Fredrick Douglass (1867) on race and integration in the US
by David Zetland (originally published at The one handed economist)
I had heard of Douglass, but man oh man, I had no idea of his brilliance.
His “Composite Nation” speech is full of wisdom and hope, offering a path to that “shining city on a hill” that Americans have had such a hard time reaching — mostly due to a desire to preserve “tradition” over “progress.”
(Listen to this Malcolm Gladwell episode on a segregationist in the 1970s — a man who has many imitators, led by T***p, in today’s America.)
Here are some excerpts that deserve your attention:
- “We have for along time hesitated to adopt and may yet refuse to adopt, and carry out, the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the Republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality. We are a country of all extremes—, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name a number. In regard to creeds and faiths, the condition is no better, and no worse. Differences both as to race and to religion are evidently more likely to increase than to diminish.”
NB: Most racists insist that Whites are biologically better than Blacks; some even asserted that Whites and Blacks evolved as separate species that could not mate! Listen to Scene on Radio’s “Being White” podcast series to understand the origin of racism (Portuguese slavers needed an excuse to justify their infernal trade).
Douglass goes on to address the “Yellow Peril” that was (infamously) battled with exclusionary laws that were enacted in 1862, strengthened in 1882 and not fully repealed until 1965:
- “Repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners is an ancient feeling among men. It is peculiar to no particularly race or nation”
- “They will come as individuals, we will meet them in multitudes, and with all the advantages of organization. Chinese children are in American schools in San Francisco, none of our children are in Chinese schools, and probably never will be, though in some things they might well teach us valuable lessons. Contact with these yellow children of The Celestial Empire would convince us that the points of human difference, great as they, upon first sight, seem, are as nothing compared with the points of human agreement. Such contact would remove mountains of prejudice.”
- “It is worthy of special remark, that precisely those parts of that proud Island [Britain] which have received the largest and most diverse populations, are today, the parts most distinguished for industry, enterprise, invention and general enlightenment. In Wales, and in the Highlands of Scotland, the boast is made of their pure blood and that they were never conquered, but no man can contemplate them without wishing they had been conquered. They are far in the rear of every other part of the English realm in all the comforts and conveniences of life, as well as in mental and physical development. Neither law nor learning descends to us from the mountains of Wales or from the Highlands of Scotland”
- “But it is said that the Chinese is a heathen, and that he will introduce his heathen rights and superstitions here. This is the last objection which should come from those who profess the all conquering power of the Christian religion. If that religion cannot stand contact with the Chinese, religion or no religion, so much the worse for those who have adopted it. It is the Chinaman, not the Christian, who should be alarmed for his faith. He exposes that faith to great dangers by exposing it to the freer air of America. But shall we send missionaries to the heathen and yet deny the heathen the right to come to us? I think that a few honest believers in the teachings of Confucius would be well employed in expounding his doctrines among us.”
- “To the minds of superficial men, the fusion of different races has already brought disaster and ruin upon the country. The poor negro has been charged with all our woes. In the haste of these men they forgot that our trouble was not ethnographical, but moral; that it was not a difference of complexion, but a difference of conviction. It was not the Ethiopian as a man, but the Ethiopian as a slave and a covetted [sic] article of merchandise, that gave us trouble.”
My one-handed conclusion is that all men (and women) were created equal, but they were not — and in many cases — are not treated equally in the US. That’s a pity for our country, a hypocrisy for our reputation, and a reality that needs far deeper discussion, soul-searching, and reflection.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?
Indeed.
Thank you for posting this powerful piece.
Frederick Douglass: Escaped slave. American Social Reformer. Abolitionist. Orator. Publisher. Statesman.
(Things to do in Rochester, NY.)
Frederick Douglass held many titles in his esteemed life, but one we are incredibly proud of is “Rochester’s Son.”
Douglass called Rochester home from 1847-1872. It is the city where he lived longer than anywhere else in his life and where he gave his famous speech on July 5, 1852, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The city served as a beacon of hope for Douglass and the many he helped ferry to freedom. Douglass did so through his relationship with Amy and Isaac Post, whose home served as a station on the Underground Railroad, dangerously holding as many as 20 escaped slaves at a time. And he assisted fellow abolitionist and political activist Harriet Tubman, who led escaped slaves to Kelsey’s Landing. Kelsey’s Landing was the southernmost navigable point on the northern flowing Genesee River and the last leg of the Underground Railroad. From this point, Canadian steamships were boarded, and freedom assured. …
(I was raised in a suburb of Rochester in the fifies in & sixties. A time of riots in 1968 after MLK’s assassination. I was gone by then. I don’t recall a single mention of Frederick Douglass in my school years.)
(However, from the link above…)
… He is laid to rest in Rochester’s historic Mount Hope Cemetery, which also happens to be the final resting place of Susan B. Anthony.
Nearby is the Frederick Douglass Monument in Highland Park (placed in 1899). Prominently displayed at the corner of South Avenue and Robinson Drive, the monument is believed to be the first public statue erected to memorialize an African-American in the United States.
Retrace Douglass’s legacy in Rochester by taking a self-guided Frederick Douglass Walking Tour. 13 life-size replicas of the famous Frederick Douglass Monument in Highland Park were built and installed in locations around Rochester that were significant to Douglass’s life. Each installation includes a QR code that, when scanned, brings viewers to a website with more information about the site’s historical significance as it relates to Frederick Douglass. The site also includes a map leading visitors to other Douglass Statues, and more information can be found at douglasstour.com/tour/.
[Frederick Douglass lived in a time when realism was an essential ingredient of everyday life. When realities are inescapable then less liberty is taken with the truth except by wealthy elites and their paid hacks. So, some things do not change, but many have and not all for the better. Saw the author of the following on C-SPAN yesterday.]
https://news.columbia.edu/news/john-mcwhorter-talks-about-his-new-book-woke-racism
John McWhorter Talks About His New Book, ‘Woke Racism’
By
Eve Glasberg
January 20, 2022
In his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, Professor John McWhorter argues that a neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities in this country. According to McWhorter, this well-meaning yet pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion.
In Woke Racism, McWhorter shows how this new religion’s claims to “dismantle racist structures” actually infantilize Black Americans, set Black students up for failure, and pass policies that disproportionately damage Black communities. He shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogram friends and family, and offers a roadmap to justice.
Q. How did you come up with the idea for this book?
A. I was alarmed and even angry to see how many people were being fired, suspended, and publicly shamed for transgressions of what we might call “woke” etiquette starting in the spring of 2020…
***************
{ relatively short interview follows – but there is much more available on this at C-SPAN and many other web sites.}
A review of McWhorter’s book is available here.
Hoover Digest – Spring 2002
It’s from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute which is a conservative think-tank, so I imagine if they approve of the book, there is probably something obtionable about it.
There was this op-ed in the Washington Post about a year ago.
How ‘woke’ became the least woke word in US English
(Not too easy to access. An excerpt follows.)
You want to talk about Black history? Well, here’s a bit of etymology about a word that everyone’s been using but few have gotten quite right. The word is “woke,” which — in an appropriation akin to using the expression “the man” when one is the man — has been mistakenly and purposely misused by everyone from Bill Maher to neo-Nazis.
You’ve probably seen or heard it employed as an adjective — as in, “stay woke.” But what does “woke” mean, exactly, when used to describe a state of being or thinking?
Many who lightly toss around the word today — including people who claim to embody it, or those who wield it as a pejorative for progressives — would be surprised to learn that “woke” originated in the deepest trenches of Black nationalism.
Black leaders have been calling on Black people to wake up for decades. To the first users of the word, it meant recognizing racial subjugation committed by Whites. Thus a White YouTuber or a liberal congressperson cannot, by the literal definition, be woke.
In fact, “wokeness” was originally applied to U.S. Blacks who had been mentally conditioned into philosophical slumber by centuries of oppression, intimidation, miseducation and social frustration.
The earliest common coinage came from the Nation of Islam, which was founded in Detroit in 1930. In the Nation’s cosmology, Black Americans’ state of mental sleep could be remedied by a spiritual awakening reminiscent of Jesus’ physical awakening of Lazarus from the dead. Thus ministers termed “the so-called Negroes” “mentally dead.”
In 1937, Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who advocated that Black Americans physically return to Africa, was a strong proponent of a mental return to the mother continent before physical repatriation could take place. “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery,” Garvey said, “for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”
In 1938, blues singer Huddie Ledbetter recommended Black people “best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” …
(It’s one of those words that seem to piss white folks off. Perhaps it’s meant to.)
‘Woke’ simply means awakened, after all. “Why don’t they just use that?”
Awakened to, aware of, racism, that is.
Fred,
Nice. Much thanks.
The link above only allows you to retrieve the full issue (227 pages), to obtain a five page article. Hardly worth using it seems to me.
Fred,
Yes, I got that. The interview that I saw MLK Day on C-SPAN was also by a conservative journalist. From the Right’s POV a black intellectual like McWhorter saying something that they would say only to get bashed by Liberals for is like a big Christmas gift. Just because Right wing ideologues are occasionally correct about mistakes made by Left wing ideologues should not be taken to mean that Right wing ideologues have good intentions or that their prescribed policies would lead to better outcomes for any minorities or working folk. McWhorter’s use of them though is more a matter of convenient access to media than it is general agreement on policy. I had to go to Politico to find anything on the moderate conservative Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s POV on gun control.
Coincidentally (or not), Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger is a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight. Whats more, for his efforts Adam Kinzinger is now former Republican representative from Illinois. He is now a political commentator for CNN.
There was this op-ed in the Washington Post about a year ago.
How ‘woke’ became the least woke word in US English
(Not too easy to access. An excerpt follows. Many links which would not post.)
You want to talk about Black history? Well, here’s a bit of etymology about a word that everyone’s been using but few have gotten quite right. The word is “woke,” which — in an appropriation akin to using the expression “the man” when one is the man — has been mistakenly and purposely misused by everyone from Bill Maher to neo-Nazis.
You’ve probably seen or heard it employed as an adjective — as in, “stay woke.” But what does “woke” mean, exactly, when used to describe a state of being or thinking?
Many who lightly toss around the word today — including people who claim to embody it, or those who wield it as a pejorative for progressives — would be surprised to learn that “woke” originated in the deepest trenches of Black nationalism.
Black leaders have been calling on Black people to wake up for decades. To the first users of the word, it meant recognizing racial subjugation committed by Whites. Thus a White YouTuber or a liberal congressperson cannot, by the literal definition, be woke.
In fact, “wokeness” was originally applied to U.S. Blacks who had been mentally conditioned into philosophical slumber by centuries of oppression, intimidation, miseducation and social frustration.
The earliest common coinage came from the Nation of Islam, which was founded in Detroit in 1930. In the Nation’s cosmology, Black Americans’ state of mental sleep could be remedied by a spiritual awakening reminiscent of Jesus’ physical awakening of Lazarus from the dead. Thus ministers termed “the so-called Negroes” “mentally dead.”
In 1937, Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who advocated that Black Americans physically return to Africa, was a strong proponent of a mental return to the mother continent before physical repatriation could take place. “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery,” Garvey said, “for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”
In 1938, blues singer Huddie Ledbetter recommended Black people “best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” …
(It’s one of those words that seem to piss white folks off. Perhaps it’s meant to.)
‘Woke’ simply means awakened, after all. “Why don’t they just use that?”
Awakened to, aware of, racism, that is.
Any ideas on why Douglass uses the term Ethiopians? Was that a sort of proxy for African heritage generally in his time? Biblical influence maybe?
[putting your question to Google yielded the following]
“Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson both used an image of an Ethiopian in poems written in the 1860s. Dickinson locates ‘The Ethiop within,’ while Whitman’s ‘Ethiopia’ is the name given to an old black slave woman in the South who salutes the American flag as General Sherman’s troops march by, while she wears on her own head a turban sporting the colors of Ethiopia’s flag.”
http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume2/folsom/ethiopia/index.html
Idiomatic language is most often time sensitive. Hell, even formal language gets changes in meaning from century to century. Second Amendment anyone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ethiopia
The Wikipedia link above explains the depth of the connection between colonial slavery and Ethiopia, which is vastly more than anecdotal.
Forgotten History: How The New England Colonists Embraced The Slave
Trade
NPR – June 2016
(link to & transcript of a podcast)
American slavery predates the founding of the United States. Wendy Warren, author of New England Bound, says the early colonists imported African slaves and enslaved and exported Native Americans. Terry Gross hosts.
(America, Land of Opportunity, and Opportunists.)
Yep, one’s opinion of trade depends largely upon whom is getting traded.
I will remind you that my ancestors were Quakers, who decided as a body, in the late 18th century that slavery was abohorrent and not to be tolerated by members of their faith, and that idea spread in both Britain and the US.
That’s one notion that they had which seems to have really taken the world by storm.