Connect the Dots 101



Anna Julia Cooper, a writer, teacher and activist, circa 1902.C.M. Bell/Library of Congress

One of the works I cited in my column this week is the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History,” edited by the political theorists Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner.

The book is a series of essays on the luminaries of African-American political thought, across the history of the United States, by some of the most impressive scholars currently working. It is as close to a comprehensive overview of the African-American political tradition as I’ve read, with chapters on figures from Phillis Wheatley and David Walker (two of the most important Black political thinkers of the early American republic) to Angela Davis and Clarence Thomas.

Standout chapters, in my view, are Carol Wayne White’s essay on Anna Julia Cooper, “Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence”; Michael McCann’s chapter on A. Philip Randolph, “Radicalizing Rights at the Intersection of Class and Race”; and George Shulman’s chapter on Bayard Rustin, “Between Democratic Theory and Black Political Thought.”
One of the things I hope to do this year is engage with African-American political thought even more than I already have in the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written for my column. The reason relates to my interest in the past, present and future of American democracy.

The African-American political tradition is deeply engaged with the experience of — and the requirements for — life in a democracy. And while it certainly speaks, like the Anglo-American political tradition, to the nature of freedom in this country, it also speaks in profound ways to the experience of unfreedom and inequality that has defined life in America for many millions of its subjects and citizens. “Because of its sharp focus on the life and afterlife of slavery, African-American political thought brings the American experience of tyranny into sharp relief,” Rogers and Turner write in their introductory essay to the volume.

African-American political thought is also concerned with democracy as something more and greater than just the sum of certain rules, institutions and procedures. What runs throughout the African-American political tradition, Rogers and Turner note, “is the sense that while the formal practices of democracy such as voting matter, it is a mistake to treat democracy merely as a form rather than a way of life that extends well beyond the voting booths.” Democracy in this vision is “a cultural enterprise” in which “each citizen faces pressure to “affirm the equal standing of his or her fellows.”

Rights matter, but they aren’t “self-executing.” Instead, “they depend on a set of supports — human, economic and political — to help sustain them.” In the African-American political tradition, even natural rights “amount to statuses that one enjoys because of societal affirmation,” an insight tied to the experience of race hierarchy and racial domination in the United States.

Regular readers will quickly see the relevance of these themes in my writing for The Times. It makes sense — Black thinkers have been part of my intellectual life since I first picked up “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” in high school. But as I make democracy the focus of the column this year, I intend to make these influences all the more apparent, and explore them in even greater depth.

Jamelle Bouie