As the United States grapples with its latest cycles of racial reckoning and violent backlash, a book about a nineteenth-century figure might seem quaint—even slightly nostalgic to the uninformed. Quite to the contrary, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass by Nick Bromell is exactly the kind of book our nation and era needs, but not for the reasons we might anticipate. African American political thought has multiple approaches that preserve it as a rich area for engagement. The Powers of Dignity is situated within the most common approach: a focus on a single thinker. Like many of the figures he preceded—including Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Ida B. Wells—Douglass is a transformative thinker whose published works merit an interdisciplinary oeuvre of its own. Drawing upon a longstanding interdisciplinary archive, Bromell provides a helpful interpretive map of the flourishing scholarship on Douglass.

In an era of sharp political polarization, contending with Frederick Douglass, who has been framed more recently as a moderate racial assimilationist, would typically be a recipe for offending everyone and pleasing no one. Although Bromell’s approach cannot properly be called intersectional, it does rely on strong foundations of race- and gender-based theorizing. In search of Douglass’s “fugitive political philosophy,” Bromell relies on the concept of Black fugitivity from political theorists Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker. Interestingly, Bromell’s second touchstone for locating Douglass’s political philosophy relies on standpoint epistemology, a widely known approach within feminist theory.

On Bromell’s account, the hidden connection between the formative humanizing experiences of care from Douglass’s grandmother (among others) and the tension with the dehumanization that is essential to the functioning of chattel slavery in the United States forge a unique political standpoint. These experiences of slavery and the contingent, circumscribed versions of freedom that follow are—to Bromell—what makes Douglass a unique thinker. To wit: while grounding the origins of Douglass’s political philosophy in his break with William Lloyd Garrison, Bromell expands our analysis beyond the historical fact of the break to identify a commitment to Black human dignity. This concept of Black human dignity remained at the center of Douglass’s activism and public writings throughout his life. It relies on the most basic fact that Black people are human. Resting upon that fact alone leads him to conclude that Black people merit all the dignity of treatment and human rights that logically follow.

It is here where the contemporary connections emerge in quite provocative fashion. Bromell portrays Douglass as a thinker unafraid to remix, tracing key words in his philosophy to the 1828 work of George Combe, author of the racist text The Constitution of Man. Quite obviously, Douglass takes what he considers valuable and uses it for liberatory purposes, a strategy no different from Iris Marion Young’s use of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work in her famous essay “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” That said, I could not help but wonder about the loss of this strategy in the current political moment. At best, a contemporary understanding less nuanced than Bromell’s would render the philosophy Bromell so painstakingly uncovers derivative and unworthy of much attention. At worst, Douglass is arguing from avowedly racist premises, and he risks a relatedly provocative yet unsurprising location these days: as a target of so-called cancel culture.

Setting aside the ramifications of Bromell’s location of Douglass for a moment, Bromell lucidly captures the tragic absurdity of having to insist upon one’s own humanity: “Douglass’s point is that the very claim that Blacks are not human puts him in the ludicrous position of having to stand before an audience and prove that he himself is a man” (p. 41). The absurdity is produced by a concept of human dignity that is contingent upon the recognition of others to function. In this vein, Douglass betrays intellectual roots in a natural rights liberal approach not fully consistent with the experience of being enslaved, a point discussed below with regard to Bromell’s reliance on standpoint theory.

Humanity, dignity, and (later) honesty are framed as the building blocks of Douglass’s philosophy. We may still despair today over people’s inability and/or unwillingness to enter into the tension of securing the equal protection of Black people’s human dignity and freedom amidst founding documents and the narratives around them. But the principle of honesty makes standing in that tension more than an agnostic feature of Douglass’s philosophy—it is a moral obligation.

Douglass’s obligation to enter the “debate” regarding Black humanity is part of a longer trajectory that includes everyone from Phillis Wheatley and Ottobah Cugoano in the eighteenth century to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones in the twenty-first century. Bromell’s analysis raises a broader question for scholars of African American political thought: What are we to do with the need to respond in legible frames when such legibility is designed to dehumanize and delegitimize? In a communicative context of gross inequality, how do we simultaneously contest and change the very terms of the conversation?

Bromell’s grounding in Black fugitivity and standpoint theory is broad but not necessarily deep. It was surprising to find little if any acknowledgement of the limitations of standpoint theory specifically, leading at times to the sense that Douglass’s brilliance as a political theorist can be reduced solely to his experience as a slave. This risk emerges specifically in chapter 6, where Bromell lucidly traces three steps to humanization, culminating in the connection between our self-consciousness and the recognition of both our humanity and worth. Standpoint theory generally conceptualizes standpoints as binary and oppositional, suggesting that each standpoint is far more internally consistent than Bromell takes Douglass’s political philosophy to be. The rather pat story Bromell describes of Douglass’s journey to political consciousness and the aesthetic faculty that establishes Black humanity as a philosophical fact in chapter 6 (pp. 144–146) stands in marked contrast to the profound and complex tensions Bromell convincingly argues are located in Douglass’s philosophy earlier in the book. Moreover, the simplicity of the center-margin binary at the heart of standpoint theory also belies Douglass’s own position as we account for his position on questions of gender equality (where Douglass as a male is at the center) and Bromell’s genealogy itself, which focuses on Douglass’s roots in natural rights liberalism as well. One question lingers: from where else does Douglass’s political philosophy originate?

This is ultimately a minor concern in what is otherwise a strong account of Douglass’s political philosophy. In sum, The Powers of Dignity is both an exciting contribution to the literature on Frederick Douglass and a sobering reminder that the roots of our democracy and the theorizing that accompanies it are “a site of endless struggle” (p. 198). Bromell’s analysis of Douglass helps us see the painful racial dynamics of our present United States in a more pragmatic light, reminding us that our best hope for this democracy is to accept and acknowledge its constitutive “endless struggle” rather than the understandable but misinformed aspiration that we will one day comprehensively and permanently overcome the original sin of racism. Our lives, dare I say, depend on it.