III. Content Matter Discussion
I want to show what I think is possible by analyzing different stories from the Blight and Nell Irvin Painter biographies a rhetorical inquiry question at a time. All together, the question list can serve as a framework for studying rhetoric in the high school English classroom. I’m using Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism to guide me in this task. Crowley’s project is about getting people to talk, and through the lens of rhetoric, she puts values back into the realm of argumentative discourse.
Here is a quick list of the questions and how they might interface with SPACECAT if you don’t want to read all the way. I hope you do though because these are storied lives and the questions themselves could use some background to pose well for students:
- What is the disagreement?
- What values undergird the beliefs expressed? AND Why do we need the beliefs we live out?
- What is the difference that prompted the argument? OR What is the chain of difference that led to this position?
- Where did the persuasive event temporarily arrive?
- Is the argument reasonable, or is the arguer relying on something else like authority/credibility/personal branding, or emotion, perhaps through story or eloquence?
- How does the speaker simultaneously interrupt and hook into, formulate and connect with, circulating discourses?
- What arguments are available to the speaker in his or her time and space? OR How does the speaker recombine or disorient already aligned forces?
- Do you notice evidence of ideology or assertions about the way things are that are presented as facts instead of conjectures? OR How does the speaker allow for the movement of difference?
- What is the belief doing for the person who holds it, and how does that belief influence their behavior? AND Is the belief expressing a fantasy on any scale?
1. Disagreements motivate us to express ourselves, and we have to be willing to disagree openly to maintain democracy.26 Douglass was fresh on the abolitionist circuit, and he had found his vocation as orator. At this point, he was a Garrisonian which meant he was being mentored by William Lloyd Garrison whose abolitionist doctrine was defined by moral suasion and immediatism. The former meant that hearts and minds needed changing before the laws could change, and the latter that slavery was an individual and national sin.27 A fruitful exercise would be tracing the Garrisonian ideas through the 1845 Narrative. This was basically a religious movement, so at gatherings, Douglass and company were attacking the consciences of communities and particularly the hypocrisy of the church and its clergy. The churches in Concord had closed their doors. Blight quotes and connects: “Douglass did not disappoint. In the ‘inconvenient, uncomfortable’ space of the courthouse town hall, Douglass held forth in the afternoon on how he was ‘not a fugitive from slavery, but a fugitive slave.’ That he was still ‘in slavery’ was due to the American churches’ sanctifying and justifying the tyranny of slaveholding. Looking his audience in the eyes, he declared, ‘You are yourselves our enslavers’’’.28 This was a theme that Douglass could hold court on and can be linked to his observations of Covey in the Narrative.
The first question is: What is the disagreement? If both sides don’t clarify their positions, the dispute does not include respect for the opponent and the outcome might not be just.29 Covey used biblical chapter and verse to justify his use of the lash, but northern churches were likely giving silent approval by kowtowing to cultural habits or backing down from obligations like in Concord. Why? Why don’t we like to disagree? Because disagreement seems to be a precursor to discord.30 The goal is to foster disagreement without bringing out any level of violence: impoliteness, threats, coercion, physical harm.31 Violence seeks deterrence; if it silences, it does not guarantee persuasion.32 If democratic confrontation isn’t allowed, we risk arguments based on other forms of collective identification (like race).33 Douglass is extremely direct in the above quote. He widens the location of slavery to include the North because of his presence, still technically enslaved, there. He mastered the call-out, but on another occasion when speaking in Scotland, Douglass tells a fictitious story of himself being auctioned off to raise money for the cause of religious freedom overseas. He demands that churches in Scotland fundraising in the American South “Disgorge the plunder”.34 No part of slavery or the slavetrade should exist in religious institutions. Disagreements are multifaceted, but students should try to deeper and wider than the disagreement was with slavery. Hopefully, you can see how these questions swell.
2. It’s very difficult to disagree with people whose motivation stems from moral or passionate commitment, and we know that desires and values influence what we believe.35 Rhetoric, as opposed to strict reason, can also argue from values standpoint.36 So we want to ask the question: What values undergird the beliefs expressed? This is not always easy to tease out and can take some excavation. There is no question that Truth evolved. She went from being a sexually abused (by her mistress) slave, to a preacher in the pentacostal Methodist vein, to meeting abolitionists and feminists and hitting the road. But Truth could be somewhat of a sacred clown, often “interrupt[ing] earnest proceedings with irreverence”.37 In the 1850s, spiritualism had become vogue with reform-minded Americans because salvation was put in the hands of people and original sin left behind. While Truth eventually accepted the existence of spirits, she was very skeptical of seances, which were an extension of the idea that the spirits of God and people cannot be separated.38 At her first seance, she made fun of the proceedings, insisting she knew better, saying, “Come spirit, hop up here on the table, and see if you can’t make a louder noise”.39
Within belief structures, some values are considered non-negotiable, and instead of entering an argument ready to risk a changed mind, people invest their energy disavowing other claims or going after people.40 Truth was solidly in the God camp. She had little patience for people who lost themselves in a fit of religious fervor and “refused to attend meetings where the ecstasy turned bruising”.41 So she was a God-fearing Christian who valued self-control who was unconventional in the more middle class settings she sought out. Once in Salem, Ohio, she interrupted Douglass when he was preaching blood and armed resistance against whites. The meeting was brought to a standstill when she said, “Frederick, is God gone?”42 In both of these stories, Truth was listening very intently, either for spirits or before asking a clarifying question, but she clearly had and shared her doubts. She valued honest communication, as her name suggests, and impermanence, which her name also suggests.43 We must expose ourselves to other viewpoints to resist indoctrination.44
An extension question is: Why do we need the beliefs we live out? Painter points out a long history of African American women acting with the support of supernatural aid to counter worldly struggles.45 Truth is within a tradition and a unique expression of it. Her religious values might be part of her motive and confidence to speak, and the trauma of childhood and adulthood could also influence reaching toward the stability of a belief structure. To her merit, she never seemed rigid or stuck. Values are subject to change, and this is what we want students to embody when arguing.
3. Liberal thought values freedom, tolerance, privacy, reason, the rule of law, and equality (more in some times and places than others).46 Aristotle, the old rhetorician, thought participation in the community was what freedom was about, where we are neither ruled or ruling.47 He thought there were three issues the polis can consider: what we should do, what has been done, and what actions deserve praise or blame.48 All three implicate values applied to the future, the past, and present accordingly. In the liberal tradition, values are treated as private affairs, separate from reason, and not up for grabs on the city state’s agenda.49 If we aim for consensus in a democracy, we might lose our democratic practices because politics is not rational: passions move us and groups aren’t individuals.50 We have to keep arguing! Our identities are formed by excluding and establishing hierarchies, and difference sparks ongoing discourse.51 What could our question be? How about...What is the difference that prompted the argument? OR even better: What is the chain of difference that led to this position?
As previously discussed, Douglass began his abolitionist career as a Garrisonian, but their purist strategy of only battling slavery in the arena of public opinion and not also the lawbooks, along with some restrictive management techniques of the uncontainable Douglass, brought about a nasty break-up between Garrison and Douglass, who had a father-son type relationship. Another contributing factor was Douglass’s first trip to Great Britain to escape a capture that his elevating profile was making more likely.52 There he started wanting to be his own platform without limits. He wrote to Garrisonians back home, “I will speak in any meeting where free speech is allowed”.53 He was packaging his own message and didn’t think it at odds to claim slavery is evil at the same time that it is a threat to national security. Hurt and on fire, he defended his right to change his views by telling his old friends that “denunciation, coldness, and unkindness were not arguments”.54 Douglass aligned himself with the strategy of Gerrit Smith which involved an anti-slavery interpretation of the constitution and political action because “every man is an abolitionist for himself, but every man is not unselfish to be an abolitionist for another”.55 I love Douglass’s description of how anti-slavery meetings could be during this time: “disgraceful, alarming, divided, united, glorious, and most effective”.56 Douglass again defines himself by opposition and embraces the adversarial. People are not enemies; they are opponents.57 Douglass could never let go of a slight, saying, “Let no man succeed in insulting me!”, so the anti-slavery infighting wound him up.58 There is a possibility for respect and justice because each man is willing to address and be addressed by someone else, but the fight did get pretty nasty (Douglass was accused of having an affair), enough that Stowe stepped in asking Garrison to squash the beef.59 But the point remains: if either side caved against his will, both sides would be less than before.60 Douglass was right that the war would ultimately be about motives not opinions. As a politician he always took the most pragmatic approach, even as he got more radical, and looking back, he said it was hard to believe these internal debates were so heated.61 Do you see the dominoes that lead to Douglass’s position? It takes some inference and context, and often research, to work your way back in terms of how an argument emerged, but it’s much easier to humanize the arguer when you do.
4. If students are to be rhetoricians or rhetors, they are trying, per Aristotle’s definition to “see the available means of persuasion”.62 If they’re good, they will be able to find openings that help everyone involved think about themselves and the situation, and their relationship to the situation, differently.63 Keep these openings in mind. Of course, this superpower can be used responsibly or irresponsibly, as the common identification of rhetoric with spin tells us.64 Aristotle noted that there is ethical risk involved in putting art and personality into the commons.65 Ancients called rhetoric invention, and the discovering and crafting of arguments is where the art emerges.66 Over time, people refine what works well and develop theoretical perspectives which allow others to observe well.67 So there is a playbook, and there is a game with some rules, but the terms winner and loser aren’t helpful because persuasion isn’t just about right and wrong; it’s about a willingness to change, something more like teamwork.68 There is always more to say, so the question that I think can be applied to rhetorical situations is: Where did the persuasive event temporarily arrive?
Truth’s white audiences often saw her as an object of art or something exotic. She didn’t have much control over how others represented her (Stowe was known to “do Sojourner,” imitating Truth’s baritone voice and making her dialect too southern), but Truth initiated what others in turn used for their own ends.69 Truth’s “tough talk and humorous delivery allowed her to get away with sharp criticism but allowed her listeners to ignore her meaning”.70 The good preacher chooses her passage wisely, so by evoking the story of Esther at a women’s rights convention in New York in 1853, she is speaking about a woman who is also from another threatened group, the Jews. Esther was queen and had been passing as a Gentile, but when she finds out that a massacre of Jews was about to happen, she risks her life and reveals her identity by asking the King for help when she wasn’t summoned. The king asks her what she needs twice, offers her half the kingdom, and invites the Jews to kill those who would attack them. Truth suggests intersectionality, and in comparing the government to the king, makes governing men in America look pretty stingy about what they are offering. Her audience would have known their bible pretty well, and the name Esther might have lit up the rest of that story in their minds. But because Truth is humble at the beginning of her speech (“I know ‘a little mite’ about women’s rights and wanted ‘to throw in my little mite, to keep the scales a-movin.’”) and ends it with trademark, spunky playfulness (“I don’t want any man to be killed, but I am sorry to see them so short minded. But we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is comin’.”), people could miss the veiled threat to men and whites.71 This persuasive event temporarily arrived at one place in the immediate context because of widespread Old Testament re-readings and Truth’s tone and demeanor, but arrives for us as code beyond simple metaphor, as anger, and as a black woman refusing to choose race or gender, choosing both. Also, because I get to read these words, the double meaning of mite stands out to me. Did Truth sneak a humblebrag in there?
5. Liberal discourse seeks understanding, but just because we understand something doesn’t mean we automatically agree.72 Liberal discourse asks that morals and emotions are put to the test by reason. The old Enlightenment man, John Locke, distrusted enthusiasm, what he called a “warmed brain”, because its products can’t be proved by anything other than intuition.73 There is a difference between understanding and conviction.74 But once ignorance has been fixed by education, the goal of the rhetor is to convict, do away with error, and pull out all the stops to resist resistance.75 Remember that logos is just one of the appeals in the triangle. Maybe, instead of listing appeals, we should ask: Is the argument reasonable, or is the arguer relying on something else like authority/credibility/personal branding or emotion, perhaps through story and eloquence?
You can see it in the title, but Blight’s biography takes care to describe Douglass as a prophet throughout. His thesis rings true. He includes some characteristics of prophets like the apocalyptic capacity to think of history as a capital ‘S’ Story with endings and regenerations, like how prophets must be shattered in order to shatter others, and like his engagement with society over its fundamental values.76 After Douglass returns from that first transformative trip to Great Britain, he gets angrier. This corresponds with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision, leading up to secession and carrying through the Civil War. He begins to egg on violence. Of the fugitive-slave crisis: “Two or three dead slaveholders will make this law a dead letter”.77 We know from his first autobiography that he could brawl, and he would throw down to protect himself during abolitionist meetings turned riots. But while talking of violence is not committing it, Douglass doesn’t hold back. His style is the vehicle for how he views reality, and racist policy and racial violence were teaching him. Then he turned around and taught, “[Black people] need this deed for their self-respect. An image in the American mind, Douglass asserted, had to be destroyed--that of fugitives who ‘quietly cross their hands, adjust their ankles to be chained, and march off unhesitatingly to the hell of slavery.’ In the public mind, he said, such behavior was judged ‘their normal condition.’ But no longer. ‘This reproach must be wiped out, and nothing short of resistance on the part of colored men, can wipe it out. Every slaveholder who meets a bloody death...is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race. Resistance is, therefore, wise as well as just’”.78 Is this argument reasonable? Is it moral? Is it justifiable political violence? Emotions were running high, but rightfully so. As we attempt to separate reason from force of delivery, we also must remember that reason and emotion need each other and build on each other.79 Douglass’s philosophy of violence is great fodder for classroom conversation. He saw Black Lives Matter coming, quoting Isaiah, “There is no peace, said my God, to the wicked”.80
6. We also have to consider that the language we use and how we adapt it to time and place constructs us and the world.81 Words and speech refer to some part of reality, and they can join tightly to ideologies and beliefs that play out in communities.82 Language is slippery and foundational at the same time. We can’t think without it. And this sounds very abstract, but when we say a word like slavery there are associations the word carries with it. In America, black chattel slavery is evoked. I’ve now also heard sex-trafficking described as modern slavery. I grew up with a Baptist minister father, so I also think of Hebrew enslavement in Egypt. I think of the lasting impact of slavery in America and the shapeshifting of oppression. Language, like human subjectivity, can change, can be more than one thing, and is contingent (dependent on meanings that have come before).83 When I see “No Justice, No Peace” tagged on a monument-less pedestal, I now think Isaiah, and I think Douglass. As rhetors, we must use the language available already as a result of shared living to make an argument.84 We already know Douglass and Truth could Bible-thump. Douglass carried a book called The Columbian Orator with him out of slavery which provided him with not only the conventions of elocution, but also “a vocabulary of liberation”.85 Because they are tightly networked, words can be ground for persuasion. Here’s the question: How does the speaker simultaneously interrupt and hook into, formulate and connect with, circulating discourses?86
Truth was speaking at a Millerite revival. The Millerites were end times theology with a date set and everything, and Truth had just started preaching as a profession. She knew she wasn’t a Millerite when ministers started roiling the crowd. She calmed the people down by calling them “children” and asking them why they were so frenzied, “Are you not commanded to watch and pray?” She then turned to the ministers, and had this to say to everybody: “Here you are talking about being ‘changed in the twinkling of an eye.’ If the Lord should come, he’d change you to nothing! for there is nothing to you. You seem to be expecting to go some parlor away up somewhere, and when the wicked have been burnt, you are coming back to walk in triumph over their ashes--this is to be your New Jerusalem!! Now I can’t see any thing so very nice in that, coming back to such a muss [her word] as that will be, a world covered with the ashes of the wicked! Besides, if the Lord comes and burns--as you say he will--I am not going away; I am going to stay here and stand the fire, like Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednago! And Jesus will walk with me through the fire, and keep me from harm. Nothing belonging to God can burn, any more than God himself; such shall have no need to go away to escape the fire! No I shall remain. Do you tell me that God’s children can’t stand fire? It is absurd to think so”.87 Yes, that’s a long quote from an observer of her rebuke, but we should savor the precious few words we have from Truth. Truth to form, she cites biblically, but she takes the destructive power of fire and makes it a proving ground. She argues for an earth-bound struggle with God’s help, not a gloating survival. The fire is proof of relationship with God instead of a means of separation. Also, by denying that change can happen quickly, those who can, amount to nothing because they don’t have much substance to begin with. Her words tapped into the situation at hand and reframed a vindictive mindset that seemed to yearn for death. She pivots on the words ‘nothing’ and ‘fire’ in a similar way that she does on ‘black’ telling another crowd, “It took my black face to bring out your black hearts”.88 It’s word hinges; it’s serious fun.
7. The question that comes next is: What arguments are available to the speaker in his or her time and space? This question is huge, an encircling context question, a consideration of speaker-audience-purpose, the process behind choices. Postmodern thought has turned binaries (black/white) into relationships (shades of gray).89 Because of history, ideology, and power structures, the range of possibilities for argument within a given situation varies by person.90 Truth could be scathing when criticizing white people, but the way she said it made them laugh. Truth’s affect or mood often stood in for the reality of what she said. Can-do-ness, or the power of the capable, emerges because forces like time and place, an available disagreement, an available argument, and who the speaker is (and that he or she spoke) have aligned in one moment.91 Another way to ask the question of this paragraph is: How does the speaker recombine or disorient already aligned forces92?
It was quite the bad habit in the 1800s for white people to racially describe black people, even if they weren’t necessarily trying to offend. Resisting racist discourse in a country founded on it is difficult. Pathways become ruts, and white racism is a hegemony that is “still undergoing challenge”.93 An example comes from an article about Douglass’s first speech in Ireland in 1845. Here’s Blight’s version of what a member of the press had to say: “Enthralled with his mixed parentage, the reporter declared the orator’s appearance...singularly pleasing and agreeable. The hue of his face and hands is rather yellow brown or bronze, while there is little if anything, in his features of that peculiar prominence of lawyer face, thickness of lips, and flatness of nose, which peculiarly characters the true Negro type. His voice is well toned and musical.’ Exasperated by these racial characterizations, which he encountered almost everywhere, Douglass sometimes snapped back, declaring in a Cork newspaper they they ‘looked like a good advertisement from a slave trader’”.94 Truth also had to deal with categorical specifications, as we’ll look at more later. These exotized descriptions were part of how community was defined between blacks and whites, and such commonplaces, as Crowely tells us, help define communities by frequent usage even as they hold extensive arguments that are not often said.95 Commonplaces are said when for some reason community values need to be put on display, but because of their familiarity in the community, commonplaces can also be used to launch an argument, which Douglass does here.96 He deftly links such language to the auction block and shows how systemic racism evolves and why abolition continues after The Emancipation Proclamation. It becomes an argument because Douglass is able to bring an ideology to the surface, to consciousness.97 Ideology is a great topic for the rhetorician because it is a display of how beliefs connect.
8. If Douglass or Truth happened to change any hearts and minds in racist and slaveholding America, it’s because they were able to resonate, or politically arouse people to join together, and do it well enough to outpace competing ideologie.98 And anyway, most likely their influence would have been only part, a link, of why that person transformed.99 Ideological values, along with fantasy and emotion, are major motivators for behavior.100 When someone’s “densely articulated ideology” is threatened, it’s a personal threat because there is a personal cost to losing the structures around which your life orbits.101 Sometimes belief structures are used to explain everything in a person’s life! When language related to a tightly knitted belief structure is evoked, other language (meaning) is triggered.102 This is why people imbricated within a belief structure can make connections not necessarily tied to reason, and these connections then get repeated ad infinitum and often thoughtlessly.103 These connections create a very high level of sympathetic resonance across their lives. Ideology channels attention, inspires emotional reactions, and then ideas domino, again forming a chain that must be followed to the source.104 So ideology is always interested, and similarly it takes a never-ending, never-disinterested process to generate alternative positions (another reason why SPACECAT is maybe too static in how it prompts responses).105 Audiences can listen and change themselves when a climate is created that allows it. This paragraph’s rhetorical inquiry question comes from the ancient idea that what exists and what doesn’t, what’s good and what isn’t, and what’s possible and impossible should be referred to as conjecture instead of facts.106 This accounts for the movement of difference, and keeps arguments productive.107 So...Do you notice evidence of ideology or assertions about the way things are that are presented as facts instead of conjectures? OR How does the speaker allow for the movement of difference?
Truth’s famous breast-baring episode works to unpack this. Painter cites the following account of what happened. By the late 1850s Truth had enough draw as a speaker to put on a series of meetings in Indiana, Some men kept one of these meetings from ending, claiming that Truth was a man. The fight for authenticity was raging for people outside of the dominant white, male culture. Pro-slavery people in the audience wanted her to show her breast off-stage to women who would report back to the crowd. Confusion and uproar ensued, but Truth shamed her questioners: “Sojourner told them that her breasts had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring; that some to those white babies had grown to man’s estate; that, although they had suckled her colored breasts, they were, in her estimation, for more manly than they (her persecutors) appeared to be; and she quietly asked them, as she disrobed her bosom, if they, too, wished to suck! In vindication of her truthfulness, she told them that she would show her breast to the whole congregation; that it was not to her shame that she uncovered her breast before them, but to their shame”.108 Truth really keeps the categories in check. She claims responsibility for strong examples of manhood while infantilizing her hateful audience and their insinuations.109 She resists being just a scrutinized body, throws light on double standards in regards to black bodies vs. white bodies, and avoids any sexual scandal by exploding the madonna-whore dichotomy.110 She certainly allows for the movement of difference. Truth poses here as a southern slave as she speaks to pro-slavery agitators for more black women than just herself within the system of slavery. Her ideology is black feminist, but she allows her audience to reach their own conclusions. She is persuasive, not prescriptive.
9. You are patient to be with me this far, and you are reminded of the shortcut. We just need to talk a little more about motivation. Beliefs are social and must be useful.111 Crowley writes, “Our beliefs are continuously formed and transformed by our lifelong interactions with ourselves”.112 Rhetors must pay attention to how beliefs fit into their audience’s economy of values. People determine “where, how, and with what intensities” they can become involved in the world around points de capiton (quilting points) that hegemonies (dominant dispositions, prevailing ways of seeing) attach to.113 These collectively determined nodes help us determine what is significant and what gets us in our feelings, and then, in a feedback loop, emotions are the experiences that provide the foundation for our values.114 This is how the points de capiton get fixed and determine identity and resist difference.115 We get emotionally attached. So values and emotions definitely influence behavior.116 Desire arises because there is perceived or actual lack.117 Fantasies, a type of desire, are “pleasure without obligation,” and collective fantasies we call myth.118 Myth is there to try to fix some kind of disruption in society, and it has a simplifying effect as it covers up the fact that we can’t live up to mythological expectations.119 Language and culture, the imagination, and the real shape our personal feelings, tastes, and opinions, but are we focused enough on the real?120 The real is what keeps values conversations communal and up for argument. We ask ourselves: What is the belief doing for the person who holds it, and how does that belief influence their behavior? AND Is the belief expressing a fantasy on any scale?
Let’s bring ourselves down to the real. Waiting for a ferry, Douglass was once out walking in Battery Park (Manhattan) with two white, female friends of his, the Griffiths sisters. Julia Griffiths, from England, helped Douglass run his first newspaper. Douglass often relied on white women to be his intellectual companions and to make possible his hectic schedule. But back to the story: they were attacked and assaulted by six white men, and Douglass fought them off with an umbrella. Closer to the dock, one of the same assailants jumped out and punched Douglass in the face. The Times printed articles that argued Douglass deserved it for violating racial-sexual boundaries. Douglass of course used this attack to make his case even stronger: “His offense, he argued, had never been the companionship with white women, but the assumption of equality with them. America’s aristocracy of skin could not tolerate such behavior...Douglass argued that the term ‘prejudice’ was simply too weak and ‘innocent’ to capture what blacks endured. A more ‘savage’ language was required…’Properly speaking,’ Douglass contended, ‘prejudice against color does not exist in this country. The feeling (or whatever it is) which we call prejudice, is no less than a murderous, hell-born hatred of every virtue which may adorn the character of a black man,’ Black men were acceptable as ‘appendages,’ he said. While ‘riding down Broadway in company with ladies,” Douglass wrote, they observed ‘several white ladies riding with black servants.’ Those well-dressed carriage drivers did not offend the hooligans who attacked Douglass and his companions. Douglass relished his ‘impudence’; equality, not color, offended. He had given definition and texture to the idea of racism”.121 Douglass had certainly been shaped by other experiences like this in his life. He “‘could not remember to have made a single antislavery tour’ when he had ‘not been assailed by this mean spirit of caste’”.122 Douglass built his life around this cause, so it's safe to say, this ranks high in his economy of values. What Douglass does here is name a quilting point, a cultural value that people clearly get upset about. Black people in the vicinity of white people weren’t the issue, but even the impression that black people were on an equal footing with whites was. What was the disruption that caused the buttressing myth that some people are more equal than others? The assumption of cultural superiority of European countries that sent colonists seeking religious freedom in America...and we’re off, looking for the origins of hate. I want my students to try to go there, but it’s helpful to focus on the real of the situation, what happened to Douglass and how Douglass responds. He argues on a basis of cultural values and giving examples, peels back another layer of the world.
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