“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.
