8/10/15 1 Chapter 4 the Demandingness of Freedom
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[Note: This is the second of two chapters on David Walker in the book that I’m currently working on. The first of these chapters appeared in shorter form as “David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal,” Political Theory 43.2 (2015): 208-233.] CHAPTER 4 THE DEMANDINGNESS OF FREEDOM: WALKER AND RACIAL DOMINATION Melvin L. Rogers UCLA [email protected] [T]he common utility that is drawn from a free way of life is … being able to enjoy one’s things freely, without any suspicion, not fearing for the honor of wives and that of children, not to be afraid for oneself. —Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be. —Ralph Ellison, Working notes to Juneteenth Few doubt David Walker’s reliance on God as the foundation of his defense of the freedom of blacks in America. It is difficult to bracket the place of God in his thinking and have a recognizable picture of a free society.1 The religious content of the Appeal is internally connected to our nature as human beings such that without the stipulation of God, liberty makes little sense. Walker relies on the proposition that we are created in the image of God as a reason for why our nature is constituted in the way that it is.2 We might think that the mere assertion of God’s role in creating us as free creatures is enough to sustain Walker’s argument that blacks be treated equally. Regardless of how blacks comport themselves in the face of domination, we might say, that whites are obliged to abstain from practices of enslavement. Or to put the matter differently, the meaning and protection of freedom need not depend on our affirmation of it. If this were simply the case, there would be 1 David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, ed. Peter Hinks (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1829/2000), 7, 64. 2 Walker, Appeal, 27. There is partial affinity between my claims here and the argument advanced by Jeremy Waldron in his reading of John Locke. See Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 3. 8/10/15 1 little reason for Walker to argue that it is ignorance that distorts the self-understanding of blacks or to insist on the necessity of blacks acting in a way commensurate with the demand of freedom. And yet Walker does make these arguments. The reason for doing so is important; he means to underscore the importance of cooperation between God and humans and ultimately among themselves. Although the “spirit and feeling”3 of freedom that constitute humans cannot be erased, he is aware that its role in making us the creatures that we are does not mean we will always recognize the demand of our nature. Our nature, you see, is not self-executing. To draw an analogy with the claims of Chapter 1: Just as the fact of the moral sense does not automatically generate an appropriate deployment of it, the fact of the spirit and feeling of freedom does not mean we will always comport ourselves in the light of it. This gap introduces interpretative space that the Appeal means to fill; we must, as it were, assume a standpoint from which the meaning of human nature, and in turn the force of freedom, comes into view. As Thomas Jefferson insisted on the necessity of enlightenment, Walker insists on the need to remove ignorance. This explains his goal to awaken among his audience a “spirit of inquiry and investigation.”4 In emphasizing his quest to enlighten his reader, I do not mean to downplay the religious dimension of the Appeal. I mean to put it in its proper place. For him, black Americans must resist the idea that just because God is foundational, they are relieved of their responsibility to address their unjust conditions. As I argued in the previous chapter, prophetic intervention does not mean to replace the judgment of the audience; rather, it appeals to and depends on that judgment. The question of whether blacks are free human beings does not exclusively depend on the religious claim about human nature (although important), but on a normative view about 3 Walker, Appeal, 64. 4 Walker, Appeal, 5. 8/10/15 2 oneself as a human being that Walker seeks to persuade his reader to adopt. This explains his aversion to acting slavishly—a criticism directed to those blacks within and outside the formal institution of slavery. For him, African Americans must perform their freedom in order to lay claim to it. This is what he means to awaken black Americans to—the demandingness of freedom. This suggests that Walker has a rich notion of what counts as being free. His persistent attack on servility and ignorance throughout the Appeal means to illuminate a form of enslavement that distorts the humanity of the enslaved person, not exclusively because individuals are treated as property but also because of the narrowing effect it has on one’s self- understanding. To free oneself from this notion of slavery is to move toward human flourishing; it is to resist domination. By domination I mean the extent to which black Americans live at the arbitrary mercy or whim of their white counterparts, what Walker refers to, as do contemporary thinkers, as the absence of republican liberty.5 But domination radiates outward into the elusive social and cultural horizon of the community, subtly shaping and disciplining one’s comportment even in cases where there is no obvious master. Republican liberty as Walker uses it involves an important qualification where racial domination is concerned. Whereas variants of republicanism typically describe the necessity of civic virtue to the republic, Walker’s analysis directs his black audience to the necessity of solidarity with the race given the racialized nature of domination. For him, domination absorbs 5 For a defense of this view of republicanism see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); A Theory of Freedom: The Psychology and Politics of Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); cf. Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002). The argument here should not be seen as accepting the additional, but controversial claim advanced by Pettit and Skinner (not Viroli) that this view of freedom is distinct from what one finds in liberalism or that this account of freedom exhaust what we might want to say about human agency. For the argument against drawing a distinction between republicanism and liberalism based on freedom see Melvin L. Rogers, “Republican Confusion and Liberal Clarification,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34.7 (2008): 799-824. For the argument that this view of freedom is incomplete see Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-Domination,” Political Theory 36.1 (2008): 9-36. 8/10/15 3 the identity of individuals into a larger racial classification that is itself associated with certain negative attributes. This classification system becomes the basis for treating blacks unequally. The perfect illustration of understanding race in just this way, Walker believes, is Jefferson’s 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, especially its Query XIV.6 Although Jefferson theoretically rejected sliding from a system of racial classification to normative prescriptions for political, economic, and ethical treatment,7 Walker views these two as fitting seamlessly together in the American republic. For black Americans to affirm republican liberty requires tracking how race conditions domination and thwarts the expression of freedom. Walker’s question, to use Michael Hanchard’s language, is not “what are black people,” but rather “what tends to happen to people defined as black that does not happen with the same relative frequency to other people in a given society?”8 To resist racial domination as republican liberty demands is not merely to escape the arbitrary mercy of any given white American, but the larger classification system that is responsible for domination in the first place. It is both the fact of racial domination and the racial classification system that politically sustains it that transforms the display of civic loyalty to the republic into a special obligation among blacks to blacks, since they are liable to be subjected to the ill effects of race when it is used. His defense of racial solidarity thus turns out to be a 9 consequence of what republican liberty demands under conditions of racial domination. 6 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1787/1984), especially 264-70. 7 As Jefferson remarks in a letter: “I expressed them [referring to his claims in Query XIV] with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others” (See TJ to Henri Gregoire, February 25, 1809, Jefferson: Writings, 1202). 8 Michael Hanchard, “Contours of Black Political Thought: An Introduction and Perspective,” Political Theory 38.4 (2010), 529. 9 Cf. Glaude, Exodus; Melvin Rogers, “Liberalism, Narrative, and Identity: A Pragmatic Defense of Racial Solidarity,” Theory & Event 6.2 (2002); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of 8/10/15 4 Walker is neither politically nor sociologically naïve.