Being “Faithful to ourselves:” Frederick Douglass’s Prescription for Black America
Being “Faithful to ourselves:” Frederick Douglass’s Prescription for Black America
The advice of the 19th-century Black abolitionist bridges the modern racial equity debate.
“Where does the onus lie?” is the demarcating question in America’s contemporary racial progress discourse. Assertions of systemic racism — that society is to fault — gained notoriety as America has grappled over the past decade with high-profile police killings of unarmed Black people.
Black thinkers such as Nicole Hannah Jones and Ibram X. Kendi argue for a top-to-bottom antiracist reexamination of power structures, revealing the ways in which society continues to oppress Black people and must therefore change to end centuries of dehumanization.
But other Black luminaries worry that a focus on systemic inequities creates a “cult of victimhood” which strips Black people of agency. New York Times columnist John H. McWhorter, one such critic, decries that the antiracist framework obsesses “with white people understanding that [racial disparity] ‘isn’t our fault’,” a notion which implies Black people are “uniquely incapable of coping with a challenging reality.”
Frederick Douglass, for one, was confident that Black people could and should take matters into their own hands. Addressing the challenges of abolition, the preeminent nineteenth-century Black intellectual argued that “if there be one evil spirit among us,” it is that which “teaches us to depend upon others for the accomplishment of that which we should achieve with our own hands.”
For Douglass, self-improvement and self-reliance were crucial, and education was critical to both.
He provides his own story as a case-in-point. As Douglass describes in his famous Narrative, while enslaved as a boy he risked severe punishment to educate himself by illicitly obtaining reading materials. Happily, one text he found, The Columbian Orator, “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul” and exposed him to the natural rights discourse of the Enlightenment.
As Douglass tells it, his self-education was a liberatory moment during which he realized his own agency and capacity for action.
Indeed, The Columbian Orator taught him how to effectively resist enslavement. In another memoir, My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass details an excerpt from the Orator which he finds particularly impactful, “a short dialogue between a master and his slave.”
The fictive slave, foiled in his attempt to run away, tells his enslaver that “I submit to my fate,” but the slave nonetheless proceeds to argue for his humanity and freedom. Taken aback, the master emancipates the slave.
Later, Douglass recounts his own confrontation with an enslaver following an act of resistance. Threatened with the whip, Douglass physically restrains his enslaver, Mr. Covey. Surprised, Covey asks Douglass if he “meant to persist in [his] resistance.”
Douglass replies in the affirmative, telling Covey that he “did mean to resist, come what might” (emphasis Douglass’).
Like the fictive slave in the Orator’s dialogue, Douglass accepts fate but decides that he must act regardless. The parallels of fate and confrontation upon which Douglass draws show that his own actions, his own resistance, his agency, were rooted in the illicit self-education he undertook.
So for Douglass, refusal to accept the racist structures of society was manifested in education and self-improvement, which are indeed themselves acts of resistance. He argued that self-improvement would show “ourselves worthy and respectable men” and therefore make “our enemies slanderers,” defeating racist assumptions of Black inferiority.
However, the self-improvement argument, taken by itself, is hardly adequate, and its staunchest proponents often fail to appreciate the white violence which has invalidated Black efforts throughout history. As Trymaine Lee argues in The 1619 Project, white violence frequently destroyed capital accumulated by Black people, driving the persistent racial wealth gap.
But Douglass was hardly so naïve, and he shared the contemporary antiracist concern with oppressive power structures and how to alter them. According to Nick Bromell, a Douglass scholar, “we cannot understand Douglass’s thinking about Black politics, democracy, and citizenship until we see how his concern with power permeates all of these.”
In Bromell’s view, under Douglass’s conception, power is innate to all human beings. To avoid dehumanization, marginalized peoples are then called upon to exert force, altering power dynamics in their favor.
Douglass did just that when he exerted violent force to alter the power dynamic between himself and Mr. Covey. Having resisted Covey, Douglass found that “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” Covey left Douglass unpunished and never again took up the whip against him.
Douglass thus recognized that Black people must work diligently to keep white people in check. “To be faithful to our oppressors, we must be faithful to ourselves,” he argued.
To successfully push white society to change its ways, Douglass emphatically asserted that Black people must trust their own agency and work diligently to improve their ability to act.
Douglass thus provides a middle path between the antiracist discourse of the Black left and the emphasis on personal agency, responsibility, and education offered by the Black center-left and center-right. Douglas believed that both traditions are necessary for racial progress. He would believe that the onus rests on white society and Black people alike.
