Articles

Journal Articles (Peer Reviewed)

Two Varieties of White Ignorance. Journal of Politics 86, no. 3 (2024): 920-933. https://doi.org/10.1086/729937

Summary blog post: “How to be humble in antiracist politics,” Journal of Politics Blog, June 24, 2024: https://jop.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/how-to-be-humble-in-antiracist-politics/
The concept of white ignorance refers to phenomena of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in an information deficit about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I contend that an antiracist politics that conceives of its epistemic task in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for liberatory struggle. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one’s own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons.

Hope and Despair in the Political Thought of David Walker. The Pluralist 19, no. 1 (2024): 14-22. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/920616

Awarded Joseph L. Blau Prize at Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 2023 Annual Meeting

On Plantation Politics: Citizenship and Antislavery Resistance in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. Philosophical Studies 180, no. 3 (2022): 871-91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01877-4

Special issue on best and most notable work from APA Pacific Division 2020/2021 meeting

In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.

Declaration in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. American Political Thought 9, no. 4 (2020): 513–41. https://doi.org/10.1086/710756.

In this paper, I develop an account of Frederick Douglass’s use of declaration as an emancipatory mode of political action. An act of declaration compels an audience to acknowledge the declarer as possessing a type of normative standing (e.g. personhood or citizenship). Douglass, through acts of declaration like his Fifth of July speech and fight with the ‘slavebreaker’ Covey, compels American audiences to acknowledge him as a fellow citizen by forcefully enacting a commitment to resist tyranny and oppression. The distinctive emancipatory potential of declaration is grounded in its political epistemology of acknowledgment, on which political actors understand other persons as members of a shared community through the ways in which they comport themselves in relation to one another. Declaration makes political communities more inclusive not only by changing who we understand as fellow members, but how we understand them as such.

Deliberation and Emancipation: Some Critical Remarks. Ethics 129, no. 1 (2018): 8–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/698731.

This article draws on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany in critically assessing the efficacy of reasonableness in advancing the aims of emancipatory politics in political discourse. I argue, through a reading of Douglass and Delany, that comporting oneself reasonably in the face of oppressive ideology can be counterproductive, if one's aim is to undermine such ideology and the institutions it supports. Douglass and Delany, I argue, also provide us with a framework for evaluating alternative discursive strategies we might wish to employ in light of the limited value of reasonableness for emancipatory politics.

Review Essays

The Contingency of Despair. American Political Thought 12, no. 3 (2023): 453-462. https://doi.org/10.1086/725848.

This review essay situates recent scholarship on two nineteenth-century Black American political activists, Maria Stewart and Henry McNeal Turner, in relation to contemporary Black political thought on the role of despair in the Black freedom struggle. As Jared Loggins has argued in this journal (“Who Decides What We Should Do with Our Despair?,” Winter 2022), despair’s role is a question of political judgment: it is a decision to be made rather than an answer to be discovered. I argue that, by returning to the role of despair in nineteenth-century Black American political thought, we are able to enrich our political imagination concerning possibilities for despair and its counterpart, hope, in emancipatory politics. Maria Stewart offers us a vision of apocalyptic hope for the end of an unjust world, while Henry McNeal Turner despairingly declares that the Black freedom struggle must begin again.

Book Reviews

Review of Leslie M. Alexander, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, University of Illinois Press, in Journal of the Civil War Era 14, no. 2 (2024): 252-254. https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2024.a928946

Review of Tunde Adeleke, In the Service of God and Humanity: Conscience, Reason, and the Mind of Martin R. Delany, University of South Carolina Press, in Civil War Book Review 23, iss. 2 (2021). https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cwbr/vol23/iss2/11/.

Review of Keneshia N. Grant, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, in New Political Science 43, iss. 3 (2021): 372-374. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2021.1957315

Interviews

“Frederick Douglass’s Political Philosophy.” New Voices: Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy Season 2, Episode 6 (2022)