Neil Roberts: Why faith? You don’t talk about religion or spirit. So why discuss faith as a way for us to not only understand the idea of democracy, but to understand the tradition of African American political thought writ large?
Melvin Rogers: Faith is important partly because African American political thought comes onto the scene in response to a sustained attack on the very dignity of Black people. From the perspective of David Walker, Maria Stewart, or Hosea Easton, it isn’t clear that there is evidence to suggest that the United States can be anything other than a slaveholding society hellbent on dominating Black people.
When that’s the landscape they’re describing, how do we make sense of their affirmative gestures toward their white counterparts? As I was reaching for a term that could help stabilize the narrative from the 1830s to the 1960s, faith felt like the only option. Faith means running ahead of the idea that you need evidence to justify the stance or appeal that you’re taking.
What I came to discover as I was reading these figures is that they wanted us to see that under conditions of oppression, when it is not clear that the polity to which you belong is susceptible to transformation, what you find yourself resting on is faith. Maybe it’s faith in human nature. Maybe it’s faith in the aspirational core of democracy. Part of what I try to argue is that for them faith seems to be wedded to democratic struggle, particularly under intense, oppressive conditions.
When it is not clear that the polity to which you belong is susceptible to transformation, what you find yourself resting on is faith.
NR: I was hoping you could say more on some of the figures in the narrative that you’re telling. But I want to invite you to do so with regards to what I take to be one of the biggest contributions of the book, which is your intervention into how we understand republicanism.
Republicanism is a central idea for philosophy and political theory. It’s also overwhelmingly taught in a race-neutral manner. You suggest not only that another vision of the world is possible, but that this vision was previously articulated, just silenced, disavowed, or underappreciated.
What exactly is republicanism to you? And how have you sought to rewrite republicanism’s genealogy with attention to Black intellectuals, artists and the movements that they fostered? Republicanism is a tradition that, in Western political thought, becomes irrelevant by the 19th century. You’re saying that it wasn’t irrelevant, and that it was really Black Americans that actually kept faith in democracy despite it seeming irrational.