What can the writing & speeches of Black thinkers teach us about protests today? I’ve been puzzling over this since @MarxinHell read my research & raised several questions. I'm grateful for the close reading 🙏🏽 and want to offer some answers. 1/
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@MarxinHell In his thoughtful critique @MarxinHell raises three questions. I want to focus on his last point that I might be selectively reading Martin Luther King (never a good look!). 2/
@MarxinHell Given the timing, I want to draw on Frederick Douglass’ historic speech from 168 years ago today, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and consider not just Douglass’ & MLK’s words but why they used specific rhetorical strategies. 3/ teachingamericanhistory.org/library/docume…
@MarxinHell Let me also confess that when I’ve read Douglass’ speech in the past, I’ve usually skimmed what seemed like a long-winded introduction. If you read it closely, though, there’s an ingenious structure (so I beg a bit of patience). 4/
@MarxinHell Douglass begins the speech quite conventionally with self-deprecating remarks and then shifts to honoring his audience & the exceptional accomplishment of the American people. July 4th, he says “is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God.” 5/
@MarxinHell In Douglass’ opening narrative, the colonists are courageous and England is despotic. “Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress.” 6/
@MarxinHell ”They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner…This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn.” 7/
@MarxinHell How to respond? Douglas declares ”Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity.” 8/
@MarxinHell By now, you might see where Douglass is going but he doesn’t yet reveal his hand to the audience. He goes on ”The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too…” 9/
@MarxinHell ”They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression.” 10/
@MarxinHell In the hands of a less fierce abolitionist, the speech might have stopped around here, celebrating the remarkable achievements of “brave men” who found a “remedy for oppression” while also noting the inhumanity of slavery. Douglass, however, had other plans. 11/
@MarxinHell Throughout the speech, Douglass drops clues as to where he is headed. Early on he defines July 4th: ”It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom.” Whose independence? Whose freedom? 12/
@MarxinHell In cinematic terms, for most of the introduction Douglass narrates the revolution as a fly on the wall describing how the audience’s forebearers fought for their liberty and authored the great Declaration of Independence. But it’s a setup, an intellectual trap. 13/
@MarxinHell Midway through, Douglass flips the script and opts for a different lens. He asks “Why am I called upon to speak here today?” His answer, ”I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view.” 14/
@MarxinHell In the fight between revolutionary patriots and a tyrannical Crown, the audience could imagine themselves heroes and a cruel government the villains. With the perspective change, however, the plot twists and the audience is suddenly cast in a different light. 15/
@MarxinHell Earlier, Douglass said of the Declaration of Independence, ”Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” Having built up America’s ideals, now Douglass brings down the hammer. 16/
@MarxinHell Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim…” 17/
@MarxinHell “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty & heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty & equality, hollow mockery…” 18/
@MarxinHell “Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages…” 19/
@MarxinHell “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” 20/
@MarxinHell Douglass’ account of how American exceptionalism collides with American hypocrisy is one of the great passages in American letters, expressly written to arouse a White audience from complacency. But why bring it up in a debate about how to interpret MLK? 21/
@MarxinHell Like Douglass’ rhetoric in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” my paper argues King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” should also be read, in part, as an appeal to those Whites doing little to change the White supremacist status quo. 22/
@MarxinHell @MarxinHell disagrees with my interpretation and quotes MLK’s harsh indictment of white moderates as “the greatest stumbling block” for civil rights. Where I see an attempt at persuasion, @MarxinHell seems to read MLK’s comment as straight criticism. 23/
@MarxinHell But why might King criticize white moderates? @MarxinHell’s tweet doesn’t actually say. Is MLK indifferent to what white moderates do? Is MLK trying to push his “Christian & Jewish brothers” to align with the segregationist coalition? Neither argument seems plausible. 24/
@MarxinHell Alternatively, Douglass’ speech is a perfect example of a rhetorical strategy routinely used by Black leaders who aim to be heard by elevating American ideals while also trying to be agents of change on racial equality by shaming White Americans into action. 25/
Cheryl Wall, in an edited volume on James Baldwin, traces the arc of this approach over more than a century: “Black activist intellectuals have used the oppression of African Americans to indict and shame a nation whose actions contradict its principles.” 26/
Sadly, Wall passed away earlier this year. Her obit quotes a related line, “From its earliest iteration, the African American essay endorsed the democratic ideals the nation professed, while condemning its failure to fulfill them.” 27/ nytimes.com/2020/04/21/boo…
Like Wall, I read Letter from a Birmingham Jail not as straight criticism but rather as a highly strategic political text attempting to upend the priorities of those White people “more devoted to ‘order‘ than to justice;” 28/
Finally, reading Douglass closely also helps address two other questions raised by @MarxinHell about why I frame the paper around the Black agency. To paraphrase Douglass, ”I try to see from the marginalized activist’s point of view.” 29/
The paper’s point of view appears in the first sentence of the abstract: ”How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities?” The model centers the perspective of activists trying to lead from below. 30/
The paper assumes a stratified society, a repressive state, a segregated media, and a majority population that is indifferent or hostile to minority group concerns. Under such conditions, what are marginalized activists to do? 31/
Should 1960s Black activists have waited for mainstream White media to take an interest in racial discrimination? Or, in the 1980s should ACT-UP have waited for Jesse Helms to see the light on funding AIDS research? 32/
As I note in the paper’s introduction and conclusion, this is not just an American dilemma. Activists from historically subjugated groups around the world, whether LGBTQ, disabled, religious or ethnic minorities, etc. similarly face nearly impossible choices. 33/
Under majority-rule systems, statistical minorities — particularly those who are loathed by many in majority — have few ways of pushing change. Should marginalized groups use legal or extra-legal means within a profoundly discriminatory society & government? 34/
These are hard choices but choices they are. Even under terrible circumstances, activists still have some ability to resist domination. To draw on a psych term, the paper assumes activists have some “locus of control” over the tactics they use. 35/
Douglass’ life is illustrative. Born enslaved & separated from his mother, Douglass nevertheless constantly resisted his assigned station in life. Despite great risks, he learned to read & taught others. After brutal beatings, he retaliated. 36/
Ultimately, he escaped slavery, wrote The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published a newspaper & became a leading abolitionist. In short, Douglass’ entire life is a testament to the the power of those at the bottom to fight back. 37/
To some readers of my research, framing the paper with Black agency at the center of the story of resistance to oppression seems “suspect,” “unhelpful” or even ”grotesquely immoral.” 38/
As I’ve written before, erasing Black agency replicates a certain kind of profound disregard in which marginal groups are not seen as fully human and capable of independent thought and action even against often overwhelming constraints. 39/
In 1852, only by seeing July 4th from the ”slave’s point of view,” and only by ceding no ground on the fullness of Black humanity as “moral, intellectual and responsible,” is Frederick Douglass able to see America as it really was. 40/
Similarly, in 2020, if we don’t try to see the world from the perspective of Black activists, if we don’t sit with choices they face, if we cede any ground on whether #BlackLivesMatter, how are we to fully understand America today? fin/
