Darkened Light is intended as a contribution to the history of political thought. Political philosophers and theorists have much to say about freedom, equality, domination, exclusion, and justice. Still, they often overlook the views of those who suffered under the weight of oppression. African American political thought is a rich archive in this regard—a philosophical vision of democracy forged in the crucible of struggle. Darkened Light is reconstructive in form, fueled by sensitivity to the experiential conditions of black people. This led me to two central questions. (1) How should we understand the political-philosophical thinking of African Americans who often found themselves dominated by the society they so diligently sought to transform? (2) What must their vision of democracy presuppose about the people they appealed to and the society they stood in?

The first question concerns the intervention of several key figures in African American political thought: David Walker, Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin. Do they focus on the juridical institutional structures of political life? This is an important question, and Walker, Douglass, and Wells clearly addressed the inequity in the legal-structural dimensions of the United States. This question remains relevant today, evident in critical examinations of the carceral state, policing, and systemic racism. Many thinkers in African American political thought, however, assert that the quality of laws and institutions depends on the dispositional orientation of social life and its influence on individuals. They argue that freedom and equal regard are inseparable from a sense of security—a security found in one’s fellow citizens. Thus, I emphasize the republican rather than liberal character of their democratic vision, highlighting the intertwining of freedom, equal regard, and character.

The second question explores the presupposition guiding African Americans as they confront practices of disregard and hatred. This explores the thinkers’ most philosophically rich elements—their views on human nature and democratic legitimacy. They consistently defended a developmental view of human nature (the source of their perfectionism, as I say throughout), linking it to the principle of openness that underpins democracy’s legitimacy. This connection reveals the presupposition guiding these figures. I further argue that this presupposition manifests itself in their invocation of the aspirational view of the people—a people not yet, a people that may yet be. I illustrate how they crafted their appeals, targeting the affective and aesthetic dimensions of the self. All of this was an uncertain affair—a constitutive feature of democratic life—making faith central to their writing and acting under conditions of domination. Faith involves running ahead of the evidence needed to justify one’s stance.

The book is not exhaustive; some thinkers receive more attention than others. Thus, my reference to African American political thought is qualified. I follow one pathway, albeit a very important one, within the broader tradition. The unstated claim is that applying the argument to the full history of African American political thought would reveal a wider range of thinkers that support the book’s arguments. There is more to say on this point, and I hope others will contribute. No book can capture everything, and all books inevitably fall short of fully addressing the questions they pose. I interpret the critiques from Jack Turner, Erin Pineda, and Paul Taylor not as outright rejections of the book’s primary arguments. Their insights shed light on blind spots, prompting me to reevaluate my claims.

Turner expresses concern about how the politics of character and conversion will manage the compromises that come with the workings of power and governance. This is not merely about Darkened Light but Turner’s own work. His attraction to Emerson, Whitman, Ellison, and Baldwin—consummate defenders of the necessity of conversion—brings him into the orbit of the book’s concerns, even as it reflects his ambivalence about its recommendations. His ambivalence is warranted. However, the emphasis on character and moral education is a deliberate strategy by these thinkers to cultivate a democratic culture capable of sustaining enduring political structures. They contend that the quality of our civic life is inextricably linked to the moral character of its citizens. When confronted with unlawful opposition, resorting to the force of law is one approach. Yet in instances where law and institutions are tainted by anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies, one can only paint the best alternative pictures (provided you do not resort to violence), holding out faith that one is not, in the words of John 1:23, “crying out in the wilderness.”

Turner raises a more fundamental question central to political life, that of how this politics of character and conversion handles the moral compromises often required by electoral politics. He is right to worry that I am silent on this. While the book primarily addresses the moral and cultural dimensions of democratic life, it does not preclude strategic political action. Baldwin, for example, had no problem advocating voting for Jimmy Carter rather than Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election because he believed the former created a wider window of time for sustained moral transformation. “And, since I am not the only black man to think this way, if Carter is reelected, it will be by means of the black vote, and it will not be a vote for Carter. It will be a coldly calculated risk, a means of buying time.”Footnote ¹ For Baldwin, voting for Carter did not endanger the foundation of democratic life. He managed the costs of living within American politics and considered what minimal framework was needed to create society anew. Baldwin was not alone. The ethical-political vision of these thinkers was not so pure that it was beyond the realism of American politics and the responsibility required to navigate it.

This is different from where I placed my emphasis in the book. But when noting missing elements, we must ask: does the philosophical architecture preclude recognition of other significant political questions, or does the framework permit an immanent critique? I believe my framework permits immanent critique, although I should have done more in the book to illuminate the point.

Pineda focuses on the book’s perceived romanticism, not the version found in stories of inevitable progress (which I criticize) but what she takes to be a form of ethical appeal purified of power and coercion. She does not dispute the argument I advance. However, Pineda worries that it gives the impression of being complete in its characterization of how key African American thinkers used rhetoric. I was candid in the book that this approach was partial. Notwithstanding, Pineda is right. The story I tell focuses on the noncoercive form of rhetorical appeals. It honors the affective and cognitive capacities of those to whom one appeals, with the idea that, once persuaded, they will be able to uphold a vision of a racially justice society, even when the laws are silent about proper ethical comportment vis-à-vis one’s black fellow citizens. As she points out with her example of Martin Luther King Jr., the aspiration to persuade from within seems to function without recourse to coercion and the desire to control or manipulate. Yet King had no problem deploying manipulation and control as a defensive political stance.

It would be surprising that anyone reading this book does not also remember, even if vaguely, Douglass’s dictum: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”Footnote ² Anyone with even a brief encounter with Wells will immediately see her strategic use of power to force change. Moments like these capture what the figures discussed were ready to do in the face of white supremacy’s insistence on controlling and extinguishing black life. We must not over-describe these moments; this is not the general tone of their writings, not even King’s. Admittedly, King makes the briefest of appearances in the book due to the weight of his theological commitments and this decision requires a more sustained elucidation that sadly I cannot provide here. Even when they reached for coercive approaches, they were never under the illusion that the entanglement of power and coercion by itself could bring about ethical transformation. All these thinkers realized that force alone could not secure what King called the beloved community, whether confined to the United States or beyond.

What is at work in Pineda’s criticism is the belief that I am too interested in the ethical life of the United States. It comes out in her claim that, by the end of his life, King largely agreed with Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael). This claim requires careful analysis, but the short version is that King and Ture worried in similar ways about these matters (as did Delany and Douglass), but they drew very different conclusions owing to different philosophical views of American ethical life and human nature. King’s Where do we Go From Here: Chaos or Community is a love-filled book; it offers a realistic look at the United States’ tendency toward chaos while presenting a prophetic vision of community before the Kingdom of God.

It may be that my focus on the United States is misplaced. Late in his life, Du Bois came to think something like this about his preoccupation with the US, but at the end of their lives, King and Baldwin didn’t share such a view even as they remained intensely critical of US politics. Pineda’s worry that my attempt to address the problem of white supremacy’s persistence by centering African Americans’ interest in character is exhausted may also hold some validity. I don’t finally think she is right. The thinkers in this book, to be a bit presentist, would say something like: there is no way to sustain the fight against inequality, the defense of unions, or the battle for the lives of the least of these without thinking that something about one’s very identity—one’s humanity—is at stake. In the concluding moments of his last book, King was clear about this: “Our hope for creative living … lies in our ability to reestablish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice.”Footnote ³

Taylor’s concerns focus on my treatment of Wells and the Afropessimists, and he worries that I may compromise depth for breadth. Regarding Wells, Taylor worries that I collapse the concepts of “sense of justice” and “conscience.” He questions whether Wells’s focus is on understanding right and wrong (an epistemic matter) or on cultivating the affective attachments necessary to act on such judgments. I intended to offer a general account of Wells’s moral-psychological commitments while providing sufficient depth to reveal their philosophical richness. I now understand that, to the analytically trained eye, my treatment of her thinking might appear too cursory.

I aimed to illustrate how Wells mobilized the “sense of justice” and “conscience” to foster ethical growth and self-scrutiny. The concept of “conscience” frequently appears in her discussions of political responsibility and ethical action. She speaks of conscience as both a property of the self and of the nation (as when she aspires to arouse the conscience of the nation). Wells’s account of the self is always social in character; she assumes this rather than argues it. There is no way to awaken conscience or a sense of justice independent of our acculturation into society. In this regard, her appeals are less epistemic and are rather deeply affective, aimed at turning the emotional and ethical sensibilities of her audience toward a specific configuration of right conduct. She does not believe she confronts a community wholly bereft of ethical norms of conduct, even if she means to expand the scope of who falls under them. Wells is uninterested in thinking of conscience as a private affair (hence I run it into a sense of justice, although in retrospect I should have provided more justification for doing so). The meaningfulness of conscience is found in precisely how it terminates in action vis-a-vis others.

Wells recognized that moral knowledge must be coupled with emotional commitment to drive meaningful action. But moral knowledge and emotional commitment are not distinct. She was a Christian until the end, and this shaped her views. This contains an important insight central to, but not dependent on, Christianity—namely, that emotions are often judgments of value about the world. Wells’s association of emotions with perception is why her emphasis on how things look, say lynching, matters a great deal to her. Her emphasis on recharacterizing lynching as horrific is an attempt to ready her reader to perceive lynching differently, as well as to shock the conscience and awaken a deeper moral sensibility. This approach does not abandon the distinction between belief and faith but insists on it. Wells’s faith in the capacity for ethical transformation is not just about holding correct beliefs but about fostering a moral disposition that compels action against injustice, especially when the evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. That there might be something like right and wrong action as entailed by our nature (which I believe Wells affirmed) and that we have the capacity to recognize this (which I also believe Wells affirmed) in no way means we will be rightly oriented in our conduct. Wells’s commitment to her fellows’ transformation in this regard is not finally secured by moral knowledge or the moral-psychological profile of humanity, thus necessitating faith.

Taylor’s worry about my reading of Afropessimists involves him asking me to imagine that they are claiming something other than what I think their words permit. Their claim could be that a real break with the past requires a future imagined on different terms. I don’t see evidence that this is what they are doing. But for the sake of the argument let us say that they are. It then seems to me that the account of perfectionism found in the book—a vision of the ascension of the soul in this world through a confrontation with the horrors of one’s history—should seem appealing. Rather than forgo politics (as Afropessimists often do), they should attempt to recast the meaning of politics by articulating how alternatives live in the interstices of social life and do so precisely because of the perfectionist orientation that attends human life.

I hope Darkened Light prompts readers to see the tradition it takes up as part of their shared intellectual inheritance. It is there for us all; we need only listen to its guidance.