Per Caritatem

Like a voice crying out in the wilderness, Frederick Douglass speaks both eloquently and powerfully to the brutality and injustice of chattel slavery. For example, in his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain. He begins by drawing our attention to “the practical operation” of America’s slave industry, an industry “sustained by American politics and American religion! Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.”[1] Driven around the country like mere animals, these men, women, and children are beaten, prod, and whipped, as they process in dirge-like fashion toward the New Orleans slave market. Douglass then zeros in on a few of these infelicitous, iron-clad souls—an elderly, gray headed man, a young mother with sun-scorched back and teary eyes carrying her infant child, a teen-aged girl mourning the violent separation from her mother. Tired and exhausted from hours of exposure to the blistering sun, the young mother begins to lag behind. Then you hear it—“a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.”[2] What was this awful sound, followed by a high-pitched, piercing scream? The sound was a whip striking the young mother’s bare shoulder; the scream needs no explanation. As the slave traders drive this human herd to the auction block, where the males will be “examined like horses” and the women ”exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers,” Douglass implores us not to forget “the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.”^[3]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery. Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted. Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fail to reach his muted ears. Deafened to the wailing of mothers torn from their children and children torn from their mothers, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into golden keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother.

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, allowing the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude. If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business. Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether a scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character. Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit. “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”^[4] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”^[5] The slave’s face, however, with its expressive capacities spanning the spectrum of human emotions—from compassion to agony, ecstasy to alarm—the face as the display case crafted to exhibit the eyes is of no interest to the slave buyers. Provided that it is free of work-hindering defects, the slave’s face is utterly insignificant to the purchase. “It was the instrumental value of these bodies that mattered to the buyer, their size and shape, the color and the ages, the comparability of parts and durability of attributes—not the faces.”^[6]

[1] Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” 436.

[2] Ibid., 437.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 142–3.

I received recently a generous gift from Father Patrick Henry Reardon: the new, revised version of his classic book, Christ in the Psalms. The new edition includes a helpful Introduction, wherein Reardon explains what the book is about, emphasizing toward the end its Christocentric focus. There are also substantive changes to his discussions of five Psalms. Although my brief comments below do not do the book justice, I want to highlight one of his new entries: Psalm 73. Here Reardon recounts Asaph’s reflections on the act of Creation as an act of deliverance or liberation. As Reardon observes, “[n]othingness was not neutral. Existence is not natural to nothingness” (145). In other words, God’s act of creating ex nihilo, was, especially given the resonance with such “battle” imagery in the ancient world, a conquering of forces opposed to God. Creation, thus, contains, so to speak, an imprint of future redemptive historical events. Listen to Reardon’s re-contexualization of Creation as the original Exodus or act of deliverance.

Centuries before parting the Red Sea. He [God] divided the more primitive waters, cleaving the fountains and the flood, cracking open the multiple heads of the sea monster in order to feed, with their meat, the peoples of Ethiopia. Creation, that is to say, was the initial Exodus, a deliverance from bondage, a redemption from the deep dungeon of non-being. The Lord smote that more ancient Pharaoh and fed him to His hungry creatures (145).

Reardon goes on to describe creation as “both a moral and a metaphysical act” (145). That is, God’s ordering of the chaos, his taking “hold on the tohu wabohu and invoke[ing] His light of the darkness of the abyss” are redemptive, salvific acts. “He did this in the sense that in the very heart of Creation, its arche or principle, there is a deed of redemption, the world’s deliverance from the oppression of primeval chaos” (145). As God’s covenant of creation “unfolded” (here one is hindered by language itself—as T.S. Eliot reminds us, “Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision”; “Burnt Norton,” V, in Four Quartets), he created time and space. The former is intimately tied to the and given expression in the liturgical calendar, whereas the latter is connected to his sanctuary. Reardon’s meditation on Ps. 73 ends by reflecting on how we, in our present human condition, attempt to undo Creation and thus to return it to chaos.

Of all the evils lamented by Aspah, therefore, the worst are the desecrations of sacred space and sacred time. God’s enemies destroyed the first with ax and fire, the second by the suppression of feast days. Man becomes the Lord’s enemy in the space dedicated for worship and glorifies himself in the sacred time set aside to glorify God. Both space and time are thus defiled. Rebellious man, by this desecration of his life, returns Creation to the primeval chaos. Living outside the covenant inherent in the structure of the world, he endeavors to undo what God has done (146).

(Although Reardon doesn’t develop an environmental ethic from this Psalm, I suspect he would be very open to the suggestion).

In his essay, “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’,” Richard Yarborough highlights how 19^th century, white bourgeois constructions of masculinity and “manhood” influenced early African American writers. We see evidence of the influence of socially constructed notions of gender in Frederick Douglass’s writings and speeches. For example, commenting on his fight with the reputed slave-breaker, Mr. Covey, Douglass describes the victory as having reawakened in him a sense of his own manhood.[1] As is true today, notions of masculinity and femininity, like notions of “blackness,” are shaped socially and culturally, shifting over time as a result of various changes in legal, religious, political and other practices and discourses. Douglass—as is the case with every other human being—is not immune to social forces. In fact, in many ways he accepts the (white) hegemonic view of what it means to be a successful, autonomous, self-made male.[2]  However, Douglass is acutely aware of what his white audience can hear and what they refuse to hear. In other words, as I shall argue, while Douglass succumbs to dominant (white) constructions of masculinity he also employs gender essentialist and gender subversive narratives in a rhetorico-rebellious key. To be clear, none of what follows should be taken as making excuses for Douglass’s participation in promoting a patriarchal social order or for overt affirmations of gender essentialism; however, it is to claim that advances in social progress—especially in oppressive contexts such as 19^th century America—typically require for a temporary period a special deployment of the dominant cultural tropes for the purpose of reshaping cultural consciousness. The danger lies, of course, in allowing the strategic discourses—essentialist or otherwise—to sediment; instead, they too must be interrogated once the oppressed group’s political aims have been sufficiently achieved.

Yarborough enumerates several characteristic traits or features encountered in 19^th century white narratives of masculinity. Among these “masculine” traits mediated through the white hegemonic narrative of Douglass’s day, we find: courage, self-control, rational excellence, nobility, verbal mastery, and autonomy.[3] Aware of such dominant tropes and realizing that they had to work against entrenched negative notions of blackness, Douglass and other black writers such as William Wells Brown crafted their autobiographies and their fictionalized black protagonists with white discourses of masculinity in mind.[4] Thus, we find in Brown’s novel, Clotel, depictions of black male heroic slaves as “hardly distinguishable from bourgeois whites” in speech, behavior, and appearance.[5]

On the one hand, African American writers were constrained by white narratives, whose influence affected the creative freedom and extent to which black writers could develop their plots and construct their heroes and villains. On the other hand, Douglass and others used the pre-formed white-masculinst tropes in creative and subversive ways to challenge prevailing views of black inferiority. Given that the white conceptions of ideal masculinity in Douglass’s day portrayed males as independent, courageous, powerful, self-reliant, reason-bearing individuals, who through perseverance and strength forge their own destinies, it is not surprising that Douglass describes his physical struggle with Covey as having restored his sense of manhood. Would his narrative have had the impact that it did among white (male) readers if he would have employed culturally “feminine” tropes? The most likely answer is an emphatic “no.” In short, black male writers were faced with a difficult balancing act in their attempts to create “successful” black male characters. That is, given both white views of ideal manhood and the negative depictions of black males as unreasoning “savages,” black authors had to justify incessantly every move their black protagonists made.

In his 1853 novella, “The Heroic Slave,” a fictionalized retelling of Madison Washington’s lead role in a slave revolt aboard the American ship, Creole, we find Douglass’s attempts to strike this impossible balance. For example, similar to his description of his own restrained use of physical force qua self-defense against Covey, Douglass depicts Washington as having exercised reasoned restraint in his heroic lead role in the slave insurrection. No doubt Douglass chooses to work within these white-formed literary limitations; however, in so doing he plays an active role in re-forming the white imaginary with respect to their false construal of blackness. Continuing his subversive rhetorical strategies, Douglass draws a parallel between the slave revolt aboard the Creole and the American Revolution.  As his drama unfolds and the revolt gains steam, Washington proclaims to his white antagonists (and here white readers are implicated): “We have struck for our freedom, and if a true man’s heart be in you, you will honor us for the deed. We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they.”[6] In other words, Douglass appeals to socially approved (white) male acts of violence—the violence enacted by the white revolutionary “fathers” in their struggle for freedom—to justify the violence of Madison Washington and the other slaves in their quest for freedom.[7]

Again, none of the above is meant to promote a status quo position with respect to gender or race. Feminist and womanist theorists, as well as other critics concerned with gender equality are right to highlight the tensions in Douglass’s various freedom narratives—in particular, his failure to challenge the patriarchy of his day and his embrace of white masculinist ideals. Granting these tensions, Douglass’s imperfect attempts nonetheless challenged the white imaginary both to rethink their views of blackness and to confront the contradictions of their own violent, irrational practices. Douglass’s literary battles, both his victories and his defeats, mirror his struggles to break free from white constraint not only in the form of slavery but likewise in his relations with white abolitionists, in particular, his complex relationship with William Lloyd Garrison. As Eric J. Sundquist observes, Douglass’s ongoing identity formation was constituted in relation to a series of both white and black father figures. Douglass’s revisions to his autobiographies is in part motivated by his struggle to grapple with not only his present/absent white master/father (Aaron Anthony) but with the black rebel Nat Turner, the black hero Madison Washington, the white Founding Fathers, and white abolitionists such as Garrison. Through creating his own version of Madison Washington and his multiple versions of himself, Douglass engages in an act of self-fathering. In this stage of his life, Douglass refuses his role as Garrison’s “text” and creates a new, living, ever-revising “self-text,” or as Sundquist puts it, a “self-fathered figure combining black and white ideals.”[8]

Through his mastery of “the codes of Anglo-American bourgeois white masculinity,” Douglass sought to create a black male hero “who would both win white converts to the antislavery struggle and firmly establish the reality of black manhood.”[9] By choosing to birth his black male characters through white masculinist “codes,” Douglass’s successes on one front become failures on other. Nevertheless, given his context of oppressive structural racism and entrenched patriarchy, it is difficult to imagine how he could have navigated an error-free path. Perhaps an all-out frontal attack on both racism and patriarchy would have resulted in alienating those (males) possessing the political power and cultural capital necessary to bring about significant social change. Such is the complexity of our human condition and the difficulty of outmaneuvering both Scylla and Charybdis.

For those interested in critical race theory and “whiteness” studies in particular, Professor George Yancy’s new book, Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, is a valuable resource.  Dr. Yancy is an associate professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He is a well-known scholar in critical race theory and has written, edited, and taught on the subject of race for several years. As his institutional website notes, Dr. Yancy “is particularly interested in the formation of African-American philosophical thought as articulated within the social context and historical space of anti-Black racism, African-American agency, and identity formation. His current philosophical project explores the theme of racial embodiment, particularly in terms of how white bodies live their whiteness unreflectively vis-à-vis the interpellation and deformation not only of the black body, but the white body, the philosophical identity formation of whites, and questions of white privilege and power formation. He is also interested in the intersection between philosophy and biography, and how this intersection implicates normative issues at the level of praxis.”  Not only is Dr. Yancy an excellent scholar whose passion for justice and desire to allow marginalized voices speak is abundantly evident (just check out his CV), but he is a kind, approachable, and generous person.

The following summary of Professor Yancy’s new book is taken from the Temple University Press website:

“Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder’s charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy’s essays map out a structure of whiteness.

He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its “danger,” and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a “gift” to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively.

Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.”

Dr. Yancy’s book is also available for pre-order via Amazon.com. I encourage you to order your copy now!

Taking as his point of departure the story of Rip Van Winkle, who, having slept for twenty years, awakens to a world he hardly recognizes, Martin Luther King Jr. develops the analogy in his speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” to speak to contemporary issues of his day—issues still alive and well in our day. The important point about Rip Van Winkle was not that he slept for two decades but that he slept, as King puts it, “through a revolution.” When Van Winkle had ascended the mountain for his rest, he saw a picture of King George III. When he awoke twenty years later, the picture he saw upon his descent was not a monarch’s but rather George Washington’s. During his twenty-year “nap,” Rip Van Winkle was unaware of the significant social, political, economic, religious and cultural changes that had occurred.

Having captivated our attention with his sleeping metaphor, King begins to improvise on his theme.

There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, “We want to be free.” And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.

King then comments on how one can avoid the Rip Van Winkle syndrome and thus be attuned to pressing social and political issues and concerns. First, King encourages us to strive to “achieve a world perspective.” For those who believe “that we can live in isolation” and “live without being concerned about other individuals and other nations is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The great challenge now is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.” In other words, King argues against social atomism and individualism which promotes one’s own self-interest above all else. In place of radical individualism, which as many political theorists and critics of classical liberal democracy have pointed out (Marxists, feminists, communitarians, critical race theorists), leads to alienation, oppression, and exploitation, King calls for solidarity and a concern for humans qua humans.  None of this suggests that King is advocating for a post-racial society where we deny difference. Rather, he sees that in order to fight for justice, human rights, and the like, there must be some common bond, some unity that connects us and yet allows difference to manifest and even be celebrated. In other words, I see in King a desire to hold unity and difference in tension rather than to exalt one over the other. Listen in the following passage to King’s way of putting it:

all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be – this is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main [...] And then he goes on toward the end to say: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. And by believing this, by living out this fact, we will be able to remain awake through a great revolution.

King’s second point is that we must work unceasingly and passionately to uproot and eradicate racial injustice in all its forms, personal or societal/structural. Having noted a number of positive strides in the fight for racial equality—“the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill in 1964” and so forth, King makes clear that these advances are only a beginning and that significant work remains to be done. Although there has been much success on legal fronts with respect to segregation laws, nonetheless, socio-political and economic issues continued to enslave American blacks (of King’s day and in our day as well.) For example, as King explains,

The Negro is still at the bottom of the economic ladder. He finds himself perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Millions of Negroes are still housed in unendurable slums; millions of Negroes are still forced to attend totally inadequate and substandard schools. And we still see, in certain sections of our country, violence and man’s inhumanity to man in the most tragic way. All of these things remind us that we have a long, long way to go. For inAlabamaandMississippi, violence and murder where civil rights workers are concerned, are popular and favorite pastimes.

Racial injustice, as King reminds us, is not something that will simply work itself out in due time.  Rather, it is something toward which we—black, white, brown, etc.—must labor. I conclude my brief commentary on King’s speech with a final passage, a passage that I find both powerful and unsettling. Why unsettling? Because like Rip Van Winkle I have a tendency to choose to sleep rather than remain awake during the revolution.

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.

As you reflect on Dr. King’s words, I ask you to consider taking a concrete step to help an African American friend of mine, Michael X. Smith, (with whom I am have been corresponding for over two years) who is serving a life-sentence in prison for a crime of which he claims innocence. Please take a few minutes to read his story and, if you are so moved, to sign his petition for a retrial.