THESIS
STRAINS OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT THAT ESSENTIALIZE European-derived institutions, languages, and ideas as alien impositions to be demonized, replaced, or appeased overlook the demonstrable, active integration of African-descended people into the linguistic, legal, and philosophical frameworks of free communities shaped by civic humanism and classical republicanism. These frameworks, transmitted through English common law, natural-rights philosophy, and the practical exercise of property and contract, have served as shared instruments of agency rather than pure pathology. Claims that treat “European” culture as a monolithic colonial essence requiring rupture therefore rest on selective historical construction and understate continuity of participation. Civic humanism and the republican tradition supply the relevant historical depth. The ideal of active citizenship oriented toward the common good, balanced government, and the cultivation of virtue against corruption runs from Aristotle’s Politics through Cicero, the Italian Renaissance humanists (Leonardo Bruni), Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, the English neo-Harringtonians, and the American founding generation. J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975) traces this continuity into the Atlantic world, arguing that the American Revolution itself constituted a late expression of civic humanist concerns with time, corruption, and the stability of republics.
Quentin Skinner’s work on the neo-Roman concept of liberty as non-domination further clarifies the tradition’s emphasis on freedom as independence from arbitrary power rather than mere non-interference. These ideas are not ethnic property; they are articulated principles about the conditions of free political communities. African American political actors repeatedly appealed to them on their own terms. Frederick Douglass, for example, grounded opposition to slavery in the “indestructible and unchangeable laws of human nature” and self-ownership, echoing Lockean formulations while insisting that the Declaration’s principles applied universally. In his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” he invoked the labor-mixing account of property and the universal recognition that “there is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.” This is an argument conducted inside the same conceptual resources that defined free communities in the Anglo-American line.
Legal practice supplies concrete evidence of integration. Dylan C. Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (2023) documents that, from the late antebellum period through the mid-twentieth century, African Americans routinely exercised rights of property, contract, inheritance, marriage, and association in county courts. Even under slavery, custom recognized certain property claims such as a boat owned and operated by an enslaved man, for instance, for which Confederate soldiers paid passage. After emancipation, Black landownership in the South rose sharply: by 1910 more than 500,000 Black families held title to roughly 15 million acres. Penningroth observes that “for African Americans, property and contract were civil rights” and that people “hammered out their relationships with one another and with white people within the law, not just in struggle against it.” The vast majority of the cases he examined involved disputes among Black litigants themselves. English common law categories, e.g., title, contract, prescription, associational privilege, functioned as operative tools. This pattern is difficult to reconcile with a picture of total exteriority or pure imposition. Free communities in the common-law tradition treated property and contract as foundational civil rights precisely because they enable independent action, and Black Americans used those instruments extensively.
Extreme variants of Afrocentrism illustrate the contrasting pattern of essentialization. Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa (1996) examines claims that Greek philosophy was stolen from a Black Egyptian “mystery system,” that Aristotle plundered the Library of Alexandria, and that figures such as Socrates and Cleopatra were Black. The Alexandria claim is chronologically impossible: the city and its library were founded after Aristotle’s death. Lefkowitz notes that such assertions often treat the absence of confirming Egyptian philosophical texts as supporting evidence (“argument from silence”) and rely on post-hoc similarity rather than demonstrable transmission. Ancient Greeks themselves sometimes credited Egypt with greater antiquity and wisdom, but modern Egyptology after the decipherment of hieroglyphs has not sustained the stronger causal claims of wholesale derivation of Greek philosophy. Lefkowitz’s point is methodological: treating desired historical outcomes as articles of faith, and regarding evidentiary challenge as inherently racist, converts history into political myth. Parallel tendencies appear when contemporary discourse pathologizes “Whiteness” or “colonial habits” as the primary causal forces in present disparities while minimizing the internal use of property law, contract, English literacy, and constitutional language by African Americans themselves.
The method that treats the Anglo-American and European civilizational inheritance as constitutively alien or evil, and that therefore demands its moral reorganization or systemic replacement rather than its internal correction, carries a structural flaw that is both political and developmental.
In The Failure of Contemporary Demands and Indictments, I argued that such indictments register to majorities as a claim of permanent victim-status seeking to rewrite the rules of security, status, and continuity. It therefore invites defensive consolidation rather than the persuasion that historically worked through co-partnership. Early Black Atlantic and American republican writers extracted the language of natural liberty, equal standing, and civic capacity, and turned those resources against the specific violations of slavery and exclusion. They positioned Black people as competent co-partners able to uphold, extend, and correct the civilization from inside its own principles, treating historical failures as breaches of equal standing rather than proof that the principles were never available. Contemporary patterns that study European histories primarily as sites of structural fault or original sin, and that treat positive inheritance or reformist resources as secondary or suspect, forgo precisely that form of persuasion. They convert a claim of partnership into a claim of moral supervision, subordinate republican remedies to external racial or class accounting, and render dialogue about internal problems illegitimate. The result is not only alienation but a forfeiture of the very instruments of property, contract, constitutional language and the duty of protection, through which free communities have historically expanded membership and corrected their own defects.
That forfeiture is especially costly given the external expectations and internal scripts that treat capacity itself as suspect. The perspective of Neely Fuller Jr. framed non-white populations as permanent prisoners of a refined system of domination whose easiest operation is confusion: entertainment redirected toward trivial or self-destructive content, glorification of silliness over logic, and the normalization of internal violence as culture. Under that framing, serious engagement with the institutions of free communities is read as collaboration or false consciousness, while permanent indictment is read as the only authentic posture. Accepting the frame by disowning belonging and responsibility to the civilization one inhabits therefore ratifies the expectation of incapacity rather than refuting it. It prevents the full understanding required to mark new history, whether by extending non-domination through the Fourteenth Amendment’s duties, forming civic capacity that majorities cannot easily dismiss, or demonstrating that the same principles of self-ownership and equal standing apply without remainder. The stronger path, consistent with both the historical record of agency and the incentive structure of majorities, is the opposite: to claim the shared resources as one’s own, to correct their failures from within, and thereby to become an advanced people whose competence is no longer in dispute. Relinquishing that claim leaves both the individual and the group dependent on the very system of external judgment the indictment claims to reject.
Linguistic and conceptual integration reinforces the same conclusion. English is the shared medium, yet even African American Vernacular English is a dialect of it, with systematic differences in grammar and phonology but full mutual intelligibility and shared semantic and syntactic resources for abstract political argument. The vocabulary and argumentative structures of natural rights, due process, property, and citizenship are English-language inheritances of the common-law and Enlightenment traditions. One may contest particular applications or document failures of those ideals, but one cannot coherently treat the medium and the legal-philosophical instruments as external contaminants while simultaneously employing them to demand recognition or redistribution inside the same polities.
The sociological pattern of demanding that host societies transform themselves to accommodate a separate “global Black” essence, or of treating ordinary civic habits as colonial residues to be replaced, therefore sits uneasily with the record of participation. Historical trauma is real and has lasting effects; it does not license the conversion of complex institutional histories into essentialist diagnoses of entire cultural inheritances. Free communities organized around republican principles and civil law have always contained internal critique and expansion of membership. The relevant continuity is the repeated demonstration that African-descended people have used those same principles and instruments to claim and exercise agency.
Let me say a word on the distrust that exists strongly among us and the pattern towards essentialization. There is a belief that White people do not want Black people to learn these things (the history and principles of free communities, civic humanism, republicanism, common law, natural rights, etc.) which I have written on, which are viewed as the “history of the colonizer,” but this is not entirely true. It is a broad generalization that collapses very different historical actors, regions, and motives into a single racial will.
Anti-literacy laws were concentrated in Southern slave states. South Carolina’s 1740 Negro Act (after the Stono Rebellion) prohibited teaching enslaved people to write. After Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion, states including Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and others passed or tightened laws making it illegal to teach enslaved or free Black people to read or write, with fines, imprisonment, or whipping. We know this history and are taught it young. The emotional reaction has always come first, before the reflection, which usually stops and remains in a stage of intense emotional reaction as if a master stood over our heads this minute with the whip. The stated purpose was practical control: preventing forged passes, the circulation of abolitionist literature, and organized resistance. These were not national “White” policies. Northern free states generally lacked such bans; free Black communities operated schools, and some white individuals and organizations taught or supported literacy even in the South, including in Douglass’s own case, his initial lessons from Sophia Auld in Baltimore before her husband forbade it. Enforcement was uneven, and many enslaved people learned anyway through secret means. After emancipation, education expanded rapidly through Black self-organization, Northern white missionaries, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and later public systems, however imperfect or segregated.
The continuous record of Black engagement with the classical and republican traditions themselves, which advocates a classical curriculum and a classical Christian education have been dropped. Contemporary works such as Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather’s The Black Intellectual Tradition explicitly argue that classical education can liberate rather than subordinate. Many contemporary classical-education advocates of various backgrounds promote the Western canon and civic republican history for all students, not as racial property.
The distrust that places the motive on “all White people” therefore overstates the case and has been the dominant battle-cry even since my youth, discounting the perspective I continue to labor in putting forth the more I continue to learn to clothe my words. Slaveholders who wanted to keep people ignorant for control existed; but so did abolitionists, educators, and ordinary citizens who treated knowledge of law, history, and self-ownership as compatible with freedom. Motives varied by interest, region, ideology, and individual character. Treating White people as uniformly opposed converts a partial historical pattern into an essential racial conspiracy, which is the pattern of essentialization that runs through the view of many.
It remains better to understand the history of free communities and the Anglo-European traditions of republicanism, civic humanism, and civil law than to cry foul as the primary posture. Those cultures, at their strongest, treat competence in the principles of free government — knowledge of law, capacity for self-ownership, civic virtue, and the ability to correct failures from within — as strength worthy of free people. Permanent external indictment, or the expectation that majorities will voluntarily dismantle their own frameworks of security and continuity, is not what those traditions regard as the path of an advanced people. Understanding the instruments allows one to use them, critique their failures accurately, and contribute to marking new history rather than remaining in a posture of dependence on external judgment. The struggle of access or resistance exists either way, but the knowledge itself is still the stronger instrument.
“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est” (“For knowledge itself is power”)
— Sir Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (Sacred Meditations), 1597.
REFERENCES
- Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1852.
- Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. Basic Books, 1996.
- Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. Liveright, 2023.
- J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton University Press, 1975.
- Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
