A Black Philosophy of Liberation
Vincent Lloyd’s new book is a philosophical love letter to the Black community. It is a philosophy that emerges not from the armchair, but the streets. It is embodied wisdom from the Movement for Black Lives transposed into a crisp and stimulating argument, which will spark conversations in academic and activist spaces alike.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells a story to illustrate the nature of philosophy (the famous “Allegory of the Cave”). A prisoner watching shadows on a cave wall breaks free to behold the light of day. The emancipation of this captive is like the journey of a mind that is learning to look past appearances to see the deeper truth of things. The philosopher is one who has arrived at a liberating vision of the Good.
Lloyd argues that, more than two millennia later, the enslaved Black man Frederick Douglass experiences a similar insight. He chooses to fight his overseer rather than submit to brutal mistreatment. In this struggle, Douglass recognizes himself as more than a slave. Although still legally the property of another, he connects with a higher truth that defies such domination. The anti-carceral absolute that Plato terms the Good, Douglass calls liberty. Lloyd’s name for it is Black dignity.
One could say that Douglass grasps the human dignity that he, along with every human being, possesses intrinsically. This innate property could be identified with humanity’s rational nature or—if one prefers to speak more theologically—with the image of God imprinted on humanity at creation. From this perspective, it would make little sense to think of the dignity itself as Black, even if this is the racial category that best fits some of its bearers, such as Douglass. Dignity would be something natural and universal, not specific to any racial group. It would be synonymous with the sort of morally obligating personhood that Immanuel Kant and, in a different way, Emmanuel Levinas take as the ground of their universalist philosophical ethics. It would be the reason why every life matters at least in principle if not in the actual course of history.
But Lloyd makes a bolder claim, and one cannot understand the force of his book without appreciating why such apparently reasonable universalism dissatisfies him. He develops a theory of dignity that holds itself accountable to the Movement for Black Lives. He affirms the grassroots wisdom that inspired Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi to declare with unapologetic particularity, “Black lives matter!” Lloyd’s position as an organic intellectual embedded in this struggle leads him to argue that dignity is not merely a universal feature of human nature but a specific practice, performance, or way of life. It is something one does more than something one has. It happens only when one fights against domination, whether in organized protests on the streets or in defiant acts of art, music, and creativity.
This emphasis on struggle leads Lloyd to contend that Blackness is part of the very meaning of dignity. He acknowledges various interlocking examples of domination related to gender, sexuality, coloniality, ableism, xenophobia, and economic exploitation. Nevertheless, he argues that the transatlantic slave trade, which shapes Western modernity by inventing Blackness as its maximal other, provides the paradigmatic case of domination because it erects a literal master-slave relationship on a massive scale. The system of social control that is rather anemically called “race” is actually a metaphysical division of bodies in which one type of body is meant to rule and another is meant to be disposed of at will.
If dignity means the struggle against domination (understood in this paradigmatic sense), then dignity is Black. And its Blackness is essential, not accidental. One enacts dignity only by acting as, like, or with the Black community in its opposition to the ongoing aftereffects of the slave system, including police brutality, mass incarceration, and a host of other anti-Black macro- and micro-aggressions. To echo the Black theologian James Cone, whom Lloyd cites, one might say that dignity means “becom[ing] black with God.”
The philosophy Lloyd advances can be characterized in many ways. As a postliberal project, it refuses any abstract individualism or universalism. As a postsecular project, it embraces diverse spiritualities in the African diaspora, whether more closely linked to traditional African religions or progressive forms of liberationist Christianity. It has a family resemblance to American pragmatism insofar as it locates the truth of dignity in its practice. At the same time, it has realist and even metaphysical ambitions: it wants to say how things really are. In this regard, its references to the transcendental philosophies of Plato and Levinas are instructive. Although it is incarnate in social action, Black dignity functions like an absolute, an unquestionable principle, perhaps even a new God of the philosophers.
There is something phenomenological about Lloyd’s philosophy. Each chapter discloses an aspect of the practice of Black dignity. By the end, the profiles of rage, love, family, futurity, and magic coalesce into a manifold that fills in the intuition, as Edmund Husserl might say. In a sense, too, this is a project of literary criticism. It offers readings of narratives and poems by Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, Samuel Delany, Aimé Césaire, and more. Hewing more closely to Jacques Derrida than Plato, Lloyd resists any fundamental bifurcation between philosophy and literature, idea and image, knowledge and rhetoric.
Finally, Lloyd’s method is historical. He sketches a social, cultural, and intellectual history of Black struggle, noting changes from abolitionism, to Civil Rights and Black Power, to the epoch of multiculturalism (which he argues culminated with Barack Obama’s presidency and the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin), to the current era of renewed activism symbolized by the Movement for Black Lives. He especially dramatizes the shift between the last two periods, arguing that Black dignity has reemerged after several decades of dormancy. According to Lloyd, the Black struggle against domination that was inaugurated during slavery and reinvigorated in the mid-twentieth century movements led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X became obscured from the 1980s onward by respectability politics, tokenizing efforts at cultural inclusion, sentimental appeals to love, and failures to recognize the widespread persistence of anti-Blackness. But now, finally, this Black struggle—which is the very meaning of dignity—has found its bearings again.
Lloyd joins other theorists of this shift, such as the Afropessimist Frank Wilderson and the poetic thinker of fugitivity Fred Moten, but he adds his own accents. The hallmark of his discourse of Black dignity is neither fatalistic honesty nor aesthetic sociality but activist engagement. Like Wilderson, Lloyd recognizes the depths of the problem of anti-Blackness. Like Moten, he values artistically mediated experiences of Black intimacy. But his central aim is the fight for a new world without domination. Therefore, he emphasizes a revolutionary, even apocalyptic politics.
This is a powerful argument, which should be read more than once. Like Lloyd’s previous books such as Black Natural Law and Religion of the Field Negro, this book is dense with references, implications, and questions that add layers of nuance to its central message and provoke timely conversations.
One lingering question is whether any sense of universal and intrinsic dignity should be retained. For his part, Lloyd acknowledges this as an “aspect” of dignity. But when defining dignity per se, he emphasizes performative criteria. As a theologian, I confess that I am committed to some form of universalism. I believe that each person—and, in its own way, each living being—has ineradicable dignity in the sense that all such divinely made creatures are owed proper respect as a matter of justice. However, I would stress that one can frame this theological point, not as an alternative to Lloyd’s view of Black dignity, but as a way of thinking that depends on it. Respect for persons and other living beings is contradicted by domination and can only be achieved through concrete acts of resistance like those in the Movement for Black Lives.
A related question is whether any form of multiculturalism should be retained in this new era of Black theory and politics. To be sure, if multiculturalism implies tolerance of domination, as Lloyd suggests it does, then it cannot be salvaged. However, I would argue that it is both possible and necessary to imagine a multicultural—or perhaps better: intercultural—struggle against domination. This would be a global fight in which cultural resources from within and beyond historically Black communities are marshalled toward shared and overlapping goals. Neither the specificity nor the power of Blackness would need to be relinquished in order to support such a porous, relational coalition. In fact, the sort of anti-oppressive togetherness I am imagining depends on the performance of Black dignity.
Whatever discussions may unfold around this book, its singular contribution is undeniable. For the last decade or more, the streets have been speaking a difficult wisdom, and Lloyd is listening, thinking, and struggling with them. This novel site from which to do philosophy revitalizes it, unifying thought and praxis, the absolute and the particular. It opens a horizon of meaning that, though neither exclusivist nor monocultural, remains wedded to the lives of Black people. Lloyd clarifies that there is no dignity, no liberty, no ultimate goodness that can be achieved while such lives are discarded as if they were nothing at all. The path toward greater intellectual, social, and spiritual wholeness, which has been the perennial dream of philosophy, cannot bypass the enactment of Black dignity but must run through it.
Although philosophy has sometimes supported domination, Lloyd shows there is another way, a higher truth. Like Enrique Dussel, he proposes a philosophy of liberation. Only this time, “everything [is] Black.”
Andrew Prevot is Associate Professor of Theology at Boston College and author of The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism; Theology and Race: Black and Womanist Traditions in the United States; and Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crises of Modernity.