A History Of African American Political Thought | Dr. Melvin Rogers | TMR

Live-streamed on September 16, 2024

Dr. Melvin Rogers, professor of political science and associate director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, & Economics at Brown University, joins to discuss his recent book The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.

Professor Melvin Rogers then joins, first outlining the importance of intellectual history in helping to contextualize the institutions and structures that materially shape our world within the ideas and strains of thought that inspired them, before stepping back to examine the two often contradictory strains of black intellectual thought that dominated how African American intellectual leaders saw the American project’s relationship to Black people, be it as a something that is, at its core, about degrading and dominating Black identity, or something that, like all of humanity, is unfinished, malleable, and subject to growth. Professor Rogers then walks Sam through the pre-Civil War evolution of these beliefs, exploring the stories and works of folks like David Walker and Martin Delaney to demonstrate how central the question of the American project was to the push for abolition and Black liberation, with the former presenting a challenge and a disruption to the project while the latter saw it as immutable, best to be abandoned altogether. After reflecting on the model of the American project in the pre-war North, Professor Rogers moves to the post-Reconstruction era, tackling the retrenchment of White Supremacy in the US political system as the resilience of the underlying cultural anti-Black beliefs that the era had failed to address, examining how this issue – one that abolitionists had very much acknowledged – was then addressed by Black intellectuals moving into the 20th century, with folks like Billie Holiday and James Baldwin bringing the contradictions and horrors of American racism to the fore to, once again, challenge the idea of the American project itself, and push white Americans to acknowledge the lingering impact of the ideas that shaped our society.

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