Tag Archives: Douglass

We, He, She, They: Inscription and Liberty Through Pronouns

Posted on by
Reply

“The Garrison party, to which he still adhered, did not want a colored newspaper—there was an odor of caste about it” (Douglass).

“And when he adopted the pronoun we—an echo of “We the people,” transcribed from the Constitution’s first line to the top of his own blank page—he engaged in an act of political representation: he defined a community and dared to speak on its behalf” (Hager).

“Identity definitely is important, but it’s also not the only thing that matters […], pronouns belong to the social world of language, not to individual psychology” (ContraPoints).

Hager’s introduction to the early writings of African American concerns the anecdote of an unnamed man engaging in what is described as an “act of protest” (Hager 1). What Hager notes is so powerful about this is not only the way in which the author actively criticizes the hypocrisy of the Constitution’s alleged inclusion, but that it is done so through the “[adoption of] the pronoun we” (Hager) This kind of language allows the author to inscribe his identity and the identity of countless African slaves who had suffered, died and survived under slavery onto the page in a way that hijacks the power of the Constitution and turns its words on itself.

Our contemporary discussions about pronouns often circle issues of representation for transgender and non-binary peoples. Such discussion has been fraught with controversy as the very demand of a people to be represented by a pronoun which they believe is most representative and respectful of their identity and their place is society is something which challenges the very harmful, gendered structures that are demanding silence in the first place. The struggle for representation in the transgender and non-binary communities concerns gendered pronouns which, as ContraPoints argues, plays a significant role in the sociopolitical nature of language—how we relate to and signify each other. Though her argument is distinctively focused on issues of gender, I believe it intersectionally translates to the concept of racial identity in a way that echoes the need for a minority subject people to adopt a pronoun which situates them in society and challenges who the pronoun represents in the first place. As ContraPoints often argues in her videos, her adoption of the “she” pronoun represents the fact that she lives her life as a woman, that she experiences life as a woman. Therefore, “she” becomes the necessary way for her to inscribe herself through language. Similarly, the unnamed author in Hager’s example argues that if he is to live his life as a free person, then the act of adopting the pronoun “we” is in fact necessary and revolutionary.

We see a similar demand amplified in the actions of Frederick Douglass as he fights for the establishment of a “colored newspaper” which would not merely “represent” the issues of African Americans, but would become the published voice for them, the defining published voice which careers the same audacity as the adoption of a collective pronoun so that at once a people can be included in the language of the Constitution (Douglass). And though we can be open to a conversation concerning any fractures or rifts brewing among a revolutionary movement, the resistance against Douglass starting an African American paper is, almost directly, a refusal to allow the pronoun “we” to be transferred from whites to blacks. To establish the North Star is to open “the social world of language” and allow the “we” to be redefined (ContraPoints). It is an effort to move beyond an individual, psychologically-based feeling of freedom; it’s to march toward a linguistically and politically free existence as “we.”

I am including ContraPoints’ video which I quote from and reference here. Though her topic exclusively concerns gender and a different contemporary issue, I believe the arguments translate well, offer great insight on the function of language and unpack a somewhat difficult-to-understand concept in a thorough—if not eccentric—fashion.

Piece from today’s NYT re: Douglass and the GOP (Happy Birthday, FD!!)

Posted on by
Reply

[reposted from last year but relevant!]

Check out this short piece by David Blight, history prof at Yale, on how the Right selectively reads Douglass as a champion of libertarianism. As much as Douglass did take a more moderate path than some abolitionists, and as much as he did embrace elements of what we now call “neoliberalism,” including an embrace of markets to solve social problems, it’s hard to imagine the degree of disgust he would feel today with a party in the thrall of “white nationalism,” as evidenced in his long riff on the liberation he felt upon entering the “monarchical” Britain.

Blackness, Whiteness and Freeness as Inscriptions

Posted on by
Reply

Frederick Douglass’ experiences in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and Freedom described his great effort of producing a historical consciousness for himself, by employing himself to acts of writing.  Outside of the United States, in England, he experienced his first taste of freeness: placing Douglass beyond the reach of the ideologies that perpetuated the slave system in America.  His painful upbringing describes the structurally repressive forces that defined his “blackness”, along with his sense of “freeness”.  By lineating Christian religious beliefs with the justified actions of his subjectors, Douglass accounted for various examples of metaphoric language, in the Christian bible, and found their counterparts in the role-play amongst members of American society in the mid-nineteenth century.  This brings to mind the concept of ideological state apparatuses by late 20th century philosopher Louis Althusser, who claimed that the institutions of church, family and cultural traditions are constructs which directly contribute to the social role-play of public life.  Through this lens, a person can be conditioned to become either a slave or a master from birth.  If one is conditioned to be a slave and the other is educated in owning and managing slaves, upon interaction both will fulfill the social roles prescribed at birth: both will be slaves to tradition.  Both will be fated to the lives set out for each, in line with the social expectations of their families and churches.  To be imbued with “blackness”, during Douglass’ time, was to fulfill the scripted role of the slave to “whiteness” in America at the time: according to Christianity.  Douglass was well aware of the employment of this technological device when, he later, on wrote about his life:

“I took my stand on the high ground of human brotherhood, and spoke to Englishmen as men, in behalf of men.  Slavery is a crime, not against Englishmen, but against God, and all the members of the human family; and it belongs to the whole human family to seek its suppression. (My Bondage and Freedom, XXIV, pg.22)”

Writing produces a historical consciousness in the writer, meaning mythic thinking becomes logical thinking the moment a thought is embedded into a medium.  This could mean putting pen-to-pad, inputting keystrokes into a text-field, or even reading pages to stimulate, and influence, the mind.  Flusser’s essay Does Writing Have a Future describes writing as an action that used to involve digging into.  Mesopotamian clay tablets metaphorically related to the creation myth found in the book of Genesis, involving clay being used as a medium to create man.  Man is, or was, an inscription of conscious thought imbued into the clay to form a version of history, according to Flusser:  “One who writes by digging can only hope that the subject one has engraved doesn’t decay too quickly (even if the digging writer was God). (pg.13)”  To have one’s ideas projected into the world to be received, is to become the idea itself.  When writing, a person becomes an extension of his/her self.  In writing, the person becomes the authority of his/her life and gradually begins to understand the “freeness” found in its practice .  By constantly reading Douglass was able to view the inscriptions of other writers.  As their ideas reflected off of the pages and into his mind, he grew aware of his dire condition and dedicated his life to gaining more “freeness”.

Discourse and Intellectual Labor in Douglass

Posted on by
1

The two ideas I’ll talk about are fairly related, so I’ll begin with one that was referenced in a class discussion, which I believe nicely sets up the other point. Discourse is always in the arena, in the playing field of the oppressor. That is to say, any marginalized group, by the very fact of its marginalization, can only communicate in the language and medium of the oppressor. Even language that is meant to subvert or break the power dynamic is doing so in relation to the original power structure. The vocabulary and medium of the oppressor must be used in order for those in power to recognize the argument, movement, group, etc., or else it is not viewed as legitimate discourse. It is why Douglass must use the language, the cultural references, the ideas of white people in order to tell his narrative of enslavement. The fact that Douglass learned to read and write, to “speak eloquently” (which reeks of respectability politics), makes him worthy of telling the story. The dual use of his education and experience, which is told to us by the first two letters by white men, put in context the contradictory nature of the validation of Douglass’s experience. His experience was, in their words, nothing extraordinary, which meant he suffered no more and no less than the average slave, but his education also put him at a superior level. It is the very fact that Douglass is literate that makes his experience validated enough to be worth listening to and believing. If it were not the case, then slavery would have been done away with early on; if the testimony of every slave were just as valid as that of Douglass, then why wasn’t the whole country riled up against slavery? It is because Douglass is using the tool of the oppressor to communicate that white people find him qualified enough to relay his experience to them.

The second idea is that of the continuous need for the black community to partake in emotional and intellectual labor. It is Douglass who has to learn the vocabulary and medium of communication in order to reach white people; white people are waiting for this testimony, a passive expectation that the call to action will come to them, not that they must be the ones to initiate it. This is a narrative that continues to this day, in which black people must still put in the emotional and intellectual labor to explain to people what they are struggling with, to justify why they are suffering. This is perhaps further aggravated by the fact that American history, in the classrooms and textbooks, is white history. Black history in the United States is kept in the margins, so people are taught to be ignorant of the suffering of black people that made this country what it is today. This country was built on black labor and black suffering, yet their history is relegated to the sidelines, and because of how power structures work in the United States, that means black people must continue to explain to their oppressors what has been done to them. Essentially, black people must relive and exhibit their trauma in order to gain even the faintest recognition of their humanity. Douglass, by repeating the story of his life, by putting it on display to be applauded by white people, to be analyzed by white people, is doing the emotional and intellectual work that white people should be doing. His life becomes an artifact to be studied in order to bring awareness to the plight of enslaved black people, when it should be white people, who created the power structure in the first place, who deal with the issues, who should be at the very least aware of what circumstances and life experiences the system creates for the black community.

(I’ve attached this video of a black woman poet explaining, in some ways, how she has to navigate the different vocabulary and media of communication as related to her identity)

Jamila Lyiscott: 3 ways to speak English

Jamila Lyiscott is a “tri-tongued orator;” in her powerful spoken-word essay “Broken English,” she celebrates – and challenges – the three distinct flavors of English she speaks with her friends, in the classroom and with her parents. As she explores the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents, she unpacks what it means to be “articulate.”

Authority and history in Douglass’ autobiographies

Posted on by
1

In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage My Freedom, Frederick Douglass seeks to perform the radical act of the telling of his own story. We have explored the implications of writing on humanity, and the relationship between writing as a Western means of evaluating humanity. In his works, Douglass does so by controlling the inscription of his own history.

While Douglass seeks to reclaim his narrative, and individualize it, a conflict rises in the framing of his work. In the prefaces to both of the works, we see others—white scholars, and a black editor—attempting to qualify his writing and consequent historiography. Similarly to the publications of Phillis Wheatley, as examined through Du Bois’ criticism in The Souls of Black Folk, despite being structurally, grammatically, artistically, and factually correct, the writing must be provided with the framework to not so much explain the narrative as to explain the phenomenon of a Black writer.  These prefaces, while intending to give supplemental background through which readers may approach Douglass’ accounts, minimize his agency by othering him from the accomplishments of his own work.  He is forced to strike unfair bargains: while he is extraordinarily smart, that cannot be addressed because then people will think he is an exception to the common assumption that Black people were unintelligent; while his work is incredibly artful, it cannot be taken as too artful otherwise it may obfuscate its historical factuality. These compromises are only faced by Douglass because as a Black man, the white structures dominating writing and publishing the possibility of a dominated person having a story and coherently writing it must be mutually exclusive.

In authoring his autobiographies, it is significant that Douglass permanently claims the stakes on his own history—which by any measure is revolutionary simply in the fact that Black people were assumed inept of human reason. Flusser suggests that history in/and writing is/are inherently linear. To navigate ideas coherently, to explore the progression of ideas and events, and to make conclusions must be done in the progression of a single series. It is in this structure than we can innately understand events and thought progressions, and carry them forward. Douglass exemplifies this behavior, and in doing so, solidifies himself as a rational human—much to the discontent of white powers surrounding him. In the progression of his narratives, specifically in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we are not presented with just linear events or just spiraling analyses of his experiences, but rather a progression of life and logical thought throughout. By doing so, both the art of his writing as well as the history told through it become inextricable woven and undeniably human. By seizing the opportunity to tell his story in such a way, Douglass retains his humanity and his authority over his life, rather than forfeiting it to the many people with many perspectives who could seek to tell it later.

Arianna aptly displays a perfect example of claims on narrative and history via Flusser’s theory:

The manipulation of the historical narrative is vital to maintaining the established hierarchy. He writes, “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.” While religion is presumably something that inspires faith, charity, and kindness, it is often used as “a justifier of the most appalling barbarity.” This manipulation of the truth, or perhaps willful blindness to hypocrisy can still be seen today in right wing and conservative hate speech against minorities, immigrants, and the queer community.

To add onto this, Douglass’ discussion of religion in regards to how it is distorted by slave owners, both in the quoted section above and elsewhere, exemplify his grasping ownership of his story and views. Specifically, Douglass clarifies at the end of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass that it is not religion he is opposed to, but the grotesque malleability of it as practiced by White Southerners through inhumane, un-christian beliefs. He says explicitly, “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper….” By cementing a factually grounded opinion of religion, he prevents others from twisting and purposefully misconstruing the intent of his writing from it’s intended purpose. His clarification of this matter displays his complete understanding that someone will likely attempt to do this and as a preventative farce, does so to the slaveholding “christians” by (almost preemptively) parodying their hymns. In this, Douglass infringes on a white form of storytelling and, in claiming it for his own, retells its history through his own lens, just as he knows others have and will attempt to do to his.