Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Rage
2014; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/07393148.2014.924244
ISSN1469-9931
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoAbstractThis article defends the dialectical rage of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass because it led to good political judgment and was an effective strategy for political mobilization. The life of Douglass illustrates that rage is not always blind, counter-productive, and violent but can be an appropriate response to injustice. From the vantage point of Douglass, rage emerges as an essential component of democratic citizenship. NotesI thank Sonia Alianak, David Anshen, Basil W. R. Jenkins, Matthew J. Moore, Nicholas L. Tampio, and Adriel Trott for comments on earlier drafts. I also thank Amanda Iglesias for research assistance. Finally, I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. 1 John Rawls's ideal of reasonable citizens precludes a role for rage. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Jürgen Habermas's conception of rational deliberation prevents him from according rage a role in his theory of deliberative democracy. See Habermas in William Rehg (trans.), Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996). Michael E. Morrell argues that the dialogic dimension of deliberative democracy could be improved if empathy was accorded a central place. See Michael E. Morrell, Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). Morrell risks obscuring political differences that call for anger and antagonism as opposed to empathetic communion. 2 For Aristotle, the ideal citizen is free of anger; see Roger Crisp (trans.), Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For Seneca, anger is "the most hideous and frenzied of all emotions"; anger "refuses to be governed"; anger "tears entire nations to pieces"; finally, "instead of moderating our anger, we should eliminate it altogether." See "On Anger" in Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, ed. and trans. John Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 17, 37, 96, 114. For Thomas Hobbes, unrestrained appetite, desire, and passion guarantee mutual destruction. See Edwin Curley (ed.), Leviathan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1994). For Immanuel Kant, virtue is based on inner freedom and commands man to bring his inclinations under reason's control; in Mary Gregor (trans.), Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 208. Kant claims "derangement accompanied by raging (rabies), that is, an affection of anger (toward a real or imaginary object) which renders one insensitive to all external stimuli, is only one variety of mental imbalance"; in Victor Lyle Dowdell (trans.), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 118. 3 W. E. B. Du Bois sought a "union of intelligence and sympathy" as a way to prevent "fierce hate and vindictiveness." See Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), p. 113, p. 80. For Martin Luther King, Jr., black rage would not make life better for African-Americans engaged in civil disobedience against legalized segregation. Although rage may be justified, King feared it would wreak havoc on black America and lead to more explosive violence. King sought to find a middle course between "the 'do-nothingism' of the complacent" and "the hatred and despair of the black nationalist." Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York: Signet, 2000), p. 75. Echoing King's concern, James Baldwin believed that rage threatens the polity, inhibits understanding, and leads to self-destructive action. Baldwin describes the sickness of rage: "That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant's warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die" [emphasis added] in James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York: Library of America, 1998), pp. 69–70. For Cornell West, rage is not politically productive but rather needs to be contained and culturally channeled through the black church and music in order to avert its self-destructive consequences. See Cornell West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 135–151. An exception who goes in the opposite direction regarding the validity of anger as a political emotion is Malcolm X: "Douglass was great. I would rather have been taught about Toussaint L'Ouverture. We need to be taught about people who fought, who bled for freedom and made others bleed," in Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, 1992), p. 124. 4Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 2405. 5 According to Simon Kemp and K. T. Strongman in "Anger Theory and Management: A Historical Analysis," "we find surprisingly few changes in our concepts about anger in more than 2,000 years," Simon Kemp and K. T. Strongman, "Anger Theory and Management: A Historical Analysis," The American Journal of Psychology 108:3 (1995), p. 414. 6 bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995). For a defense of rage as a source of political motivation see Peter Sloterdijk: "The development of a culture of indignation through the methodically exercised excitation of rage becomes the most important psychopolitical task, a task first taken up in the French Revolution," in Mario Wenning (trans.), Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010), p. 119. Finally, for Terri A. Hasseler, "we can learn a great deal from the ways in which different groups respond to and articulate their rage"; see Terri A. Hasseler, "Socially Responsible Rage: Postcolonial Feminism, Writing, and the Classroom," Feminist Teacher 12:3 (1999), p. 220. 7 bell hooks, Killing Rage, pp. 12–26. 8 Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger," Women's Studies Quarterly 9:3 (1981), pp. 8–9. See also Valerie C. Lehr, "Redefining and Building Community: The Importance of Anger," Women & Politics 15:1 (1995), p. 40. See, finally, David Ost, "Politics as the Mobilization of Anger: Emotions in Movements and in Power," European Journal of Social Theory 7:2 (2004), where he argues political stability is "congealed anger," p. 230. 9 My article builds on Nick Bromell's "Democratic Indignation: Black American Thought and the Politics of Dignity," Political Theory 41:2 (2013), who argues indignation works in a dialectical fashion insofar as indignation "monitors and assesses one's response to insult," p. 287. Through the interaction between insult and reflection, anger is guided "toward productive political and social ends," p. 287. Margaret Kohn in "Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic," Journal of Politics 67:2 (2005), pp. 497–514, productively illustrates Douglass's fight with Covey via Hegelian dialectics.10 See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Signet, 2005); Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Library of America, 1994); Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Library of America, 1994); Philip S. Foner (ed.), Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999).11 See Leonard Harris in "Honor and Insurrection or A Short Story about why John Brown (with David Walker's Spirit) was Right and Frederick Douglass (with Benjamin Banneker's Spirit) was Wrong," in Bill Lawson and Frank Kirkland (eds), Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1999), p. 239. Angela Davis argues Douglass was not radical enough insofar as "Douglass failed to use his position to forcefully challenge the Republican Party's complicity with the repressive process of reestablishing control over southern black labor" in Angela Davis, "From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of the Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System," in Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, p. 344. Charles W. Mills argues "Douglass is thus a classic representative in the black American political tradition of the dominant assimilationist view" in Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 171.12 See Harris, "Honor and Insurrection," p. 239. This position is challenged by William Gleason in "Volcanoes and Meteors: Douglass, Melville, and the Moral Economies of American Authorship," in Robert Levine and Samuel Otter (eds), Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). "In 'The Tyrants' Jubilee,'" according to Gleason, "we can see Douglass exploring what it might mean not only to warn of insurrection but also actively, even intemperately, desire it, should the South refuse to recognize both the humanity of blacks and the insurrectionary hubris of its own ways. The final line of the poem—"And the wind whispers Death as over them sweeping"—is as close to a call for exterminatory violence as one will find in Douglass before the war," pp. 125–126.13 Davis, "From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of the Prison," pp. 341, 351.14 Mills, Blackness Visible, pp. 167–200.15 Leslie Friedman Goldstein, "Morality & Prudence in the Statesmanship of Frederick Douglass: Radical as Reformer," Polity 16:4 (1984), pp. 610, 619.16 See Omedi Ochieng, "A Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Frederick Douglass and the Architectonic of African American Radicalism," Western Journal of Communication 75:2 (2011), p. 169.17 Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 167.18 Even though he opposed capital punishment (see "Resolutions Proposed for Anti-Capital Punishment Meeting," 1858), in "A Terror to Kidnappers" (1853), Douglass states: "Everything must be dealt with according to its kind" (Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 271). In his speech "Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper" (1854), which was a response to the public outcry over the death of an individual attempting to implement the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston, Douglass claims: "We hold that he had forfeited his right to live, and that his death was necessary, as a warning, to others liable to pursue a like course" (Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 279). In the same speech, Douglass states: "Resistance is…wise as well as just" (Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 279).19 See Muneer I. Ahmad, "A Rage Shared by Law: Post-September 11 Racial Violence as Crimes of Passion," California Law Review 92:5 (2004), pp. 1259–1330, for the reciprocally reinforcing nature of law and popular rage.20 See James Allen et al. for a photographic account of extra-legal violence against African-Americans. In James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000). Douglass interpreted the increasing use of lynching as follows: "The resistance met by the Negro is to me evidence that he is making progress…The men lynched at Memphis were murdered because they were prosperous…When he shakes off his rags and wretchedness and presumes to be a man, and a man among men, he contradicts this popular standard and becomes an offence to his surroundings" (Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 748).21 Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois, p. 176.22 See Hester Blum, "Douglass's and Melville's 'Alphabets of the Blind,'" in Robert Levine and Samuel Otter (eds), Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 262.23 Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 752 (emphasis added).24 Ibid., 751 (emphasis added).25 Runaway slaves were branded with an "R" on their face, had an ear cut off, were dismembered, tortured to death, or killed.26 Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, p. 501.27 See Douglass, "The Heroic Slave" (Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 226).28 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 171.29 Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 375.30 Ibid., 375.31 Ibid., 239. For Harris, Douglass was comfortable defending a literary version of mutiny rather than practicing it himself in Harris, "Honor and Insurrection," pp. 238–239.32 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): "Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison" (p. 39).33 Bromell, "Democratic Indignation," p. 290.34 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 54.35 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 223.36 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 55.37 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 209.38 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 89.39 See Kohn, "Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic," p. 499: "Literacy would undermine the system by strengthening slaves' recognition of their own humanity and desire to be free."40 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 230 (emphasis added).41 Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 375.42 See George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 19.43 Foner, Frederick Douglass, pp. 195–197.44 Ibid., 200–203.45 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 165.46 Ibid., 182.47 Ibid., 294.48 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). For Foucault, the body is a target of power and rendered docile so that it can be "subjected, used, transformed and improved," p. 136.49 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 277.50 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 82.51 See Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia, PA: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1906): "In the cold passion that took possession of him, the slave-boy became utterly reckless of consequences, reasoning to himself that the limit of suffering at the hands of this relentless slave-breaker had already been reached," pp. 39–40.52 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 282.53 Ibid., 283.54 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 284.55 Ibid., 285.56 Ibid., 286.57 See Kohn, "Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic," p. 503.58 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 82.59 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 287.60 Washington, Frederick Douglass, pp. 39–40.61 See Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons," Dissent (Autumn 1963), p. 12.62 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 73.63 Ibid., 72.64 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, pp. 263, 265.65 Ibid., 310.66 See Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 1996), for how the black and white races are legal constructs.67 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 291.68 Ibid., 291–292.69 Ibid., 245.70 As Douglass claims, "voting supplies for Slavery—perpetuation of Slavery in this land" (Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 78).71 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 104.72 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 197.73 Baker argues silence can be a gesture of political resistance but silence can also signal the expectation that blacks must earn the right to speak or that someone else will speak for them; see Houston A. Baker, "Scene…Not Heard," in Robert Gooding-Williams (ed.), Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 38–48.74 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 342.75 See Douglass, "Capt. Brown Not Insane" (1859); Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 375.76 Washington, Frederick Douglass, p. 47.77 Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 193. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012), for the connections between slavery, Jim Crow, the doctrine of color-blindness, and the War on Drugs.78 See James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: Palgrave, 2006), for Douglass as a pragmatist (p. 92).79 Joel Olson, "The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry," Perspectives on Politics 5:4 (2007), p. 690.Additional informationNotes on contributorsWilliam W. SokoloffWilliam W. Sokoloff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The University of Texas—Pan American. His research focuses on the relationship between democratic citizenship, political resistance, and pedagogy. He has published in the American Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Political Theory, Journal of Continuing Higher Education, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, Polity, PS: Political Science & Politics, Scholar & Educator, and Theory & Event.
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