“Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.”
My current book project, To Tell the Truth Freely: Freedom, Dissimulation, and Resistance in African American Political Thought, builds on the themes in my first book by examining how influential Black intellectuals and activists employ the fraught practice of dissimulation to confront racial oppression. By dissimulation, I mean the deliberate equivocation, modulation, or concealment of political arguments under oppressive conditions. For many influential Black figures during the long civil rights campaign, dissimulation served as both a sword and a shield, sustaining political resistance to racial oppression while helping them evade (or, at the very least, attempt to) racial violence. Scholars of African American political thought often focus on the efficacy and ethics of dissimulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but my book project argues that dissimulation carries profound psychological stakes for the Black actors that enlist it.
This book project advances a central argument: ambivalence is central to Black political resistance and dissimulation is a constitutive part of the pursuit of freedom under the conditions of oppression. On my account, dissimulation both empowers Black actors by enabling advocacy and burdens them with profound psychological costs. I engage with five influential Black figures, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Anna JuliaCooper, who offer competing accounts of the role of dissimulation in Black political resistance. Each of these figures also revises their view of dissimulation over time, coming to see new possibilities and new limits in the practice over the course of their careers and advocacy.
Thus far, I have published one article in this project, “‘To Tell the Truth Freely’: Ida B. Wells on Sacrificial Death and Political Resistance,” in Perspectives on Politics.
Abstract: A courageous agitator, Ida B. Wells is known for her principled commitment to racial justice and reluctance to consider concessions in her anti-lynching advocacy. Yet this article argues that Wells negotiates her political principles, specifically her commitment to sacrificial death in political resistance, given the constraints she faces as a Black woman advocating for racial justice in Jim Crow America. Wells links Black leadership with sacrificial death, but she qualifies this view of resistance when confronted with threats against her own life and the Black community in Memphis, Tennessee. Wells is committed to racial justice and willing to make unimaginable sacrifices to try to awaken the conscience of white Americans to the injustice of lynching, but she also engages in political resistance that centers care for the Black community. By examining Wells’s theory of political resistance and Black leadership in her political writings alongside her reflections on her anti-lynching advocacy in her autobiographical writings, this article recovers Wells’s commitment to care and community in her political resistance and reflects on how Black actors negotiate competing principles in practice under oppressive conditions.
