I’m going to share some discomfort with you.

Reading a 1960s-era essay by African-American author James Baldwin, I found myself directly and uncomfortably addressed:

White man, hear me!

Uh-oh.

He had just finished criticizing Whites for pretending not to see the racial history of the United States, so his direct address elevated my pulse. But what came next was milder than I expected. Here is the passage:

White man, hear me! History […] is not merely something to read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.

As a White person, how should I respond to Baldwin? I know that many respond with defensiveness: “Oh yeah, well I wasn’t around during the slavery years, and I never had anything to do with the KKK!” But Baldwin is not saying that I did any of those things. The point can’t be that White people today should feel guilty about what they could not possibly have participated in.

I understand him to be asking White people to think seriously about how America’s history is still “present in all that we do,” because only then can we intentionally reshape those structures that keep repeating themselves, in light of American values–liberty and equality–that most of us claim to hold.

In this essay–among the most difficult I’ve ever attempted–I’m going to do just that. As I have done elsewhere, I will turn to literature to help me think through these matters. And in doing all of the above, I’m going to try to avoid two pitfalls: the stereotypical leftist response of speaking from an ethos of White Guilt, and the stereotypical rightist response of speaking defensively and/or dismissively about race. I see no reason to feel ashamed of my demographics, and I believe the topics addressed are worthy of my full seriousness.

The City on the Hill

Although the USA is a nation-state, a society and a people, a geographic region, and so on, America also is an idea.

A famous formulation of it in my lifetime is America as “the city on the hill,” used in many speeches by Ronald Reagan, echoed later by Barack Obama. But the phrase has an older vintage: it was also used by John F. Kennedy, who was in turn referencing a 17th-century Puritan speech, which lifted the phrase directly from the Bible. The image of the city on the hill is used to suggest that America offers freedom, self-determination, meritocracy, and hope; the Biblical echo also adds a layer of divine teleology, as though America was the final and correct answer to how humans should organize into a society.

These ideals are, of course, difficult to square with the country’s histories of violence, notably including the genocide of the Indigenous peoples and several hundred years of slavery. But it did not end in the nineteenth century: in my lifetime, American interventions and wars in the Middle East, the ongoing violence toward and suppression of Black Americans, bigotry (and worse) directed at various religious (and non-religious) groups, and more, have no place in the city on the hill.

All of this leads to a dilemma of the sort I think Baldwin is asking us to take seriously. Either one can embrace America as the city on the hill, and risk downplaying how violence and repression are part of the American story, and also risk reproducing violence and repression for another generation. Or one can focus on the violence and repression, which risks denying the power of the aspirational idea of America.

For most of my adult life, and, I think this is true American politics more broadly, I have struggled to find the right balance between these two options. Now, in midlife, I am reflecting once again on my identity as an American. As I reread Henry David Thoreau side-by-side with James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Mark Twain, all my fellow Americans, and as I watch today questions of race dominate our divisive national conversation, after a visit to Concord, MA where America arguably began, and finally, as I returned after more then three decades to live in the American South where I grew up–suddenly, how I should feel about America became an urgent question, one that as an essayist, I wanted to work out, paraphrasing Philip Lopate, “in full view” of you, the reader.

America’s Founding Facts

This is a bit reductive, but I think a significant amount of American history can be explained by the juxtaposition of two facts:

• The founders of our society not only envisioned and successfully implemented the world’s oldest democracy, but they also offered a luminous intellectual justification for it, steeped in concepts of freedom and equality, which changed the world, and which still have the power to guide us today and far into the future.
• Many of these same founders were slave owners, had participated in (and even personally ordered) attacks on native American nations, and denied women the right to vote.

The tension between these two facts is the genesis of, I believe, the most important forces of American culture, and they explain everything from the American Civil War to our political parties today, and from our poetry and popular music to the relationships between real estate prices and postal codes.

The Other Jeffersonian Architecture

It may also seem mysterious that our founders could have had a world-changing vision of liberty and equality and embrace the polar opposite in their social institutions. But we need not speculate about it, because in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1785), one of our leading founders, Thomas Jefferson, who was also a slave owner, takes up the question directly:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state [..?] Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.

Jefferson goes on to elaborate on “the real distinctions which nature has made,” making a number of unabashedly racist claims that portray blacks physically, intellectually, and dispositionally as subhuman brutes. [Note to the reader: I typed up here and and then deleted his words, wondering whether reprinting them did more harm than good. In the end, I’ve gone with a journalistic paraphrase, but I want to make clear that his words were hateful.]

Returning to the question of how the two facts listed above could coexist, the answer is: a complete and detailed ideological commitment to White supremacy, accompanied by an existential fear that emancipated Blacks would eliminate Whites given the chance, prevented founders like Jefferson from seeing Blacks (and presumably Indigenous people and women for analogous reasons) as fully human, thereby excluding them (among others) from arguably Jefferson’s most memorable formulation, that “all men are created equal.”

I do not include this content because I want to “cancel” Jefferson (as Baldwin’s reasoning makes perfectly clear, you can’t cancel a founder anyway). I include it because Jefferson’s writings mean that White supremacy is inscribed in, not an anomaly of, the founders’ idea of America, of that city on the hill. In other words, what the founders meant by “free” was, as sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued, brought to aspirational clarity to them through its opposition to a historically specific racist image of Blacks as subhuman slaves.

Now, I do not mean to say that “the idea of America” or “the city on the hill” is White supremacist–the idea of America is far more complex than that–but I start by acknowledging that the idea of America can, and was originally intended, to accommodate a conception of freedom that is based in and limited to a White supremacist notion of civilization.

American Antibodies

Now, if it is the case that the idea of America–that city on the hill–was envisioned by a group who were, unfortunately, also White supremacist men, it is also the case that the idea of America was inherited by a much larger group, who have thankfully also had opportunity to shape what the idea of America means.

And some of those inheritors, notably Black people and White women, but also many White men, introduced and sustained (metaphorically speaking) antibodies. What I mean is that just as the body produces specific antibodies to fight against specific threats to the body (antigens), so has America produced antibodies to fight the White supremacist ideas holding back the full implications of the founders’ genius, which was to envision a democratic, free, and egalitarian society.

The most efficacious of these metaphorical antibodies were not policy proposals or political slogans, but were cultural contributions. In other words, they worked less on national and state laws and more on reforming the idea of America. They did so using two fundamental strategies: narrating Black experiences and more broadly developing an abolitionist literature. In the next two subsections, I provide some excerpts and comments on each of these.

“Tears are the Only Language Now”

You remember that old fable of “The Man and the Lion” where the lion complained that he should not be so mispresented “when the lion wrote history.” [… The] time has come when the “lions write history” — Frederick Douglass

Recently, having long heard the controversies surrounding race and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I decided to reread the novel and form my own opinion about its depictions of race and how they should affect our general evaluation of the novel. I won’t digress more on that specific matter here, except to say that I saw that one of the novel’s flaws is that, while Twain was an abolitionist and his novel in no way endorses slavery, nonetheless its characterization of the life of slaves resembles more that of paid domestic servants than it does of subjects enchained to a violent, terrorizing institution. As the Douglass quote at the beginning of this section suggests, even with the sympathetic and sharp social observer Mark Twain, the lions were not writing the history.

Except that they were! Narratives voiced by former slaves had a significant impact on shaping the perspectives of the Northern abolitionists. One of them was Frederick Douglass, who wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself (1845). The narrative tells his story from childhood to his escape from slavery and into his new life in the North. The narrative describes his forced movement from one master to the next. The work is filled with evocative details, such as how on winter nights, as a near-naked adolescent, he slept in a bag used to transfer corn to the mill to keep from freezing to death. The power of such details further exposes the deficiencies of Twain’s novel.

The turning point of Douglass’ narrative comes when, having been sent to a notorious “slave-breaker” named Covey, and driven at his master’s cruel hands to fatalistic desperation, Douglass finally resists. Covey tries to whip Douglass, and Douglass defends himself, leading to an all out brawl that lasts for two hours, after which the bloodied Covey withdraws and never tries to whip Douglass again. Douglass’s narration after the brawl here strikes me as distinctly American:

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. […] My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place.

Female slaves faced a more gendered form of terror. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) details the sexual violence she faced. Then the abuse continues, because as she shows, White women, learning of their husbands’ infidelities, further abused these victims. Jacobs writes,

He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him–where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature.

And then later, after his wife finds out:

She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. […] Sometimes I woke up and found her bending over me. At times she whispered in my ear, as though it was her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer. If she startled me, on such occasions, she would glide stealthily away and the next morning she would tell me I had been talking in my sleep, and ask who I was talking to. At last, I began to be fearful for my life.

The whole apparatus of White society is aligned against her, such that her victimization, which she expresses among other things as a violation of nature, cannot even be seen as such.

In addition to these autobiographical narratives, Black writers also composed poetry, which expressed the experiences of slaves on another register. For example, Black poet Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis’s “The Slave Girl’s Farewell” describes a young girl’s happy childhood coming to a shocking end as she is forcibly taken from her mother. The poem’s narrator addresses herself to her mother in their final moments together:

Oh let me gaze! how bright it seems
As busy memory flies,
To view those scenes of other days,
Beneath those bright blue skies

The little hut where I have played
In childhood’s fearless hours–
In murmuring stream–the mossy bank,
Where I have gathered flowers.

I knew not then that I was a slave
Or that another’s will,
Save thine, could bend my spirit’s pride;
Or bid my lips be still.

Who now will soothe me at my toil,
Or bathe my weary brow?
Or shield me when the heavy lash
Is raised to give the blow?

Thy fond arm press me–and I feel
Thy tears upon my cheek;
Tears are the only language now,
A mother’s love can speak. (1835)

The idea of a person finding out at a certain point of life that she is a slave appears not just in Purvis’ poem, but also in Jacobs’ Incidents. It is echoed in the twentieth century in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How It Feels to be Colored Me” (1928), in which she states, “I remember the very day that I became colored,” an experience she also fictionalizes in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Each of these moments of surprise expresses just how unnatural slavery/racial prejudice is.

“I Will Be as Harsh as Truth”

Our skins may differ, but from thee we claim
A sister’s privilege, and a sister’s name

— Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis

The other strategy I mentioned was the development of an abolitionist literature, and in this many White voices were powerful. One of these was that of William Lloyd Garrison, who published Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, and who directly confronted the vision of the founders, drawing the obvious conclusion:

Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights–among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.

Other writers of editorials and tracts argued against slavery, often intertwining their arguments with those advocating for the rights of women. Indeed, in 1837, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women linked abolition with women’s rights, by emphasizing the patriarchal nature of the institution of slavery.

In a similar spirit, Angelina Grimké, in her 1836 “Appeal to Christian Women of the South,” reminded White women of their agency:

But perhaps you will be ready to query, why appeal to women on this subject? We do not make the laws which perpetuate slavery. No legislative power is invested in us; we can do nothing to overthrow the system, even if we wished to do so. To this I reply, I know you do not make the laws, but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do; and if you really suppose you can do nothing to overthrow slavery, you are greatly mistaken.

Partly inspired by Grimké, Harriet Beacher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an abolitionist novel that follows a highly sympathetic slave named Tom, as he is sold from a family to a cruel master, and is subject to violence and ultimately death. The novel became the greatest selling work of fiction in the United States before the Civil War, with hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation. Its impact was such that some have argued that helped push the nation toward civil war.

“Let Him Look to the Stars”

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

— Walt Whitman (1871)

Meanwhile, in the same America and across the same decades, those that I most studied as a young man in high school and college (the White guys, I mean) were developing concepts of American cultural identity: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and so on.

They were asking questions that, long familiar to us, were new to them: If individuals are no longer the subjects of a king, but rather citizens of a democracy, what are their qualities and duties? Appealing to the wisdom of the past–a past rooted in monarchies–was no answer. They needed to develop answers of their own. “The foregoing generations,” Emerson wrote in 1836, “beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” His essay “Nature” attempted to do just that.

In his “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson proposed a version of individualism that is easily recognized as American. “Trust thyself,” he wrote, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Emphatically rejecting social conformity as a good, Emerson wrote “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. […] Nothing is at last sacred by the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.” He continues to argue against socially performative acts of virtue at the expense of authenticity to the self.

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. […] What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what people think.

Neither king nor God nor social norms, but an individual’s own conscience, defined and justified their actions.

Others followed Emerson’s lead, including his younger associate Henry David Thoreau, who would put it even more directly in his 1849 essay, “Resistance to Civil Government”. There he writes, “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.”

True respect for an individual entails, for Thoreau, each citizen making their own judgments and acting authentically based on them. Thoreau was an abolitionist who went so far as to refuse to pay his taxes to a government pursuing a pro-slavery agenda, landing him in jail. He explains himself by writing, “I cannot for an instance recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also” and “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

Much as Emerson had rejected the traditions of the past to mediate his relationship with truth (i.e., nature and God), Thoreau extends that mistrust to his own government: “Must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think men should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

I include this section of the essay because it suggests to me a period where American thinkers were becoming self-conscious, seeking to create a distinctively American cultural identity and a notion of citizenship fit for a democracy. Their emphasis on what is natural, on nonconformity, and more profoundly, on what it means to be free, unfolded in a nation marred by slavery. In other words, if Jefferson’s White supremacist notion of freedom was specifically shaped by American slavery, so too was Thoreau’s abolitionist conception of freedom–although Thoreau developed them in a better, and I think, more American, direction. Likewise, as I showed earlier, Black authors of the same period were offering similar conceptions of what is natural vs. unnatural, and what freedom entails.

In other words, I found in my readings, and was encouraged by, a number of deep continuities between what Black and abolitionist White writers were saying about freedom.

The America I Carry in Me

It is true that I am a White man, and I acknowledge that as such I have certain privileges that I have inherited as a consequence of ongoing social injustice. Among those privileges is that I can choose to avoid thinking seriously about racial injustice, that I rarely directly experience its evils against my person, and that I don’t have to speak about racial injustice to get on in my career and life. Yet I have accepted Baldwin’s challenge to try anyway, and I hope in doing so I have benefited more than just myself.

But even deeper, and more powerful than the privilege, is the history that is still “present in all that we do” within me, because even if I am White and male, the history in me is not only White and it is not only male. Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis is just as much my nation’s poet as Walt Whitman is. James Baldwin is just as much my nation’s essayist as Henry David Thoreau is: and if you read them side-by-side, you will see for yourself that this is true. And what is common to them, I suggest, is their participation in and contributions to the idea of America.

In the end, my considered response to James Baldwin is that the history that I carry in me, that which gives me frames of reference and guides my future actions, is an idea of America that is indeed capable of facing the abominations the nation once engaged in, and also an idea of America that, in a way that remains true to its own aspirations and ideals, has had, and still has 200 years later, the capacity to reject them.

Finally, I conclude with two implications of my thoughts on America.

First, we must neither deny nor overstate the fact that the idea of America was created by White supremacists. That they were White supremacists is undeniable–one only need read what they themselves have said, and what they have done. But that fact does not negate the greatness of the vision they unleashed, even if they couldn’t fully see it themselves, which was among the most powerfully emancipatory that this world has seen.

Second, when we draw racial boundaries between literary works–which we do when we disparage or when we defend the tradition by “dead white males,” and which we do when we create courses and collections only of Black literature, or literature by women–we risk obfuscating the important continuities between them. Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau had much more in common than Thoreau and Jefferson did. I do not mean there is no place for debates about representation in the canon, or courses/collections that focus on a particular group, but I do mean that we need to be mindful that we don’t lose sight of the common purposes towards which these diverse groups of authors sometimes worked.

Heading Credits: “Tears are the only language now” is from Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis’ “The Slave Girl’s Farewell.” “I will be as harsh as truth” is from William Lloyd Garrison’s “To the Public.” “Let him look to the stars” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature.”

Special Acknowledgment: I used many sources for this, but one in particular deserves special mention. The tenth edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert Levine, included far more relevant primary sources (e.g., Purvis’ poetry) than were available in the Norton anthologies of the late 1980s, when I was an undergraduate. For more than one reason, I could not have put together these thoughts back then, and I am grateful that the Norton anthologies have evolved to reflect our values and needs as readers of American literature.