Hope and Despair in the Political Thought of David Walker

for many undergraduates in the united states, the Summer of 2020 was marked by the massive wave of protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. The political energy channeled into the streets found its way, by the Fall, into the classroom, with college instructors racing to incorporate material that spoke to students' anti-racist rage and the system of white supremacy against which this rage was directed—all while, of course, also struggling to devise teaching modalities appropriate to the age of coronavirus. Columbia University's Contemporary Civilization Core Curriculum course, for instance, broke with its traditionally chronological syllabus to begin with a unit on "race and justice." For a time, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Angela Davis, instead of Plato and Aristotle, introduced Columbia undergraduates to the canonical themes of Western political thought.I played a small role in advising on the revisions to Contemporary Civilization's syllabus and gave some orienting remarks to graduate student instructors as they prepared to teach the material on race and justice. Speaking with colleagues as I prepared these remarks, I noticed that, mixed in with feelings of excitement about the syllabus change and a strong sense of commitment to teach the material well, there was also a sense of trepidation. While some feared encounters with students who refused to acknowledge the role of white supremacy in shaping American society, the more pervasive fear I encountered was about students who fully acknowledged the role that white supremacy has played, but who, especially as the political horizons of the summer began to narrow once again, would come to see it as an inevitable and unalterable force.What my colleagues feared in the classroom was the potential for despair among their students, a sense that there was nothing to be done that could make a meaningful difference in dismantling white supremacist domination and the patterns of injustice that it has encoded into the foundations of our polity. As I reviewed the texts assigned for Contemporary Civilization's "race and justice" unit, I saw that such despair would be an attentive response not only to the present political situation in this country, but also to the course readings themselves. Walker, in An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, decries that "we, coloured People of these United States, are, the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began" (Walker 3). Douglass, in his famed 1852 speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," declares to his audience that "the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker than on this Fourth of July" (Douglass 368). King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" condemns the toxic complacency of the white moderate (King 97–103). Baldwin, in "A Talk to Teachers," observes that any Black person subject to the American education system "runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic" (Baldwin 679). Davis's "Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation" traces the direct continuity of white supremacist violence from the plantation to the modern prison and police (Davis, If They Come in the Morning).Despair could not be avoided or corrected in the classroom, I realized. This, of course, is not a novel observation. Many strands of Black American political thought and scholarship have recognized that despair is an integral element of the affective response to white supremacist domination.1 Yet the fact that despair—the sense that there is nothing to be done—is a reasonable and perhaps inevitable response to white supremacist domination does not itself answer the question "What do we do with our despair?" (Loggins, "Who Decides?").An insight contained within the 2020 Contemporary Civilization's "race and justice" readings, which I sought to communicate to the course instructors (and now share with you), was that the question "What do we do with our despair" need not presume despair to be solely an obstacle to emancipatory politics. Coming to a shared sense that there is nothing to be done can itself be an expression of political agency that ultimately generates hope that together, there is something we can do. The key philosophical point to this seemingly paradoxical relationship between despair and hope is a distinction between the content of despair (e.g., "white supremacy is so deeply entrenched that we cannot hope to shake its grip on our world") and the form of despair as a political judgment. The act of judging that despair is apt, when performed in concert with others, is an exercise of political agency through which persons can recognize their collective power to reshape a broken world. Collectively despairing is a way of being in political community with others; the experience of being in political community generates hope that we together can make the world anew.2This point is captured lucidly in David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In his pamphlet, Walker seeks to instill a sense of despair in his Black readers concerning the "wretchedness" of their condition under slavery and white supremacist domination. I argue that Walker seeks to channel this despair into hope by politicizing it—by having Black audiences engage with the text and their despair in concert with one another. Such engagement forges political community through a transformation from a shared sense that there is nothing to be done to a collective sense of a we that can act to change the world.David Walker was born in 1796 or 1797 in North Carolina.3 His father, who died before his birth, was enslaved, but his mother was free, which meant that Walker himself was free. Leaving Charleston, South Carolina, in the wake of the Denmark Vesey Affair to settle in Massachusetts, Walker made a living as a clothing merchant, which gave him access to shipping routes, and thereby news and information, on the US East Coast (Hinks 62–63). Walker was strongly devoted to abolition throughout his life. He served as the Boston agent of the first newspaper owned and operated by Black Americans, Freedom's Journal, for the duration of its publication (1827–1829) before writing the Appeal in 1829.4 Walker died in 1830 at the age of 33. At the time of his death, there was speculation that Walker had been assassinated by poison in response to the publication of the Appeal, but the general historical consensus today is that he died from tuberculosis.5As indicated by the full title of the Appeal (Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and expressly, to those of the United States of America), Walker's primary audience is nominally free and enslaved Black people in the United States, whom he addresses in the preamble as "My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens" (3).6 In prefatory remarks to the third (and final) edition of the pamphlet, Walker imputes to this audience a responsibility to obtain, read, and share his pamphlet with one another: It is expected that all coloured men, women and children, of every nation, language, and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them. (2)7Walker imagines communities of Black Americans coming together through the dissemination, consumption, and analysis of his writing. Walker, as Chris Apap has argued, understood "the development of black community as the necessary first step in the radical transformation of the United States" (Apap, "'Let No Man'"). And Walker was actively committed to the realization of this vision, using his shipping connections as a merchant to distribute the Appeal along the U.S. East Coast. Southern state governments worked actively to suppress dissemination of the pamphlet, arresting both Black and white distribution agents (who frequently, and implausibly, disavowed knowledge of the pamphlet they were distributing) in South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Kentucky. Nevertheless, by the early 1830s—after Walker's untimely death—the Appeal achieved wide distribution across the United States (Aptheker and Walker 45–53; Hinks 116–72; Fraser, "Distributed Agency").One of Walker's primary aims in the Appeal is to communicate his analysis of the forms of racist oppression to which Black Americans are subjected. This analysisOver the course of four articles, Walker lays out the four factors that he takes as the cause of Black Americans' "wretchedness": slavery, ignorance, "the preachers of the religion of Jesus Christ," and "the colonizing plan."The violence and cruelty of slavery are, as one would expect, central to Walker's analysis of the oppression of Black people in the United States. White slaveholders, Walker observes in Article One, claim that they are justified in subjecting Black people to slavery because they are "brutes," and so Walker observes, "ought to be slaves to the American people and their children forever!!" (9).8 But, Walker argues, it is precisely the cruelty and violence of slavery that furnish the evidence that whites use to justify slavery in this way. Enslaved Black people are, in Walker's words, "wretched," because of the historically unprecedented oppression enacted by chattel slavery.9At the same time, Walker thinks that several other factors are involved in an adequate explanation of Black Americans' "wretchedness." In Article Two, Walker argues that enslaved and nominally free Black people in the United States lack an adequate understanding of their history, and have not fully cultivated the capacities of a flourishing human life. Article One's analysis clearly implies that the primary cause of this ignorance is the cruelty and violence of chattel slavery. But Walker does think that combating racist oppression is both a matter of dismantling slavery and white supremacy, and of Black people educating and elevating one another. For Walker, resistance against white supremacy is both a matter of working on the system and working on oneself. Article Three condemns the ways in which Christianity has been used, in spite of its professed egalitarian and emancipatory values, to justify the enslavement of Black people since the outset of colonization of the Americas. Article Four argues that those whites who claim to act in the interest of Black Americans by advocating for colonization projects—which aimed to send Black people in the United States to Africa—in fact express the same attitude toward enslaved and free Black people as that of slaveholders: "Methinks colonizationists think they have a set of brutes to deal with, sure enough" (71).10In its content, Walker's Appeal explicates the interlocking aspects of racist oppression of Black people in the United States: the cruelty and violence of chattel slavery, the ways in which enslaved and nominally free Black people need to more fully cultivate the capacities of a flourishing life, the betrayal of Christian values, and the paternalism of white colonizationists. A full accounting of the structure of white supremacist domination generates, Walker acknowledges, a sense of despair: "Can our condition be any worse?—Can it be more mean and abject?" (4). The depth and interlocking nature of white supremacist domination leaves a reasonable reader with the sense that there is nothing that can be done to change the condition of Black Americans.Yet Walker describes the goal of his analysis of white supremacist domination to be "to awaken in the breast of my afflicted, degraded, and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!! ! ! ! !" (5). While the content of Walker's analysis generates despair, the mode of its presentation—an appeal to enslaved and nominally free Black audiences—is designed to generate hope around a collective sense of political agency, transforming a sense that there is nothing to be done into a sense of what we can do together.In "David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal," Melvin Rogers provides a compelling interpretation of what it means for Walker's pamphlet to function as an appeal to Black audiences. In issuing his analysis of racist oppression in the United States as an appeal to free and enslaved Black people—who, Walker asserts, have a responsibility to obtain and read his pamphlet—Walker implies that this primary audience has the authority to render judgment in response to his argument. When I appeal to (or petition) someone, I treat them as an authority with the power to address my appeal/petition. As Rogers puts the point: To petition or appeal means seeking redress from an authority regarding one's grievances. To petition tacitly reflects a normative attitude about oneself i.e. as in need of an authority's help, but also about one's social and political world—that is, as being capable of responding appropriately to the claims being advanced. (218)One of the central provocative moves in Walker's Appeal is that he treats enslaved and free Black people as a collective political entity capable of responding to his analysis and grievances. By structuring his appeal in this way, Walker—implicitly, but unambiguously—acknowledges nominally free and enslaved Black people as possessors of political agency: as possessing the capacity to collectively analyze a situation and decide how to act in concert with one another. The Appeal is an invitation to exercise this collective capacity.For Walker, it is precisely through analysis of anti-Black oppression—which includes an affective relationship of despair in response to the depth of this oppression—that enslaved and nominally free Black people in the United States gain a sense of their potential for collective action. While the content of the judgment that the Appeal invites Black audiences to make might take the form "there is nothing to be done," the fact that this judgment is made through collective "inquiry and investigation"—by fulfilling the responsibility Walker imputes to his Black readers—means that the process of coming to despair generates a sense of political community among Black Americans. Walker's goal is not to make individual readers despair, but to forge a people through this politicization of despair. It is precisely in reading and responding to the text—activity that Walker himself was deeply invested in instigating through covert distribution of the Appeal—that Walker's primary audience comes to see themselves as possessing the collective power to resist the very conditions of oppression about which the Appeal despairs.This is why Walker observes in Article One: For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough—they are whites—we are blacks. We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves, according to their chance; for we must remember that what the whites have written respecting this subject, is other men's labors, and did not emanate from the blacks. (17)The task of abolition, in Walker's view, is not only to evaluate and disprove arguments made in defense of these oppressive institutions; the task is fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and organizing the collective political agency of the oppressed. The struggle against injustice is at the same time a struggle to forge new forms of political community. Despairing together, Walker shows, is one means of generating such community.I have argued that David Walker connects a political affect of despair to a political affect of hope by distinguishing between the content and form of despair. While the content of despair—a sense that there is nothing to be done—might seem to foreclose, much less generate, the possibility of hope—a sense that we can act together to change things—Walker shows in the Appeal how the activity of despairing together is a way of forging political community. Walker envisioned the dissemination of the Appeal as a means of bringing Black Americans to collectively confront their "wretchedness" as a consequence of white supremacist domination, and in so doing, channel a shared sense of despair into a sense of peoplehood and collective agency.It would be an overstatement of my thesis to say that despair poses no problem for emancipatory politics. But Walker's analysis of the potentially generative interplay between despair and hope also helps to articulate the political dangers posed by despair. One can have a sense that there is nothing to be done in isolation from others; indeed, the feeling of despair itself can drive one into isolation. This is why Walker is at pains, in his prefatory remarks in the Appeal, to impute a responsibility to Black audiences to engage with his pamphlet in concert with one another. The emancipatory potential of despair, on Walker's account, depends upon despair being shared. While, Walker shows, there is nothing that precludes us from despairing together, this politicization of despair is a project whose success is not automatic, and which must confront the atomizing pressure that despair exerts on individuals.This is precisely where I locate the role of educators, like the Core Curriculum instructors to whom I initially directed these remarks, in relation to their students' despair. Whereas the organizer, like Walker himself, aims to channel the sense of community generated by collective despair into a more or less concrete course of action (in Walker's case, insurrection), the educator helps her students recognize the potential to despair not in isolation from, but in community with, one another. The educator can do this by showing how political thinkers like Walker have sought to channel despair into hope through projects like the Appeal, spurring students to think with one another about the emancipatory potential of despairing together. Such humanistic study affords opportunities for civic education not in the sense of instilling expertise about institutions and policies, but in offering us a richer sense of our own political agency by seeing it refracted in the ways texts operate upon their historical audiences, and upon us.