Publications

Journal Articles (Peer Reviewed)

On Plantation Politics: Citizenship and Antislavery Resistance in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. Philosophical Studies 180, no. 3 (2022): 871-91. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01877-4

In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities.

Declaration in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. American Political Thought 9, no. 4 (2020): 513–41. https://doi.org/10.1086/710756.

In this paper, I develop an account of Frederick Douglass’s use of declaration as an emancipatory mode of political action. An act of declaration compels an audience to acknowledge the declarer as possessing a type of normative standing (e.g. personhood or citizenship). Douglass, through acts of declaration like his Fifth of July speech and fight with the ‘slavebreaker’ Covey, compels American audiences to acknowledge him as a fellow citizen by forcefully enacting a commitment to resist tyranny and oppression. The distinctive emancipatory potential of declaration is grounded in its political epistemology of acknowledgment, on which political actors understand other persons as members of a shared community through the ways in which they comport themselves in relation to one another. Declaration makes political communities more inclusive not only by changing who we understand as fellow members, but how we understand them as such.

Deliberation and Emancipation: Some Critical Remarks. Ethics 129, no. 1 (2018): 8–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/698731.

This article draws on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany in critically assessing the efficacy of reasonableness in advancing the aims of emancipatory politics in political discourse. I argue, through a reading of Douglass and Delany, that comporting oneself reasonably in the face of oppressive ideology can be counterproductive, if one's aim is to undermine such ideology and the institutions it supports. Douglass and Delany, I argue, also provide us with a framework for evaluating alternative discursive strategies we might wish to employ in light of the limited value of reasonableness for emancipatory politics.  

Review Essays

The Contingency of Despair. American Political Thought (forthcoming).

Johnson, Andre E. No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.
Waters, Kristin. Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022.

Book Reviews

Review of Tunde Adeleke, In the Service of God and Humanity: Conscience, Reason, and the Mind of Martin R. Delany, University of South Carolina Press, in Civil War Book Review 23, iss. 2 (2021). https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cwbr/vol23/iss2/11/.

Review of Keneshia N. Grant, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, in New Political Science 43, iss. 3 (2021): 372-374. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2021.1957315

Interviews

“Frederick Douglass’s Political Philosophy.” New Voices: Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy Season 2, Episode 6 (2022)

Work in Progress

Email for drafts.

Seizing Citizenship: Frederick Douglass’s Abolitionist Republicanism - In my current book project, I argue that Frederick Douglass develops a distinctive conception of republican citizenship in his antebellum political thought. In the republican tradition, one is a citizen because she contributes to the polity. Traditionally, what counts as a contribution to a polity is restrictive— holding political office, serving in the military, engaging in public deliberation— in ways that reinforce exclusionary hierarchies. Douglass’s theoretical innovation in the republican tradition, I argue, is to refigure the idea of contribution in a capaciously inclusive way: we contribute to a polity by acting in ways that shape and contest what the polity values. Enslaved and nominally free Blacks Americans are, Douglass contends in the 1850s, already American citizens in this republican sense. This is because the resistance of Black Americans against slavery is an embodied assertion that those who resist, in both grand and quotidian ways, matter. I explore Douglass’s application of his conception of republican citizenship both in his antebellum abolitionist politics and in his postbellum aspiration to forge a pan-American among marginalized peoples across the western hemisphere.

An essay on organizing interracial solidarity (title redacted for review)- What does solidarity look like in polities fractured by racial oppression? Emancipatory politics in such polities must confront what Juliet Hooker labels the problem of racialized solidarity: the strong tendency for political relationships of empathy and commitment to map onto and reinforce white supremacist hierarchies (Race and the Politics of Solidarity, 2009). This paper contends that, in formulating a conception of solidarity up to this task, we ought to interrogate the assumption that solidarity always consists in unity—frequently at the cost of papering over racialized difference. I develop this claim through a case-study analysis of the United Construction Workers Association, a Seattle-based labor organization that combatted racial exclusion in the city’s building trades in the 1970s. Drawing on archival documents including interviews, newspapers, pamphlets, and UCWA internal reports, I argue that UCWA developed a contestatory conception of solidarity under the banner “No Separate Peace” in its efforts to transform Seattle’s building trade unions. Key members of UCWA, including Tyree Scott, Beverly Sims, and Michael Woo (who also served an integral role in the organization of the Alaskan Cannery Workers Association) developed a model of solidarity on which confrontation with racialized alienation among workers was itself constitutive of the struggle for class solidarity. This paper thus provides a contestation-based framework for intersectional solidarity through philosophical engagement with on-the-ground political actors as political theorists on their own terms, who have generated a conception of solidarity that challenges the dominant association of solidarity with unity.

An essay on white ignorance and humility (title redacted for review) - The concept of white ignorance refers to forms of not-knowing that are produced by and reinforce systems of white supremacist domination and exploitation. I distinguish two varieties of white ignorance, belief-based white ignorance and practice-based white ignorance. Belief-based white ignorance consists in false beliefs about systems of racist oppression. Practice-based white ignorance consists in unresponsiveness to the political agency of persons and groups subject to racist oppression. Drawing on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, I contend that an anti-racist politics that conceives of its epistemic task primarily in terms of combating practice-based white ignorance offers a more promising frame for emancipatory politics. A focus on practice-based white ignorance calls for a distinctive form of humility that involves recognition of the limits of one’s own political agency in relation to others, which is integral to democratic relations between free, equal, yet mutually dependent persons.

An essay on blame and standing (title redacted for review) - I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame functions to facilitate moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to an agent’s standing to blame are one variety of challenges to the appropriateness of blame. Such challenges serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of the standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer (e.g.) has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue or is blaming hypocritically. In contrast, I argue that three widely-recognized conditions on the standing to blame— the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions— serve as epistemically-tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame and thereby assess our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.

'Not seeing, but believing:' Clarity and Humility in Locke’s Essay - In this paper, I consider the role of epistemic humility in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. An epistemically humble agent recognizes the limits of her capacity for comprehension and the role of such recognition in our epistemic practices. It is tempting to ascribe to Locke a negative conception of epistemic humility, on which on which we ought to “sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those Things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our Capacities” (I.1.4). This is because Locke seems straightforwardly committed to the clarity thesis, that comprehension consists in gaining a clear view of ideas and their relations. I argue, however, that Locke is not straightforwardly committed to the clarity thesis in the Essay. Instead, Locke tempers the epistemic power of clarity in his critique of the enthusiast, who believes that she has an immediate connection to God. Locke’s critique of the enthusiast suggests a role for a positive conception of epistemic humility in Locke's epistemology: that recognition of the limits of our capacity for comprehension is itself sometimes implicated in the expansion of our comprehension.