National Identity, Racial Justice, and the Mobilization of Shame

In this essay, I consider the historical uses and limits of shame and shaming rhetoric in efforts to advocate for racial justice through a comparative reading of an unlikely pair of artifacts: a public speech by Frederick Douglass, offered in London in 1846, and, a photograph of student activists, demanding their right to public education during a 1963 protest in Farmville, Virginia. The obvious differences in these artifacts only make their commonalities even more striking: rather than deploying shame to identify moral failings and elicit self-reflection and self-correction, both threaten the exposure of American hypocrisy, racism, and injustice to international audiences. Through its comparative reading of these artifacts, the essay works through contradictory claims about shame's utility made by scholars in political philosophy, public policy, and psychology, and it identifies the historical limits of shame's value in the American discourse of racial justice.