of Freedom, 125.

   56.   Angela Davis, “Race, Power, and Prisons Since 9/11,” in The Meaning of Freedom, 84.

   57.   Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

   58.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 9.

   59.   Ibid., 107.

   60.   Davis, “Racism: Then and Now,” 132–133.

   61.   For this view, see Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New York: Arlington House, 1977).

   62.   See Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

   63.   For a history of this, which is part of the tradition of neoconservatism, see Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2011).

   64.   Angela Davis, “Report from Harlem,” in The Meaning of Freedom, 33.

   65.   Davis, Abolition Democracy, 112.

   66.   Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 14.

   67.   For the “capability approach,” see Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

   68.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 107.

   69.   John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

   70.   Davis, “Race, Crime, and Punishment,” 69.

   71.   Davis, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” 52.

   72.   Locke, Second Treatise, 10. For the influential interpretation that Locke’s political thought was saturated with his own Christian worldview, see John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: A Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

   73.   For the distinction between law and justice in King, see Martin Luther King Jr., “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), in A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986), 293.

   74.   For what still remains a classic study of how racialized images played into the destruction of the American public policy of welfare, see Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

   75.   Davis, “Race, Crime, and Punishment,” 67.

   76.   Ibid., 69.

   77.   Davis, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” 53–54.

   78.   Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Free Press, 1986), 4.

   79.   For one of the best histories of the South African TRC, see Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

   80.   Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 115.

   81.   Ibid.

   82.   Truth Commissions have been used to address the legacy of authoritarian rule in South American countries including Chile, Argentina, and Brazil and to address racist violence in the United States—for instance, in 2003, a truth commission was established to deal with the infamous 1979 Greensboro, North Carolina, Massacre, in which an interracial coterie of activists was killed by the white-supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan. For critiques of restorative justice, see John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

   83.   This argument was famously developed in the political scientist Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), which argued for strengthening declining nonpartisan civic networks such as bowling leagues. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

   84.   A good philosophical argument for the moral power of reconciliation is Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

   85.   One important recent discussion and deconstruction of the politics and ethics of forgiveness is Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001).

   86.   Critical Resistance, “About: What is the PIC? What is Abolition?” http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language.

   87.   Prison Research Education Action Project, Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (Oakland, Calif.: Critical Resistance, 2001).

   88.   The Abolitionist 4 (Summer 2006): 12, https://abolitionistpaper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/abolitionist-issue-4-summer-2006-english.pdf.

   89.   Ibid.

   90.   This followed the view of Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of Language,” in The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1982), 215–238.

   91.   The Abolitionist 4 (Summer 2006): 12.

   92.   Ibid.

   93.   Ibid.

   94.   Ibid.

   95.   Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

   96.   For theorists of care ethics, see Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

   97.   The Abolitionist 4 (Summer 2006): 12.

   98.   The following is taken from Critical Resistance, “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” 49. http://criticalresistance.org/resources/the-abolitionist-toolkit.

   99.   Derrida’s articulation of this idea is most clearly captured in Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 41.

100.   Critical Resistance, “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” 39.

101.   Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 145.

102.   Critical Resistance, “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” 40.

103.   This argument recalls Judith Butler’s position in Gender Trouble, which discusses the performative and emancipatory dimensions of resignifying language. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 194–205.

104.   Critical Resistance, “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” 41.

105.   Ibid., 35–36.

106.   Ibid., 36.

107.   Ibid. This view is usually associated with Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 110–116.

108.   Critical Resistance, “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” 51–53. In this way, Critical Resistance’s view of conflict echoes what Locke called the “State of War.” See Locke, Second Treatise, 14–16.

109.   Critical Resistance, “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” 52.

110.   Ibid., 53.

111.   Ibid., 51.

112.   One might object that the scenario is misleading because it represents a much “easier” case of deliberating about justice because it avoids an issue like murder and rape and provides selective background information about the perpetrator—who experiences violence—that already encourages empathy.

113.   Ibid., 52.

114.   See Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory.

115.   One of the most poignant accounts of jailhouse lawyering is Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the USA (San Francisco: City Lights, 2009).

116.   Angela Davis, “Foreword,” in ibid., 14.

117.   Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kate Shulman (Amherst, Mass.: Humanity, 1996), 71.

118.   King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 296.

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF RESISTANCE

     1.   For this interpretation see Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1992).

     2.   See Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 108.

     3.   This is one way to understand the patriotic rhetoric deployed by Ralph Ellison. For this interpretation, see Alex Zamalin, African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 94–95.

     4.   For an analysis of the way this works in various American social movements that engage dominant cultural tropes, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

     5.   For a broad overview of various contemporary approaches to racial justice, which range from what he calls “traditionalism,” “reformism,” “separatism,” and “critical race theory,” see Roy Brooks, Racial Justice in the Age of Obama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a philosophical exposition of a defense of race consciousness as racial justice, see Amy Gutmann, “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 106–178.

     6.   The political theorist Judith Shklar argues that we should be thinking not simply about justice but about injustice as well, which she believes is sustained by emotions such as fear and apathy. Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

     7.   For Wolin’s famous idea of “fugitive democracy,” see Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 604.

     8.   Looking solely at public opinion—rather than countercultural intellectual currents—would thus confirm Louis Hartz’s statement that American culture is fundamentally liberal. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1991).

     9.   For a more detailed analysis of this understanding, which informs my own thinking about democracy, see Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

   10.   This is more carefully and fully developed in Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 48, 100.

   11.   There is no academic book yet on the movement, but BLM’s website offers some invaluable resources, which inform my own understanding. http://blacklivesmatter.com/.

   12.   Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 8.

   13.   For West, black nihilism is shaped by structural socioeconomic injustices. Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 118.

   14.   For the critique of Jackson’s candidacy, see Adolph Reed, The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). For a critique of Obama, see Desmond S. King and Rogers Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).

   15.   For a somewhat outdated but nonetheless valuable study of the Nation of Islam, see Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

   16.   In the words of the cultural critic Houston Baker Jr., black conservatives have “betrayed” the promise of civil rights. Houston A. Baker, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

   17.   Black Lives Matter, “Collective Value,” http://blacklivesmatter.com/.

   18.   For a history of the movement, see McKenzie Wark, The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 2013).

   19.   Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25.