“Freedom is my thing." Joan Bryant Examines Legacy of Racial Theory and Historical Barriers to Freedom

In modern contexts, there’s this prevalent notion of Black people being the “quintessential race” — that “race” only matters when Black people are involved. As Joan Bryant puts it: “I say ‘race,’ you hear ‘Black.’ I say ‘Black,’ you hear ‘race.”

But what is race, and how did figures of the past conceptualize it? Bryant’s new book Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-Century America examines how Black reformers from the 1820s to the 1920s questioned race. She argues that by looking at how these reformers — from abolitionists to ministers to temperance advocates — challenged the concept of race, we can develop a fuller understanding of what race is.

“The dominant idea is that Black people didn't question race…They just didn't like racism,” Bryant said. “Well, the people I write about are questioning ideas of hierarchy, but they're also questioning the very idea of human difference that race is supposed to signify, regardless of whether it's about hierarchical issues or hatred or something like that.” Reformers are also challenging the assumption that the people assigned to a given race category are alike.

Bryant stumbled upon the idea for this book while looking for something else. Reading antebellum newspapers, Bryant noticed references to race that resembled modern and postmodern frameworks. Someone who particularly drew her interest was William Whipper, a 19th-century businessman and abolitionist. Whipper’s writing, which Bryant explores in her book, discussed race as something “invented” by language, practices and principles. Even more significant, Whipper recognized the invention of whiteness as a site of privilege.

“I was surprised at the depth of the analyses that went into their thinking about reform movements and how race as an idea, as a concept, was engaged or refuted or reconfigured,” Bryant said.

Bryant discovered little research on this topic prior to her writing. Thus, she turned to an array of primary sources, such as Black newspapers, speeches, letters, poetry, fiction and short stories, for further insight. Bryant uncovered a similar thread across some figures — even those coming from different ideological places like Frederick Douglas and Martin Delany: as a whole, they agreed how the American way of classification is built around maintaining a hierarchy that positions white “purity” at the top.

“They're questioning this concept, and they care about it regardless of whether they want to have a black nation or not,” Bryant said. “The ideological positions didn't necessarily determine their ideas about this concept.”

Inspiring nuanced discussion and interpretation of race, Bryant’s work becomes all the more relevant when looking at contemporary debates that deal with race in America. Specifically, Bryant pointed out today’s debates on affirmative action, and how race in modern day discourse usually involves the term and concept of “identity,” which implies some inherent quality.

“Even as people talk about race being socially constructed, there is, in political discourse, this idea that it's just there, something we all have and possess,” Bryant said. “And so I take the idea that race is socially constructed quite seriously, to see how it has been configured, constructed, contested, historically.”

Bryant conveys how these 19th century reformers were ultimately trying to promote and navigate American freedom — but to do that, they had to navigate race, as it was one of the “critical barriers to or inventions related to freedom.”

Her distinguished work does not stop at Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-Century America. Bryant has since returned to her Humanities Center fellowship work: a social history project that pieces together what freedom meant for those living in the part of Southern New Jersey that overlooked Delaware while it was still a slave state — a place she calls “the edge of freedom.”

“What I hope to do there is another exploration of freedom. Freedom is my thing. That's what I'm interested in.”