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Rutgers University Press

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.104.4.0392

2161-6302

Christoph Irmscher,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

In the first of the five essays that make up this slim, incisive, and important book, Professor Ferguson addresses a pivotal scene from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), in which Douglass tackles the slave driver Covey, causing, as he puts it, “the blood to run where I touched him.”1 It is generally said that Douglass’ freedom begins at that point, even before he has managed to escape. Indeed, Covey never lays hands on him again. Douglass, by resisting Covey, gains his spiritual freedom even before he is physically free—an unsettling message, to be sure, for slaveholders anywhere. Ferguson alerts us to the biblical echoes of the passage (Genesis 32), but he also points out an important difference: when he tackles Covey, Douglass isn’t wrestling with an angel but with the devil incarnate.Douglass’ fight with Covey, in Ferguson’s reading, illustrates the fundamental role that resistance against injustice has played in Black American culture, as the inevitable outcome of the “undeserved black suffering”—in Ferguson’s understated phrase (10)—of Black men, women, and children enslaved, marginalized, excluded, and killed by whites. In fact, the latter have long been terrified of, and made efforts to prevent or tamp down, such violence. Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), felt that the pain whites had inflicted on Blacks—and who would have known this better than the owner of Monticello who tended to treat his slaves as investments, to be whipped when productivity lagged—had destroyed any reasonable hope that Blacks and whites would ever be able to live peacefully together.2 The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the first major white poets to write poems against slavery, envisioned that the “vast Temple of our liberties” would come crashing down in the near future (“The Warning,” from Poems on Slavery, 1842).3 When Frederick Law Olmsted traversed the South before the Civil War, he found a society pervaded by fear, made manifest in the many “semi-instinctive habits of unconscious precaution” (a devastating tautology) influencing and stunting the daily lives of slave owners, who barely seem happier than the slaves they kept in subjection.4 Recall, too, Thomas Sutpen, the protagonist of Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the richest planter in his county, who, traumatized from having witnessed the slave rebellion in Haiti, stages nightly mud-fights with his slaves, as if needing to be reassured that he was indeed still their master.Many more examples could be added to show that resistance seems to have an effect. At the same time, does it really? The nightmare of the Trump presidency has successfully obliterated any Obama-era talk about a “post-racial society,” and recurring reports of violence used by police against Black people cast their shadows over news cycles with the same kind of sad predictability as warnings by right-wing pundits that under Biden the United States will soon lapse into a socialist free-for-all. Ferguson’s intention in Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is, first of all, to complicate the casual use of “resistance” as a panacea for racial oppression or, put differently, to challenge the idea that the solution to the racial problems in the United States–a many-headed monster—could lie in “a resistance movement aimed at gaining rights for a single unified group” (73).This would be a bold statement to make at any time, but it seems particularly counterintuitive after the events of last year. As it happens, the chapters of this book were written years before the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, before the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement; before the often-identical anti-racist statements released by university administrators, professional organizations, and corporations; before the current pandemic, which has killed, and continues to kill, a disproportionately large number of people of color. Ferguson, who died in March 2018 after a long battle with cancer, did not live to see these developments, but I suspect that they would not have changed his views.That’s because his aim is a larger, more comprehensive one. Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is Professor Ferguson’s last work, a compilation of previously published work and unpublished manuscripts, meticulously edited by the Harvard Americanist Werner Sollors and supplemented with a short afterword, in which George Hutchinson, author of the legendary The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1996), celebrates the “thoughtful, contemplative tone” of Ferguson’s reflections and his “generous sensibility” (119). It is a tribute to the editor’s careful work and Ferguson’s brilliance that what could have been a mishmash of peripherally related ideas presents itself as a cohesive, thought-provoking whole.Jeffrey B. Ferguson was the Karen and Brian Conway Presidential Teaching Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College, a “mythical teacher,” as the back cover of the book informs us, and his pedagogical skills are indeed in evidence throughout. Methodical to a fault, uninterested in flashy metaphors and simplifying one-liners, Ferguson doesn’t play for an audience. Although his prose may, at times, tense with the urgency of his mission, he usually unfurls his ideas slowly, with steely precision, as if wanting to keep himself and his readers accountable at all times. For what Ferguson outlines is nothing less than a paradigm change in Black thinking (and in thinking about Blackness in the United States)—one that no longer assumes, as Ferguson believes any argument based on resistance would, participation in a society controlled by whites as the high watermark of Black achievement. In resisting social injustice, those who resist still subscribe to an idea of justice that, at least in the western world, was made by whites for the benefit of whites.In a rich introductory chapter that supplies the book’s title, Ferguson links the modern idea of resistance to the irrepressible desire for freedom and authenticity propagated by Enlightenment thinkers. Consider Rousseau’s injunction that we must defend our truest, most natural selves against the corrupting world that surrounds us, that we must resist where we find ourselves constrained by society or education. If the Enlightenment gave us, according to Immanuel Kant’s famous definition, the means to shed the shackles of our self-imposed intellectual immaturity, it also fostered the birth of scientific racism, the contention that there are biological differences between Black and White and Brown, that some humans are more natural (and therefore too natural) than others.As Ferguson has it, even more recent Black cultural movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, can still be traced back to the Enlightenment validation of individual and collective self-expression. And while Ferguson has no interest in critiquing such goals, he wants his readers to confront honestly the Enlightenment’s contradictory legacy (freedom for some, but not for all) and see it as a significant obstacle to figuring out any clear, unambiguous way forward for true Black freedom. In the United States, the problem is compounded by the fact that white society, even as it routinely disperses and quashes it, needs Black resistance. Treating Blacks as the “Other” allows whites to hold on to the fiction of a benignly classless society, of the good America evoked in the speeches befuddled parliamentarians gave in the immediate aftermath of January 6. (This is my example, of course, not Ferguson’s.) Just hours after an unhinged mob looted its way through the hallways of the Capitol, Senator Ben Sasse extolled the “glories of this republic” and the traditions of “the most exceptional nation in the history of the world,” which would surely make the violence that had just happened seem like an aberration, a deplorable interruption of America’s inexorable march toward ever-greater greatness. President-elect Biden chimed in by offering that “the scenes of chaos in the Capitol” did not reflect the “true America.”5 But what if they did? What if the white rioters were, deliberately or not, reacting to the prospect that a more inclusive Biden presidency might ring in the end of the fragile dominance of American whiteness that a Republican-controlled government had worked so hard to salvage?6 As Ferguson explains in his second chapter (“Freedom, Equality, Race”), drawing on the work of such scholars as Noel Ignatiev and David Roediger: “Without the stabilizing effect of ‘blackness,’ one of the main justifications for the average white person to count himself a member of the same group as the richest would not exist” (41). Indeed, the way last year’s Black Lives Matter protests were frequently misrepresented in support of full-throated calls for “law and order” underlines Ferguson’s point that Black resistance paradoxically helps shore up whiteness, “with all its confused connotations of universality and particularity, of destiny and sheer emptiness” (41).It needs to be emphasized that, for Ferguson, the opposite of resistance isn’t sorrowful compliance or meek acquiescence. Nor does he advocate a new kind racial separatism. But he does want to counsel his readers against the false optimism that comes with facile invocations of “resistance.” In reaching for the “green light” (courtesy of Jay Gatsby), proponents of Black resistance have, Ferguson feels, “blindsid[ed] the blood-colored red one,” thus extinguishing the shadow of the “nameless, vulnerable and abused slave” that, as a warning as well as an obligation, hovers behind them (90). Appropriately, in his sometimes lyrical, sometimes humorous third chapter (“A Blue Note on Black American Literary Criticism and the Blues”), Ferguson confesses his unfashionable love for the blues, an art form that reports rather than excoriates, embodies rather than merely discusses, the experience of Black suffering. Ferguson’s own writing is a kind of search for such embodiment, buoyed by the hope that the wished-for fullness of Black life, the “flying home” of which Ella Fitzgerald sings,7 need no longer depend on, and might soon actually transcend, the things white society holds hallow. From Ferguson’s perspective, even the great Du Bois, the subject of the fourth chapter in the volume (“Of Mr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Others”), did not go far enough, did not think deeply enough about the “humble facts of dependence and death” that shadow the lives of Black people. “It is up to us to recast his vision into more usable terms” (90–91).What Ferguson proposes is a form of Black dissent that doesn’t mistake stridency for efficacy and thus unintentionally reaffirms the way white society works—a vision that, rather than accepting a backseat at the political decision-making table, calls for new and different forms of togetherness. Perhaps controversially, Ferguson here also evokes Mohandas K. Gandhi, whom he admires less for his politics than for his exemplary “self-reliance,” which, for Ferguson, is not ecstatic Emersonian self-elevation but the recognition that true power comes from the remembrance of powerlessness (88–89).Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance is a rich, pathbreaking book, its pages weighed down by the gravity of the problems it addresses, the significance of the solution it suggests, as well as poignant awareness that what the author began here will forever remain unfinished. In his afterword, Hutchinson rightly calls Ferguson an “ironic” thinker, and that he is, to an extent that it becomes difficult to paraphrase his argument nonironically. Had he been allowed more time I am sure he would have thought more about the real-life consequences of the reorientation of Black thought he maps out. However, I found my mind already drifting to the ways in which his model would allow me to read and teach Black texts differently. Specifically, I was thinking about how Ferguson’s approach might help us make sense of the virtuoso beginning of one of his key reference texts, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative. Douglass begins where autobiographies tend to begin, namely at the beginning of his life, except that for an enslaved person it’s difficult to say anything definitive about such a beginning. Note how Douglass, in just a few sentences, turns his anguished not-knowing (of his birthdate, his age, his father, and, on another level, the reasons why he doesn’t know what white folks know) into a form of knowledge. Douglass knows he doesn’t know, and has in fact known that since he was a child: I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit.8 In this wonderful passage, what is superficially a negative thing—the painful knowledge gap between white folks and slaves (“no accurate knowledge”; “know as little … as”; “thus ignorant”; “want of information”; “could not tell”)—becomes, aided by the sheer force of repetition, a positive assertion of Douglass’ unique identity. Difference turns into distinctiveness. A “restless spirit” like Douglass cannot be contained by lack of access to the “authentic record[s]” white people have at their disposal. Even though Douglass is not allowed to know, he still knows, and knows, specifically, how whiteness works (“the wish of most masters within my knowledge”). And this superior form of insight, not dependent on “records” owned by white people, is what the reader will, for the rest of the narrative, associate with Douglass. His famous fight with Covey thus just provides physical (and almost incidental) confirmation for what the reader has realized from the beginning and what his master admits, too: that, restless, improper, and impertinent, Douglass is not well-suited to being a slave (to the extent that anyone would be). In all this, Douglass’ power is based precisely on what Ferguson regards as a Black person’s deepest strength—a “sincere admission of vulnerability,” derived from, but not limited by, his enslaved status (90).In his Narrative, Douglass’ actual escape is barely mentioned, as if it were a mundane, almost boring thing, confirmation of something he had already accomplished. And in way it was. In the final chapter of Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance (“Notes on Escape”), Ferguson writes almost poetically about Black flight, which, like Douglass, he views not as a running away, but as a kind of flying high—a successful escape not from but toward something, toward a new form of beauty, brought on by “the intoxicating combination of altitude and speed” summoned on the last page of Ferguson’s book (111). I know of no better illustration of this “flying high” than Ross Gay’s recent long poem Be Holding (2020), an extended meditation on an iconic moment during the 1980 NBA finals, when the Philadelphia 76er’s Julius Erving, better known as “Dr. J.,” swooped past the Lakers’ Mark Landsberger and, sidestepping Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, now fully airborne and, yes, transcendent, soared to other side of the rim and brought his right arm around for a reverse layup: precision and elegancewith which Doc knows when for how longto pull his head toward his heartso as not to smash it into the glass blackboardwhich would, at this speed and angle,hurt him bad or kill him,the goal made missile by Doc’s flightsailing just above his right ear,the daily evasion of which is,as you know,aversion of genius.9 (Gay 42, 44) Dr. J.’s extraordinary balletic leap is, in Gay’s reading, a transformation into acrobatic art of the improvisational skills honed and passed on by generations of enslaved ancestors who were forced to “quickly theorize / both flight and disappearance” (Gay 57). Dr. J.’s flight embodies precisely the kind of Black transcendence Ferguson imagines throughout this book: the vision of a life that transforms sorrow into acts of gravity-defying, miraculous grace, heading for a place still unknown, a life that “makes of falling flight,” a life in which “reaching toward / each other, // we breathe” again.10