A focus on character and merit is deeply rooted in the Western tradition.
A focus on character and merit is deeply rooted in the Western tradition.
I n his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that he dreamed that his “four children” would “one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Earlier that same year, and in a radically different context, King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” spoke searingly about the collateral damage that racial prejudice inflicts on black Americans, white Americans, and “those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” No other public figure in modern times has expressed sentiments so resonant with the tradition of color-blindness in the Western intellectual tradition. Given King’s moral and practical advocacy, he seems to have understood that he was a mere vessel of many strands of ethical thought that privilege individual character (ēthos), and its concomitant choices and actions, over conventional and arbitrary markers of distinction such as a person’s sex or race. Many of those strands of ethical thought inform my own approach to relations between all Americans, especially the relations between America’s two oldest groups, the white and black communities.
My approach to race relations, the color-blind approach, is grounded in the moral belief that the mere possession of hereditary qualities such as race should not confer moral merit on a person who possesses or not. Instead, moral merit can be, and should be, conferred on an individual’s actions, because actions reveal one’s character. When I speak about character, I should be understood as speaking about the right desires, feelings, pleasures, and pains that make up the states of the virtuous character. The belief in character, as opposed to ascriptive qualities, as the locus of moral agency has a rich and comprehensive history in the West, and it continues to animate America’s own founding documents and way of life.
Character can be morally praised or condemned because it results from our prior choices and actions, and our prior choices and actions were voluntary, so we are responsible for our own characters in the present. It makes no sense to praise, condemn, or assign moral status to ascriptive qualities such as race, which is an indelible feature of one’s body and has not come about through choice. When society does assign moral status to race, as King illustrates, bitterness and hatred become the main currency through which Americans interact with one another. The reason for the antipathy has everything to do with the arbitrariness of assigning moral status to racial characteristics. When character becomes the main currency through which Americans interact with one another, the relations between the races are less stilted, more fluid, and natural. Fair play and judging others by the content of their character is an abiding theme in the intellectual traditions of Western thought.
The ancient Greek sentiments regarding personhood and character go well beyond Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings. The theme of character extends from them to the Romans to early Christianity to the English and American abolitionists who opposed slavery.
One figure who was profoundly influenced by the West’s tradition of color-blind principles and the sentiments of liberty that grow out of those principles is Frederick Douglass. That influence, in the form of a relatively short book, The Columbian Orator, came to Douglass at a time in his life that proved pivotal and of lasting impact. The effect of The Columbian Orator on Douglass’s emotional and intellectual development speaks both to the powerful influence that the embrace of character has had in the Western philosophical tradition and to that tradition’s appeal to the innate intellectual curiosity of all human beings, from the humblest slave to the most high-toned aristocrat.
Douglass was a 13-year-old slave boy in 1830 when he first bought a copy of The Columbian Orator. As he tells it in My Bondage and My Freedom, he was intrigued and motivated to buy the book after hearing a group of little boys who said they were going to “learn some little pieces out of it” for an upcoming exhibition. What he discovered in was a collection of 84 moralistic and literary entries, including essays, plays, and speeches designed to promote elocution and character and to educate schoolchildren in the ways of American republicanism. For our purposes, it is significant to point out that Douglass does not complain about the absence of writers of color in The Columbian Orator. He is not seeking racial validation so much as he is seeking the free exercise of his intellectual and physical capacity through the written and spoken words chronicled in the book. Douglass is seeking liberty! He says as much when commenting on the lessons he took from The Columbian Orator:
The dialogue and the speeches were all redolent of the principles of liberty, and poured floods of light on the nature and character of slavery. With a book of this kind in my hand, my own human nature, and the facts of my experience, to help me, I was equal to a contest with religious advocates of slavery, whether among the whites or among the colored people, for blindness, in this matter, is not confined to the former.
Douglass speaks movingly here of two animating ideas that are essential to the tradition of color-blindness: Human nature is ultimately rational (it’s the differentia of the human species), and liberty is an inherently moral good. Despite the servitude he finds himself in, Douglass’s capacity as a rational human being puts him on an equal moral footing with any white person and equips him with a righteous indignation toward his fellow religious African Americans who insist that, for spiritual reasons, slavery should be endured with humility. It also frees him from the physical and spatial limitations that slavery entails. Not in a literal sense, but in the sense that his new awareness helps him to appreciate that his servitude is merely by convention, not by nature. The selections Douglass encountered in The Columbian Orator resonated powerfully with him because they portrayed the best examples of what human nature can produce on an intellectual level.
Douglass also speaks of The Columbian Orator as “redolent of the principles of liberty.” In speaking of liberty, he argues that slavery, in all of its aspects, is opposed to republicanism. The idea he is expressing is that the individual, and no less the slave, is free to exercise his birthright of agency for the development of his own personhood and for the development of a community that’s consistent with liberty. Both of these ideas are illustrated in an especially poignant dialogue from The Columbian Orator. Describing the exchange between a recently recaptured slave and his master, Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass writes that he “perused and reperused” it “with unflagging satisfaction.” The dialogue between the master and the slave commences after the slave, for the second time, failed to escape his bondage. The master admonishes him for his ingratitude, as he has accorded the slave some material comforts not granted to the other slaves. In answering the charge of ingratitude, the slave and master have the following exchange:
Slave. I am a slave. That is answer enough.
Mast. I am not content with that answer. I thought I discerned in you some token of mind superior to your condition. I treated you accordingly. You have been comfortably fed and lodged, not over worked, and attended with the most care when you were sick. And is this the return?
Slave. Since you condescend to talk with me, as man to man, I will reply. What have you done, what can you do for me, that will compensate for the liberty which you have taken away?
Mast. I did not take it away. You were a slave when I fairly purchased you.
Slave. Did I give my consent to the purchase?
Mast. You had no consent to give. You had already lost the right of disposing yourself.
Slave. I had lost the power, but how the right? I was treacherously kidnapped in my own country, when following an honest occupation. I was put in chains, sold to one of your countrymen, carried by force on board his ship, brought hither, and exposed to sale like a beast in the market, where you bought me. What step in all this progress of violence and injustice can give a right? Was it in the villain who stole me, in the slave-merchant who tempted him to do so, or in you who encouraged the slave merchant to bring his cargo of human cattle to cultivate your lands?
It’s no wonder that Douglass was transfixed by the slave’s piercing words. They foreshadow both the words and the deeds for which Douglass gained his much-deserved influence and reputation as a champion of liberty and as a proponent of color-blind principles. As I’ve shown, liberty, color-blind principles, and character are not unique to the 19th century and Douglass’s milieu. As an American, an African American, he inherited moral and ethical traditions 3,000 years in the making. It’s these traditions that Martin Luther King Jr., too, harnessed to inspire and change a nation in the 20th century. We must remember, however, that these uniquely Western moral and ethical traditions have not been without their detractors, black and white; they’ve been fiercely contested by various forces over the centuries.