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Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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A
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Experian hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in Podcast Podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mortaza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm excited that I'm going to talk to Dr. Kedrick Roy about his most recent book that he has published with Princeton University Press. It's a fascinating topic and I'm sure our listeners will enjoy this podcast. The book we're going to discuss is called American Dark Age Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, which just came out a few months ago from Princeton University Press. Dr. Kedric Roy is Assistant professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books, and also appears in HBO documentary Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museums in Chicago on black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and also Ralph Ellison Kedrick. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:42]
D
Thank you so much for having me, Mortez. I appreciate it.
- [02:45]
C
Great. Such a fascinating topic. I've done a lot of podcasts on liberalism, and I guess it was only in one of the books, one of the most recent books that I did on liberalism, the idea of black liberalism was mentioned there. But then I was pleasantly surprised. A couple of months after that, I saw this book, Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism. So I'm really excited to be talking to you about this book, and I guess it's also a very timely topic. But before that, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise, the area of American history you're interested in, and then tell us about the story behind this book. How did this book come about? And there are a lot of books on American history, maybe on the period you address, but how is your book different? How do you approach that area differently? I'm conscious I put too many questions there.
- [03:39]
D
Absolutely. No, it's great. No, it's great. So I studied the evolution of political concepts such as liberalism, nationalism, and conservatism in the United States from the Revolutionary era to the present. And I'm also interested in how African American intellectual traditions can illuminate contemporary scholarly and popular debates. So to that end, I wrote American Dark Age after spending a lot of time in graduate school thinking about Enlightenment ideas such as reason, science, liberalism, and progress. And I remember reading primary and secondary sources on Enlightenment authors like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. And I wondered how African Americans engaged with these figures and their ideas. So because there are so few sources on that, I set out to tell the story of the African American Enlightenment tradition, which was the subject of my dissertation and the topic of a second book that I'm finishing soon. But while I was exploring the Enlightenment in America, I couldn't help but reflect on the systems of thought and political power that so many Enlightenment authors, white and black, seemed to be writing against. So, put differently, I became concerned with the question, what was the opposite of Enlightenment? And so I found that many 18th century writers and their 19th century readers were terrified of, of returning to what some pejoratively referred to as the Dark Ages and these notions of feudalism and serfdom. For example, there's an antebellum black abolitionist named James W.C. pennington, who even referred to American slavery itself as what he called an institution of the Dark Age. So part one of the book answers three questions. One, how and why did so many African American thinkers refer to slavery in the south and prejudice in the north using terms that reflected the medieval world? Two, what did they mean by those references in their own time? And three, what can we learn from their assessments today? So part two of American Dark Age tells the story of the rise of a black liberal political tradition that emerged as a kind of counter ideology to the perceived remnants of feudalism that so many American thinkers derided. But there's also a backward looking origin story to the book. After seeing images and video of the far right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and even at the Capitol protests on January 6, 2021, I was surprised by all of the medieval imagery on full display. I mean, there were knights Templar flags, costumes and other symbols that consciously invoked the medieval world. One January 6th protester even said that he proudly took responsibility for storming the castle. So I was curious why there were so many medieval references among present day far right activists. And more grimly, medievalisms were prevalent in manifestos of mass shooters across these past two decades. This includes the 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand and the 2011 manifesto in Norway where the perpetrator made over 650 references to Knights alone. So manifestos like these inspired mass shootings in the United States, both in Poway, California and in my hometown of El Paso, Texas. So all this is to say I became very interested in the enduring appeal of the medieval world to our modern political consciousness, particularly in the United States.
- [07:51]
C
You put it beautifully, the inception story. And there's simply a lot in that I'd like to unpack, but we'll talk about some of them as we go ahead. And I was particularly interested in the fact that the right wing populists, as I mentioned, or conspiracy theories, you know, white supremacists, do make use of medieval icons and elements in their ideology. I'm kind of a middle, I'm an enthusiast in the middle Middle Ages history. And I found that aspect of that quite fascinating how they co opt some of those elements and they completely write that, let's say that black history of medieval, the black elements of medieval history, they completely omit that, delete that out of the history. And I'm glad that more recently I've been more and more people who are writing about the black Middle Ages, let's say, and I think there's a book by, that it's not by that name. But there's a book called African Europeans which addresses some of those aspects. But anyway, I'm digressing. Let's talk about the title of your book, Racial Feudalism. So what does it refer to? What do you mean by racial feudalism? And in early American. How did early American thinkers interpreted feudalism? And I think in part of your book, in the introduction, if I'm not mistaken, you were kind of arguing that you need to recover this term because it's essential to understanding, for understanding the ideological landscape of the 18th and 19th century America. Can you talk about that term, racial feudalism?
- [09:26]
D
Absolutely. Thanks for the great question. So, first, I should define feudalism. So in a narrow sense, feudalism is the precise technical term that describes the relations among fiefs, lands, lords and vassals, where vassals receive protection and often a parcel of land from their lords in exchange for obedience and service. And this created a system of local sovereignties in which the fief governs legal, political and military relationships. So Francois Louis Gansoff was perhaps the most influential proponent of viewing feudalism in this strict sense. There's also the 20th century historian Marc Bloch, who broadened the term by emphasizing feudalism's social and comparative dimensions. And he effectively opened it up for wider application. Subsequently, historians such as Elizabeth A.R. brown and Susan Reynolds began cautioning against the use of the term feudalism. They argued that it had become too capacious to be of scholarly use and it ignored the peculiarities of individual European communities. So instead, Riddles proposed that scholars stick to the language of the historical actors themselves instead of imposing backward looking analytical terms. And I agree completely. What's interesting is that in researching how early and antebellum Americans used feudalism, I found that they frequently deployed that term and related concepts both to oppose tyranny and to defend what they saw as enlightened or liberal ideas. In particular, they tended to associate feudalism with notions of aristocracy, caste, chivalry, entail, and homage. For example, Thomas Jefferson recognized feudalism as three things, as artificial hierarchies, arbitrary violations of natural rights and liberties, and as abuses of political power by a tyrannical governing authority. It's interesting because though Jefferson claimed to have rooted out feudalism in Virginia, he clearly remained wedded to a framework that I call racial feudalism. Now, racial feudalism represents two things. First, the web of feudal and medieval metaphors that Americans use to describe racial stratification. And second, an ideology that made the link between feudalism and racial hierarchy feel predetermined and natural. So although Enslavers were celebrating these connections. African Americans recognized racial feudalism as paternalism, ideas of mutual obligation that weren't really mutual, and fealty to an entrenched racially coded pecking order that appeared timeless and noble. So to summarize, recovering the term feudalism as early and antebellum Americans used it, it's important because it shows the United States as neither still feudal nor entirely liberal, but as a society where the liberal language of rights and liberties coexisted with and were shaped by ideas about a hierarchical old world. And racial feudalism also lets us see abolitionists critique of medievalisms not merely as moral protests, but as waging a type of ideological warfare over the meaning of America.
- [13:21]
C
I really like that last part of your comment that they said the United States still, it's not really a feudal society, but at the same time not a completely liberal one. And I think throughout the history of the United States, you have that kind of contradiction. It's a country that has one of the most liberal constitutions. But then how that constitution plays out for minorities in that country still in 21st century is a contentious point. And even some, some of the early American, I mean, American Founding fathers ideas, liberal ideas, did not really extend to. To African Americans. And, and that's again something you discuss in your book Jefferson's Enlightenment Ideals. You argue that his. His ideals, the Enlightenment ideal, were deeply rooted or entangled with this idea of natural hierarchy, which was kind of, I guess, relied upon to justify the racial inequality. But in terms of these contradictions, how do you think these contradictions sort of complicate this legacy? Legacy of the United States as a champion of liberty, but at the same time denying liberty to certain group in the population.
- [14:32]
D
That's great. So in 1774, Jefferson wrote in the summary review of the rights of British Americans that the colonies aren't England's feudal property. He criticized what he called the feudal tenures and feudal burdens that had dominated Britain's past. And he critiqued the political overreach of King George III and the British Parliament. In this vein, shortly after Americans declared independence in 1776, Jefferson proposed economic legislation to the Virginia House of Delegates to overturn the ongoing practices of primogeniture and intel. And this basically means that the family's wealth would go to the firstborn male. Now, dissolving primogeniture and intel, in Jefferson's view, would also work to destroy what he called the feudal and unnatural distinctions still present in Virginia, and thus create a truly republican government. Even so while Jefferson celebrated his efforts to abolish feudalism, which he believed was established after the Norman Conquest, he wasn't totally free of sympathies for medieval times. In fact, Jefferson took great interest in the history of England before 1066. John Adams remembered that Jefferson wanted America's national seal to be an image of Hangston Horsa, which are the medieval English Saxon chiefs. Now Jefferson also attacked what he called the artificial aristocracy of inherited wealth in Europe, in contrast to what he saw as the natural aristocracy that was made possible by the United States, which in his view could provide a true aristocracy of virtue and talents. However, what Jefferson failed to recognize was, is that his dismissal of black people's intelligence and virtues made their entry into his so called natural aristocracy all but impossible. So even though Jefferson rejected European feudalism, he embraced what I call racial feudalism.
- [16:43]
C
In America and that sort of again, inadvertently reinforced that ideology of racial feudalism that he claimed to reject.
- [16:55]
D
Correct? Yes. And we have these statements that Jefferson made in notes on the state of Virginia that are, that African Americans take up and reference and say, hey, Jefferson is, is, is condemning who we are as a people and is barring us from the, the right to being viewed as intellectual equals. So they, they were reading Jefferson, responding directly to him. They were aware of the things that he wrote against them.
- [17:33]
C
And I've read that one. There are some really, really disturbing sections in that text as well. Anyhow, the. Let's, let's talk about the, let's say the rule of feudal metaphors. Like I told you before I started this interview, I've studied English literature, so I'm really interested in how these kind of language and metaphors are used to legitimize racial hierarchy. You argue that in the party book that they were pro slavery advocates and they use that medieval, sorry, the feudal metaphors of feudal language to justify and cement that racial hierarchy. What does it tell us about the cultural power of medieval nostalgia in antebellum America? And I guess that also goes back to the beginning of the book when you were talking about white supremacists hijacking medieval icons or iconography to justify their toxic ideology. Can you talk about the use of feudal metaphors and also medieval nostalgia, the cultural use of those medieval elements in antebellum America?
- [18:43]
D
Absolutely. So some pro slavery writers framed slavery using medievalist language even in the late 1700s. And their vocabulary became more culturally resonant in the early 1800s as Americans seemed to grow nostalgic for ideas of chivalry. And this impulse is often associated with the popularity of Sir Walter Scott's writings, such as in the lady of the Lake in 1810 and Ivanhoe, which he publishes in 1819. In fact, Frederick Douglass later adopted his surname from Scott's lady of the Lake after escaping from slavery. Now, during the 1786 Constitutional Convention, Charles Pinckney, who was a southern politician, slaveholder and future governor of South Carolina, moved to have enslaved black people count toward the south political representation without voting rights. Pinckney claimed, and I'm going to quote him here, that the blacks are the laborers, the peasants of the southern states. So he implies that though black people couldn't vote, they were conscripted into a paternalistic system of submission that was reminiscent of old world forms of power. Pinckney's choice of language is telling because the late middle English term peasant, beyond representing a worker of the land, hearkens back to the term bonded laborer or serf. Now, if we jump ahead to the antebellum era, medievalisms became even more numerous and emphatic. In 1854, for example, George Fitzhugh, who's this famous pro slavery Southern ideologue, said, and I'm going to quote him as well, look to the old patriarchs and their slaves, to the feudal lords and their vassals, or come to the south and see our farms. And several years later, there's another pro slavery advocate named J. Quitman Moore who wrote an article in a widely circulated periodical that he titled Feudalism in America. And in it he questioned if the feudal spirit could ever be revived on the western continent again. Then he wrote that, and I'm going to quote him here, feudalism is a social and political authority founded upon the subjugation of a weaker by a more powerful race. So he believed that southern society, as he put it, had revived the genius of medieval civilization. So all these thinkers were representing the conditions of American slavery through their perceptions of an old world feudal order.
- [21:37]
C
That's. And I thought, I guess it's still very relevant, this kind of. I mean, the cultural power of these sort of language is still very relevant today as well.
- [21:46]
D
Yeah.
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C
Let me ask you about the abolitionists. How, how about the black abolitionists in the United States and the way they use feudal language? So I guess it's the opposite of what we just talked about in order to expose, expose, let's say, the hypocrisy or maybe as you put it in the book, the shadows of American enlightenment ideas. The dark side of that. What was, how did they use it differently from pro slavery advocates?
- [22:17]
D
Absolutely. So there are plenty of examples of black abolitionists who drew on feudal language to oppose slavery and types of social subordination. So I'll just talk about a handful. In 1827, a black minister named Nathaniel Paul started questioning the integrity of America's founding ideas. While there were, in his words, no less than 1500,000 human beings still in a state of unconditional vassalage. Now, in simple terms, a vassal is like a serf or a subordinate tenant under the feudal system who owes homage or allegiance to the superior lord. There's an enslaved poet named George Moses Horton who would later echo Nathaniel Paul in a poem entitled the Division of an Estate. There he portrays enslaved people tending a sprawling plantation under foreclosure as what he identifies as poor vassals. In 1837, there is an African American philosopher named Hosea Easton, and he claimed that the US Racial hierarchy emerged after what he calls European slavery under the feudal system where slaves were fixed to the soil. In the next decade, the fugitive slave and author of the first black American novel, William Wills Brown, asked an interesting question. I'm going to quote him. Shall the American people be behind the people of the Old World? Shall they be behind those represented as almost living in the Dark Ages? Slavery has given the serfs of the old world an opportunity of branding the American people as the most tyrannical people upon God's footstool. So that same year that William Wells Brown makes this statement, in 1847, Frederick Douglass gives a speech to an audience in England where he details what he calls the skin aristocracy in America. He compares the conditions that black people faced in the United states during the 1850s to what he calls all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World. He even analogizes, a little later, he analogizes his Maryland plantation to what he called the baronial domains during the Middle Ages in Europe. And by this he was referring to the spaces that are controlled by lower level medieval landowners that call themselves barons. So even after the Civil War, African Americans were still talking about working through, thinking through the connections between the medieval world as they perceived it in their own times. John Mercer Langston, who would become the first black US Congressional representative from Virginia, says this. He says that the tendency of the political fought in the south has always been towards aristocracy and feudal institutions, the right of the few to govern, the right being founded upon wealth, landed estates, and consequent social position and influence. I also found it interesting that some black Americans pejoratively equated the US Military's treatment of native peoples and Mexicans to medieval campaigns. Jose Easton again, for example, he critiqued what he called the late unholy war with the Indians and the wicked crusade against the peace of Mexico during the 1830s. And there's another black abolitionist, Martin Delaney, who does the same thing in an 1849 letter to Frederick Douglass as he chastised a US president, Zachary Taylor, and his supporters, who he said paid homage to Taylor and his crusade like a serf to a noble or a vassal to his lord. So to summarize, these and other black American thinkers drew on their perceptions of illiberal feudal power structures that they felt persisted beyond the middle ages to characterize the social conditions they experienced in the antebellum United States as a function of racial differ.
- [26:51]
C
There's a term that you use, a phrase you use in the book cheating social death. I found it fascinating, that phrase cheating social death. Can you explain what it means? And in the book you argue that it's also a response to Orlando Patterson's theory. I guess we first need to tell our audience who Orlando Patterson is and then what you mean by social debt and how and what strategies were used, let's say, To assert Americanness while, you know, these people were resisting colonization. Well, there's a lot in that. You know, I've written a whole chapter on this. But can you unpack that, that idea of cheating social debt and what. Who was Orlando Patterson and how this idea related to his theory?
- [27:38]
D
Absolutely, yes. So Orlando Patterson is a sociologist at Harvard, and in his 1982 book, Slavery and Social Death, he presents his foundational definition of the concept of social death when he describes slavery as the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. Now, under this framework, enslaved people who were cut off from family and social ties and obligations making and familial obligations making them what Patterson calls genealogical isolates. I found that Frederick Douglass confirmed this same kind of condition, not using sociological language, but in no uncertain terms. He. He used the language of social death to describe his utter separation from his ancestors, his brothers and his sisters under US racial slavery. But he wasn't alone. There are other 19th century figures like David Walker, who famously wrote an appeal to the colored people of the world. And David Walker in that text asked rhetorical questions such as, what is the point of living when in fact I am dead? Harriet Jacobs called her time of slavery a state of living death. And Hosea Easton declared systems of segregation that were set up by civil and religious authorities, as he said that they're guilty of the worst kind of murder for withholding social intercourse. So my argument by drawing on these figures, confirms Patterson's concept of social death. But I also claim that even under these pressures, African American thinkers generated new political frameworks and cultural strategies that they use to effectively render the conditions of social death inoperative. So to be clear, to cheat social death is not to deny the reality of or effects of social death, but to engage in practices of building a coherent sense of personhood, of moral authority, and of civic membership in a system that has otherwise been designed to strip those away. And black liberals repeatedly cheated social death in a number of ways, one of which was claiming that America was their own and that they themselves were more American than the enslavers and their so called social betters. And we see this in the writings and Speeches of 19th century African Americans like Harriet Tubman, Mariah Stewart, David Walker and others. Tubman, for example, claims that since black people performed the labor to build the American economy, that it's that the land was theirs. David Walker likewise said that America is more ours than it is the whites. So to this end, black American liberals rejected colonization schemes that would send them back to a land that they've never been. And they affirmed the possibility and indeed the necessity of a multiracial America. Mariah Stewart, for example, said that rather than being driven to what she calls a strange land, she'd rather a bayonet pierce her through.
- [31:25]
C
This idea of black liberalism has come up in our interview a few times and I'm keen to get a definition. And I understand that it's really challenging sometimes. I've done, I think I mentioned to you earlier that I've done a lot of podcasts on liberalism. Anyone I ask, I get more or less a different definition of liberalism. What liberalism is or what it isn't. There are some elements that they all have in common that they all agree with. But in your book you kind of distinguish between antibiotic liberalism and how it is different from that mainstream American liberalism. And I think it's a very potent idea because with American liberals and even the very well respected figures such as John Rawls, which is a 20th century, we're talking about 20th century now, he was also indifferent or he didn't really talk about the cause of the black people in the United States, especially during civil rights movement, that makes one wonder then who does this liberalism apply to? And I think liberalism is still more or less a tainted word sometimes because of it's famous for its hypocrisy in terms of, you know, who, when they talk about freedom, individuality, and happy life, who does it refer to? It seems that certain groups of people, certain races or certain ethnicities are excluded. But anyhow, I guess I'm kind of venting my frustration with liberalism to When I teach you liberalism, tell us, what is black liberalism in the context of your book, if you want to come up with a definition. And how does that black liberalism, how is it different from the mainstream American liberalism? And. Well, let's stick to this one. Then I'll ask another question, which I'll ask after your response.
- [33:22]
D
Sure. So first I'll talk a little bit about mainstream liberalism, and then I'll transition into black liberalism. So the British political philosopher John Gray identified certain core tenets of liberalism across its many historical forms and in a couple of his writings. And so he argued that four principles appear in most visions of liberal individualism, egalitarianism, moral universalism, and meliorism, the belief that human institutions are capable of improvement through reason and reform. So this understanding of liberalism was echoed and critically engaged with by thinkers like Charles Mills and Domenico Lacerdo. In the American context, I would argue that these liberal principles are most clearly articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Now, antebellum black liberalism, as I conceive of it, goes beyond merely responding to the specific conditions of racial feudalism that we were talking about earlier. It's also a tradition that works eminently and both affirms and critiques principles of American liberalism from within its professed criteria. It pushes liberal ideas to become in reality what they declare in principle in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the state constitutions that echo its language, which, by the way, black American liberals engaged with directly. So the book advances six principles of black liberalism, but I'll briefly touch on just a few of them here. One principle is that the political philosophy of early black liberalism was anti feudal, anti prejudice, and deeply committed to advancing women's rights, including the right to vote. Though European and American liberal thinkers since the late 18th century rejected feudal hierarchies, many have been accused of eliding questions of race and gender. And these are questions that Frederick Douglass and other antebellum black American liberals explicitly and forcefully confronted. Recalling my earlier point, another principle holds that because of black liberals commitment to realizing the aims and claims of America's founding documents, many of them remained anti colonizationist. That is, they opposed the various schemes promoting the involuntary and thus illiberal expulsion of black people from America, which they saw as their home. Instead, they chose to remain in place and strive to make the United States live up to its stated precepts, even if it meant subjecting the nation to critique and themselves to danger. They had what Frederick Douglass described as sufficient faith in the people of the United States to believe that a black person can ever get justice on American soil. A third principle of black liberalism affirms that the practical philosophy of black American liberals balanced the tenets of reform liberalism and aspects of classical liberalism. It operated through a critique of the existing order from within, rather than assuming the necessity of its wholesale destruction. So black liberals didn't assume that progress is inevitable. Instead, they aimed to secure liberty through calculated political reforms. At the same time, they worked towards self improvement through intellectual and spiritual development. So the last thing I'll say about this in particular, and another principle I'll say is that black American liberals understood their political outlook to be compatible with both secular social principles and with Christian spirituality. So Douglass and other black abolitionists condemned slavery's illiberal foundations by presenting it as the limit case of Christianity and common sense notions of justice and fairness. So though black liberals didn't stipulate that the public must share their religious faith, they believed that transforming America's racially coded statuses and customs could only be brought about through the moral advancement of the United States and its people. And this is something that we see in Martin Luther King Jr. And others a century later. So without moral transformation, political changes to laws and leaders would just simply be vulnerable to backsliding. So there's a case to be made that though American liberalism may have been fundamentally compromised from the beginning, at least to some extent, as people like Charles Mills and others have argued, black liberals believe that the underlying project was not inherently and permanently flawed. They were not today's Afro pessimists. They still believed that progress was possible through persuasion and cross racial alliances. And they also rejected what we would today call atomistic individualism. And they instead emphasized that the spiritual community links all people by one blood. And finally, black liberals articulated what I call in my last chapter of the book, an identity aware framework that resisted liberalism's two traps, which we see all the time in today's culture wars. You have doctrinaire colorblindness on the right and dogmatic identity absolutism on the left.
- [39:22]
C
Yeah.
- [39:23]
D
So black liberalism, at least as Douglass and others conceived of it, I feel still has resonance in our. In our present moment.
- [39:33]
C
Do you think it might not. Might not be the right question or the right way of framing it? But do you think mainstream liberalism and black liberalism are Black liberalism Let's say is an antidote to liberalism, mainstream liberalism, even for the white people, I mean in general, or for other ethnicities, let's say yes.
- [39:56]
D
So I think that black liberalism is, or at least as these 19th century thinkers were conceiving of it, could be practiced by people of any race. It's more of an attention to the lived realities that can be lighted sometimes with more, more the abstract liberal frameworks. But it's also attentive to the fact that there must be pluralism and there must be a type of universalism that that doesn't that what philosopher Derek Darby might call that lowers the race first flag in ways that could be productive for broader social cohesion and for working toward a common goal in ways that can bring about the broadest possible coalition.
- [40:52]
C
Like I said earlier, there was a book that I came across the term black liberalism for the first time in that book. And there are a lot of liberals who are trying to write critique liberalism and also write a, let's say, trying to address the shortcomings of liberalism. And one of the most interesting ones that I read was a book by Matthew McManus, if I'm not mistaken, called the Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. And that's the book where I came across that idea of black liberalism which was trying to cover the shortcomings, to address the shortcomings and also be more inclusive without really being an identitarian in the book. And I feel like the idea that you are expounding here, which is quite similar in that terms. But anyway, let's talk about. I studied literature myself and I'm really fascinated when in these books, books about history come across the role of fictions and the role of literature in advocating a specific cause. And that's something you discuss in the book as well. Why was fiction important, an important and powerful medium for advancing black liberal thought during the period that you cover in the book.
- [42:03]
D
Excellent. So when a group of people becomes excluded or subordinated by these formal institutions, fiction helps create a space for social and conceptual critique, creates a space for moral education and for particular forms of political persuasion that can be disseminated in relatively non threatening forms at scale. There's an inherent sense of plausible deniability if there's something that's only a story. So we could see this in the work of William Wells Brown's Clotel, which is widely recognized as the first novel written by an African American. It's a fictionalized anti slavery novel that imagines the fate of Thomas Jefferson's mixed race daughters, which of course, was a touchy subject then, and it has remained so. So even as William Wells Brown writes this fictional work, his narrator insists repeatedly that, and I'm going to quote him, this is no fiction. So in doing this, he collapses the wall between historical archive and fictional story to indict slavery as a hypocritical institution. The novel's description of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings also puts pressure on assumptions about racial superiority and what Jefferson might call natural aristocracy. So fiction lets black liberals do political theory with literary expressions, oral histories, and other historical records. Brown quotes extensively, for example, from newspapers and the like. So all this happens to help readers confront the contradictions of their purportedly enlightened republic.
- [44:01]
C
And one final question. You're a historian. You've written this book about 18th and 19th century, about this idea of racial hierarchy and how it was historically framed through feudal metaphors. But when you look at contemporary United States and movements such as Black Lives Matter, movements that try to challenge that systematic racism, there do you see echoes of those feudal ideology or remnants in today's social and political structures? And if so, why do they perceive? And how can we move beyond them? How can a framework, a theoretical framework such as black liberalism that you mentioned can help us get over those barriers and address the inequalities and also the racial ideology that is ingrained in the public psyche?
- [44:58]
D
Yes. So my overarching claim isn't so much that we still live in medieval times, but that hierarchical arrangements can persist as vestiges, as habits and structures and ideologies, long after the Americans, long after Americans declared themselves free from medieval past. In fact, after the Civil War, US Senator Adelbert Ames described the condition of black people as a return to serfdom or a second slavery. He said in the early 1900s that the man who was a slave is now at best a serf, and his road to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seems endless. And when you read W.E.B. du Bois, he similarly frames menial serfdom and industrial caste as lingering medievalisms and as the refuse of medieval barbarism. And he does this as he condemns what he called the return of American feudalism, his term. And on the other side of the debate, we had the Ku Klux klan of the 1920s that intentionally reclaimed images of the medieval world, calling themselves the Knights of the south and organizing their social structures, their organizational structure, on feudal models. So the abolition of slavery and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments didn't fully eradicate the underlying ideologies that make a racially stratified social order appear natural. So when we fast forward to today, and as we attempt to address these vestiges that I described earlier among some of the far right thinkers and movements, the imagery that we see popping up in a variety of spaces that reference the medieval world, I see this as an invitation for us to return to the antebellum black liberal method of imminent critique plus structural reform plus moral and intellectual reconstruction and reconfiguration. So, ultimately, the book asks whether America can finish its Enlightenment project or whether some Americans will continue to mistake racial hierarchy for the natural order of things. And I would argue that black abolitionists have already given us a blueprint. The question is whether we're willing to take their ideas seriously as political theory that we can use to help reshape our future.
- [47:45]
C
And just a final question. I think at the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that you're writing another book. What is the book about and when do you think it might be published? Do you know which publisher is it coming out with?
- [47:58]
D
Yes. So the book is under contract with Princeton University Press, and it's a book that will trace the reception of Enlightenment ideas by African American thinkers from the late 1700s through 1865. And this was the original first book that I was. That I set out to write, but I needed to address the persistence of medievalisms that continued to appear as I was doing my research. So now that that segment is done, I can focus in on the black Enlightenment tradition that I began tracing in 2018, and I expect to be done with the book sometime in 2026.
- [48:47]
C
Oh, good, good. So it's not too far away because it usually takes a long time to recover from writing one book, so I thought that it might be a couple of years away. This one came out. This one came out just a few months ago. Am I right?
- [49:00]
D
It's October 2024.
- [49:03]
C
October, yeah. Okay, cool. So hopefully I've secured the promise not to talk to you about your new book as well. Well, I'll keep my eyes open, but would be good if you could just give me an email once it's out. So I'm really keen to talk to you about that book as well.
- [49:19]
D
Absolutely.
- [49:20]
C
Yeah. Dr. Kedrick, Roy, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on your books. And I really enjoyed reading this book. I think it has a lot of echoes for our present time as well, as we have discussed some aspects of that. The book we just discussed was American Dark Age Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, published by Princeton University Press. Thank you so much for your time.
- [49:46]
D
Thank you so much, Martez. I really appreciated the interview.