What the Black Intellectual Tradition Can Teach Us About Democracy

Thomas Donnelly: So beginning with you Professor Rogers, your new book, again, is The Darkened Light of Faith, and it offers a powerful account of the Black intellectual tradition from Antebellum America, all the way up to the 20th century. I just wanna begin by asking you what inspired you to write this book now?

Melvin Rogers: Right. So I've been I was working on the book I would say for about a, for about a decade. And what motivated the book was really my first book project, which was on the American philosophy of John Dewey. And center to that project was the idea of uncertainty that John Dewey sort of emphasized as being central to democratic politics.

And once I concluded that book my thought was that Dewey had laid out philosophically the importance of uncertainty, but who has sort of lived it in an immediate way. And although there were a whole host of figures I could turn to and traditions I could turn to I turned to the tradition of African American political thought, and the lessons that are derived from their confrontation with a kind of fundamental uncertainty and vulnerability in American life.

Thomas Donnelly: Excellent. Now, Jamelle Bouie, you've written and spoken powerfully about the Black intellectual tradition in your own work. How is it influenced your work as a political journalist, and also as a public intellectual?

Jamelle Bouie: I'm gonna borrow a phrase from an edited volume, Professor Rogers worked on a couple of years ago. I think an introductory essay, where he used this phrasing to meet the African American intellectual tradition, which is broad and it encompasses a lot of different avenues, and a lot of ways actually sort of counter public the kind of mainstream American thinking about this country, about what American democracy is.

And so, as someone who's worked at The Times, is very much interested, both in sort of like the day-to-day of American democracy and American democratic life, but also as much as I can, pulling back and thinking broadly about American democracy, I think the African American tradition, provides a incredibly useful perspective, based on the perspective of insiders who are still yet outside as well and can turn a more critical eye to things that I think many Americans take for granted.

Excerpt from interview: Melvin Rogers discusses one of the main thinkers in his book: Martin Delany.

Thomas Donnelly:...I'd love to transition …to some of the other thinkers in your book, maybe beginning with a good contrast, which is Martin Delany…So, anything on republicanism, civic virtue…

Melvin Rogers: All right, so I would say a couple of things about the republicanism point glad you brought that out. So republicanism here, what we're talking about is the political philosophy known as republicanism that has its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome, not republican, the Republican Party. But the sort of philosophical idea is sort of held together by sort of two ideas. The first is the importance of civic virtue to a healthy political society, you want people to be as civically active and involved, and thus they need the requisite habits and sensibilities to be involved, right? But the reason why that matters is because it keeps them alert and on-guard, against those practices that would endanger their freedom.

Those practices that would leave you at the arbitrary mercy of another, or whether it's internally, or whether it's by another political society, and thus render you in a position of domination. So basically what you want to do then is to have institutions structured in such a way, that that sort of reflect your freedom that properly situates you in the political process so that those institutions can track your interest and concerns.

And you wanna constantly be alive, alive and awake to the potential dangers. And one of the things that these figures, these African Americans thinkers so bring to the table, is the idea that, "Look, my willingness and my interest, and respecting your freedom, partly depends on me regarding you as a member of the community, and being taken by the community as being a member of it."

And that partly depends on the ideas that are in circulation about you and in the case of the African Americans, they were not viewed as being members of the community. And so, when they engage in a sort of critical evaluation of the United States, and the practices of slavery, they are both challenging the laws and institutional structures on the books, but they are also simultaneously challenging the ideas and beliefs and habits that are in circulation, that habituate why the Americans did disregard them as human beings. And the thought was that you have to challenge both of these in order to, to sort of render stable a racially just society.

And one of the things that comes of out of this, and so studying this figures of the past, is that what it helps cultivate in us, is a kind of a kind of sort of intellectual agility, right? An intellectual agility in the sense that we become aware, as Jamelle said, to the ways in which those in the past understood their world, and try to grapple with it. And sometimes that cast into belief things about us as, that have developed in a positive direction, and sometimes it casts into belief things that have fallen away, or that we have lost. And the necessity to try to figure out how to re enliven them, but in the face of our concerns, and the face of our problems.

Now, this idea of re enlivening things in the face of our concerns and our problems, partly depends on whether or not you think your fellows are up to the task of being transformed. And Martin Delany who is sort of typically identified with the tradition of Black nationalism is writing in the 1850s. He got into Harvard Medical School, admitted him, and then he was subsequently kicked out, because students and faculty was simply beside themselves, that a Black man was permitted to attend Harvard Medical School lectures. And in 1850 we get the Fugitive Slave law.

And so in 1852 Martin Delany writes his very important, atreides condition elevation immigration destiny of the colored people. And this is a document atreides, in which he argues that, that because the condition, the first word in that title, because the condition of the African Americans is one in which they are not recognized as political equals, it means that they cannot participate in the political system, and thus provide for their elevation.

And thus, as the second word in the title, and thus they need to leave they need to immigrate, which is, which is the third word. And if they do that and go elsewhere, they then can provide for their own political destiny, which is the final word in that in that title. And so, Delany did not see the United States as susceptible to transformation, but that's because quite pessimistically Denaly thought that anti-Black racism, well, we would call it anti-Black racism was constitutive of the American polity and political identity of the United States.

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