#USIH2021 In Dialogue: The Politics of Black Freedom

MCNEIL: Thank you so much again, Dr. Spires, for agreeing to our interview for the S-USIH’s blog! A lot has changed since my New Books in African American Studies interview with you in Spring 2019 about your first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. One of the major differences, aside from both of our institutional affiliations changing, has been the coronavirus pandemic. While both experiencing and thinking through this moment, The Practice of Citizenship stuck with me due to your informative theorization, neighborly citizenship, or neighborliness. For those that have yet to read The Practice of Citizenship yet, what is neighborly citizenship and how did you arrive at this term?

SPIRES: Thank you for inviting me and for asking such great questions. I develop the concept as a counter to citizenship’s inherent exclusivity. I don’t know of a version of community that doesn’t, at some level, have an implicit sense of belonging and not belonging, even if the distinction is thin. Neighborliness suggests that belonging is about how we encounter those with whom we have no other ties. How do we identify the neighbor; how do we identify the citizen? On a basic level, the neighborly citizen doesn’t. Neighborly citizenship suggests that citizens enact their citizenship through supporting the communities and individuals around them with special focus on those with the most need. That work makes neighborhood. And, the principle is scalable: good neighbors make neighborhood. Good states think expansively about “the people” to whom they are responsible, beginning with those injured (including repairing state violence) and otherwise without access. I hadn’t worked the premise out this way at the time, but I think neighborly citizenship resonates with the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977): “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Thanks for the chance to make that connection in writing. If we develop community and allocate resources around the idea of removing oppression in all its forms and prioritizing the most vulnerable, then we all get free. For Absalom Jones, Richard Allen and others, that meant focusing on both free people of color and enslaved Africans. A nation premised on emancipating enslaved people and repairing the damage enslavement wrought would have to operate from a position of neighborliness. That’s exactly what Benjamin Banneker told Thomas Jefferson in 1792. Recent reading has me thinking about neighborliness as “radical love” via Cornell West’s 2017 Dartmouth lectures on W.E.B. DuBois and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s writing in M Archive and Dub.

How did I arrive at the term? The short answer: I got it from Sunday School growing up. To make friends, you must first show yourself to be friendly. To make neighbors, be a good neighbor. The longer answer: I began thinking along these lines because of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People: During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 (1794). The two ministers were defending Black Philadelphians against accusations that they stole from and extorted white victims while doing relief work during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Jones and Allen never mention the parable of the Good Samaritan or the love commandment by name. Instead, they shape their Narrative around the parable’s structure—something many readers with a passing knowledge of the Luke 10:25-37 conversation between Jesus and a lawyer would have recognized. In Jones and Allen’s rendering, it’s a narrative of ordinary Black folk—Philadelphia’s adjected Samaritans—supporting each other and white Philadelphians out of a sense of real sensibility: the notion that sensibility can only be expressed through the language of conduct. The “fellow feeling” contemporaneous theorists of republicanism posited as the republic’s connective tissue only worked if people acted on it on a basis of moral equality, rather than, say, a paternalistic version charity or a performative humanitarianism. This “real sensibility” could also check—to a point—the market’s corrupting influence. Jones and Allen weren’t the only ones who read the second commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” in this way. Political thinkers and theologians from Anthony Ashley Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury) and Jonathan Edwards to Phillis Wheatley and Banneker had been drawing on the concept towards similar ends, but Jones and Allen might be the first to place Black citizens in the position of the good neighbor, rather than the ones in need of charity.

MCNEIL: Neighborliness comes in the context of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic that struck Philadelphia. What can neighborliness show us about the contours of Black freedom in the context of catastrophe, especially as we brace ourselves for another national shutdown?

SPIRES: First, folks interested in the long history of racism and yellow fever epidemics should spend time with Rana Hogarth’s excellent study, Medicalizing Blackness (2017). COVID-19 has affected Black Americans disproportionately, and it’s not incidental that Black Americans also make up a disproportionate percentage of essential workers in service fields, not just nursing, but also nursing homes, cleaning services, retail, and other industries where people have been exposed to the virus. We can trace that history, especially in northern states, directly to the failures of both emancipations—the first gradual emancipation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the second emancipation after the U.S. Civil War. And, just as Jones and Allen critiqued Benjamin Rush and other contemporaneous doctors for basing their assumptions on racist data and case studies that took whiteness as their norm, we are facing an ongoing system in which Black people—especially Black women, as Serena Williams’s experience during childbirth and recent research demonstrate—are underdiagnosed and under treated. Benjamin Rush, famed physician and Constitutional framer, trained Jones and Allen to treat yellow fever patients, and they used this training to develop metrics for diagnosing Black patients. In other words, health outcomes for Black patients are directly related to the involved of Black doctors and others in medical training and public health initiatives.

Jones and Allen ask us to consider who gets called on to sacrifice in moments of crisis and whose sacrifices receive honor. I don’t highlight this point enough in the book: managing imprisoned people was one of their primary tasks. So, the city of Philadelphia drew on incarcerated people to cart bodies at the risk of catching the fever—not unlike the state of California’s drawing on incarcerated people to fight fires or the state of New York’s drawing on their labor to mass produce hand sanitizer. At the same time, Black nurses were one of the primary targets for accusations. The city called on Black Philadelphians to cart bodies, bleed sufferers, and otherwise fill in the city’s gutted infrastructure under the assumption that Black people were immune to the fever. As is often the case, they were wrong, and Black folk died as a result. These were people, especially Black women, charged with maintaining order and care on the ground as the elites debated policy, treatment, evacuation, etc. By all accounts, they did this work well. Jones and Allen reveal that no amount of virtue—public or private—could save black citizens from white betrayal and violence. Neighborly citizenship is not transactional. Delegates to the 1840 New York State Convention of Colored Citizens would argue that people should have to demonstrate virtue to access citizenship; instead, empowering people to practice citizenship produces a virtuous citizenry. “Is it a greater crime for a black to pilfer, than for a white to privateer?” Jones and Allen asked white readers. We see this same asymmetry in how media, law enforcement, and elected officials continue to treat Black activism as a threat, while codling and catering to white nationalists.

Neighborliness draws attention to Black organizing: churches (the Free African Church), mutual aid organizations (the Free African Society), and ad hoc collectives. They develop during the fever; they were ready to mobilize in times of crisis—and had been mobilizing throughout the crisis of Black freedom in a slave society. Today, some of the institutions, habits, and networks that have sustained us this far grew out of the current epidemic. Many, however, were already in place, but under resourced: foodbanks, mutual aid networks, religious and other volunteer institutions, kinship networks (biological and chosen), and the like. These are the same networks Stacey Abrams and others drew on over several years to shift electoral politics in Georgia and elsewhere. These collectives didn’t jes grew, they emerged from years of cultivating habits and surfacing networks and practices that establishment players had overlooked. So, both instances suggest that Black citizenship practices offer sustainable models that we should be supporting before, during, and after crisis moments.

The other part of this equation is how neighborliness functions as critique of market capitalism. The 1793 yellow fever epidemic exposed and exacerbated inequalities that were already present. A city, nation, or world order that measures success by profit and ethics by what the market will bear will fail everyone not affiliated with the ruling elite, eventually. Today, we might think about how wealthier nations have first access to the COVID-19 vaccine and about how the infrastructure, systemic racism, and settler colonialism in the United States might be barriers to the most vulnerable receiving care. Jones and Allen show real savvy in how they confront the epidemic in that they use their response to Matthew Cary to make a structural argument. They seize the opportunity, while all eyes are on them, to situate this local instance in a history of what we’d call racial capitalism. Classic Black Studies move.

MCNEIL: In The Practice of Citizenship Black women play an integral role in the context of your Black citizenship story. Describe the sort of political strategies they devised to advance Black freedom in the context of your book, and relate them to our moment where Black women and LGBTQ folk are leading the way toward a more progressive and radical future.

SPIRES: First off, shout out to the Colored Conventions Project and P. Gabrielle Foreman, who have prioritized accounting for Black women’s labor—official and otherwise—as a core principle. Working with the CCP has challenged and changed how I engage with archives and write about Black intellectual history. I also encourage anyone interested in a crash course in Black women’s activism to check out Martha S. Jones’s Vanguard (2020) and the growing number of exhibits featuring Black women over on coloredconventions.org.

Black women did it all, from fundraising and teaching to housing to lecturing to creating art. My own work tries to make this behind-the-scenes political work visible and to talk about some of the mechanisms that male-dominated institutions like the colored conventions used to hide or contain this work. If you look at the subscription rolls, ads for fairs, and other documents, you’ll find Black women formed the core of much of Black activism’s infrastructure. Traditionally gendered spaces like parlors weren’t just places of polite conversation, courtship, or “domestic labor,” they were training grounds, meeting places, and reading rooms. These unofficial sites cultivated what I describe in the book as critical and revolutionary citizenship—a stance towards the state that encouraged agitation as a fundamental citizenship practice. If I were writing Practice today, I would likely dedicate a chapter to Jarena Lee and Maria Stewart’s parlor politics: how Black women transformed spaces supposedly set off from politics and activism into central sites for citizenship work. I talk about it some through Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s writing, but there’s more work that needs to be done on this front. I love the way Jones writes about Lee in Vanguard, though, and I return to Elizabeth McHenry’s discussion of Stewart in Forgotten Readers (2002) often. At the same time, Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Stewart, Lee, and others weren’t hidden. Cary published and edited the Provincial Freeman (1853-1857), and while she initially collaborated with Samuel Ringgold Ward and other men and signed editorials M.A. Shadd, by 1854 she would demand readers stop misgendering her as “Mr.” or “Esquire” in favor of Mary A. Shadd. Shadd would also be among the first women recognized as an official delegate at a national convention of colored citizens in 1855.

Harper was one of the most prominent and visible writers and lecturers of her day, and I learned the concept of parrhesia—fearless speech—from her. Parrhesia involves speaking hard and untimely (as in out of turn) truths to power. What does it mean, Harper asks in Reconstruction, to have a nation claiming to be a bastion of republicanism that cannot even protect its own citizens from white violence? More, what does it mean that this same government not only does not care about this violence, but seems to sanction it? Lee did the same when she refused to watch a minister mangle the Word and took her own initiative to preach the sermon for him. This, after she had spent years convening meetings with women in parlors, because the A.M.E. Church refused her the right to preach—as in explicate scripture. The women of Ohio operated out of parrhesia when they threatened to leave the 1849 Ohio state convention if the male delegates did not recognize them. They insist on being present, even when institutions and infrastructures are built to either mute or eliminate that presence—and here I mean both U.S. and Black institutions. They also insist on not separating gender, sexuality, race, class, etc. into siloes or “single issues.” Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe this framework for understanding power.

Today, I think of people like Bree Newsome; Black Lives Matter founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi; Brittany Cooper, and others as carrying on this intellectual and activist tradition (I think with Cooper’s Beyond Respectability a lot). In an interview with Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian T. Warren, Nse Ufot, executive Chief Executive Officer of The New Georgia Project, talks about engaging voters through churches and other institutions; providing music, food, and child care at all events; and speaking in terms of empowerment and ownership of the process, rather than asking for permission. In each instance—nineteenth century and twentieth—folks are creating new infrastructure or making new uses of existing infrastructure to practice citizenship, especially when and as official spaces continue to do harm, either actively or through neglect. Where antebellum Black activists used conventions, newspapers, and public lectures, contemporary activists use social media and (not new) existing churches, civic organizations, and other collectives.

MCNEIL: What does writing about the lives and aspirations of Black freedom seekers mean to you and how does this feeling fuel you during moments of spiritual despair?

SPIRES: I like the phrase freedom seekers. It suggests that freedom is always a process rather than a destination—a horizon we work towards. Part of me wants to start this answer with something about resilience or “dogged strength” a la W.E.B. Du Bois, and those sentiments are certainly there, and they do fuel me. But, honestly, I’m consistently inspired by their humor, joy, fun. Reading Black newspapers feels like scanning Twitter in that much of my feed offers critiques, tragedy, and calls to action. And yet, and often from the same sources, there’s music, funny gifs (pronounced jiff, I’m a nerd), and signifying among family. At the height of the post-Fugitive-Slave-Act darkness of the 1850s, William J. Wilson, James McCune Smith, and Mary Frances Vashon Colder are cracking jokes on each other through pseudonyms. Wilson’s Ethiop presents himself as a stylish man of the town, hailing from Brooklyn with attitude and up to mischief. One of my favorite anecdotes from Ethiop is his account of Frederick Douglass’s visits to Manhattan in 1855. He describes a scene where Douglass engages in conversation with a host of pseudonymous correspondents (Ethiop never uses their real names) and attempts to be serious amidst the banter. Finally, however, Douglass, “Shorn of his natural gravity…breaks out” to tell his own story, “and peals of round, rolling laughter succeeds.” Here’s a group of intellectual heavies at a serious meeting in a moment when one could seriously question whether emancipation would ever happen in the United States, and they’re finding the time to laugh. I imagine the collective noting Douglass’s careworn face, the weight he’s carrying with him, and wordlessly deciding that this dude needs to laugh. That’s community. That’s family.

These moments remind me that Black folk are always multifaceted, always creating and imagining, always expanding Blackness beyond whatever container of suffering anti-black racism attempts to place it in. Harper would say poets are important in moments of crisis and spiritual despair precisely because poetry and song can lift people up. Think Verzus, OutKast, Kirk Franklin, and Eve Ewing. I come back to the humor and art, because that’s how my family operates. Humor isn’t a way to hide from the pain or the “more serious” work of political and social change; it’s a companion, and often a tool. Toni Morrison’s novels teach us that, too.

I keep coming back to Harper, because she had a gift for acknowledging the justified despair people felt while maintaining faith in Black folks’ capacity to make a way for themselves—and also a faith in America to choose a just path. Hers was not a blind faith, but rather one borne of traveling across the country over the nineteenth century, lecturing in big halls and rickety churches, and correspondence with agents and passengers on the underground railroad. She had practical hope (faith, after all, is the substance of things hoped for), and she put in the work to make that hope a reality. Faith without works is dead.

MCNEIL: Invoking the great Robin D.G. Kelley here, what are you freedom dreaming?

SPIRES: It’s funny that you invoke Robin D.G. Kelley. Freedom Dreams has been on my mind quite a bit lately. I love this early moment from Freedom Dreams (2002): “I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us.” So, what am I freedom dreaming: on a very basic level I dream about going fishing with my grandma, who passed away a few years ago. I dream of a world without “white folks” stories or the “second sight” Du Bois talks about that feels to me a lot like a racialized Spidey-sense. I dream of a world where Black grandmas and great grandmas (and grandfathers, too, though I didn’t grow up with one)—the elders—tell the story of how white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and state-sponsored racial capitalism evaporated under the heat of love and justice. Tackling climate change, for instance, would be so much easier—or maybe tackling climate change will be the vector for addressing these others—if the Global North in general and the United States in particular couldn’t get away with consistently foisting environmental harms on peoples of color. My therapist would point me to the both/and. These problems aren’t mutually exclusive, and like women’s suffrage and Black men’s suffrage, the framing presents a false and harmful binary.

Maybe I focus so much on grandmas, because they bring a perspective on history that one can only get by living/surviving/sometimes thriving for a long time. My own grandma was born in 1923 in Holmes County, Mississippi. Her parents owned land and were relatively prosperous, but that had evaporated by the time I came along, largely because her brothers migrated to Flint and other northern spaces instead of returning to Mississippi to work farms after military service. My mom’s generation grew up picking cotton for “white folks,” but also lived on property that was theirs. It’s a weird, but totally Southern, mix of propertied poverty. That mix meant that they grew up with very little but didn’t recognize it in that way (“we didn’t know we were poor”). I saw my grandma go cook and clean for “Cousin Joe Brooks,” a white man who thought my calling him “cousin” humorous. (My four-year-old mind knew only kinfolks, church folks, and strangers, so he got in where he could fit in.) I suspect he, like many white folks, could humor me as long as he thought his position and identity were secure.

I dream of a generation for whom our present is just a memory of the before times—as distant to them as, say, Exodus is to us—only I hope it doesn’t take that many generations.