Imagine you are born to a white middle class family in the United States sometime after the civil rights movement. You do not think of yourself as holding any racist attitudes. You acknowledge the social movement was a sign of moral progress and are convinced that chattel slavery was deeply wrong. Are you responsible for promoting racial justice?
For most philosophers, the basic mark of responsibility is our capacity to give reasons for our actions and to demand that others do the same. We impute reasons and motives to an others’ actions in intimate conversations such as: ‘What you said really hurt me.’ In the case of a trusted friend failing to do something, we impute an omission: ‘You didn’t keep your promise.’ Responsibility is about giving reasons in order to explain and justify our actions. As P.F. Strawson argued in the 1960s, we are looking for justifications for our reactive attitudes towards others and ourselves – for example, attitudes like guilt, shame, resentment, gratitude, and love. As the social and reason-giving creatures we essentially are, we have a need to blame others for their actions and excuse ourselves. We want to give reasons for why we said something that might have appeared as hurtful or why we did not fulfill a promise for a good reason. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as redeemable.
It seems untenable according to such a view to be responsible for things that happened prior to one’s birth like Jim Crow laws or slave-trading. One might then reasonably reply to the question raised: ‘Since these injustices do not exist because of me, then I cannot be held responsible for promoting racial justice.’
Instead of focusing on why I think a reply of this sort deeply misses the point, I want to think through this question of racial justice by framing it differently. Even though Quobna Ottobah Cugoano wrote in the 18th century as an abolitionist, his arguments about responsibility remain relevant. At the outset of his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), Cugoano tells us that he was kidnapped from Agimaque in the Gold Coast, was sent to Grenada, accompanied his slave-master to Great Britain after the Somerset Decision in 1772, and eventually became free.
Cugoano targeted the conditions that legitimated the institution of chattel slavery across the transatlantic. His struggle for justice places him at the forefront of the Africana intellectual tradition, including Afro-Caribbean and African-American thought. This rich tradition is less interested in theorizing individual responsibility than it is collective responsibility. The problems for Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King Jr., Sylvia Wynter, and Angela Davis are systemic ones: transatlantic slavery, Antebellum slavery, segregation, colonization, the disciplinary obstacles for black scholars in black studies, the prison-industrial complex, and the underlying harm of anti-blackness. The concept of collective responsibility is indispensable since the nature of these problems demand it.
Cugoano’s purpose for publishing Thoughts and Sentiments in July 1787 was to make evident to ‘The Inhabitants of Great-Britain’ that they shared responsibility for abolishing the institution of slavery. His text adopts an approach to responsibility that is sensitive to the different actors and their respective duties. I will focus on the people of Britain as a collective.
Cugoano claims that ‘Every man in Great-Britain [is] responsible, in some degree’ for slavery. In other passages he writes that so long as the African slave trade and colonial slavery continue as legal practices, there is not one person in Britain and its colonies that ‘can be innocent.’ At first glance, his claims come across as hyperbolic and unreasonable. For there were white people who had nothing to do with slavery and even acknowledged slavery as a moral wrong. In one striking passage, he notes that he knows of women who refuse to put sugar in their tea because the sweetener was produced by enslaved black labor. On closer examination of the text and his more nuanced arguments, a more interesting theory of responsibility becomes clear.
Cugoano assigns the collective problem of chattel slavery and the trade to the people of Great-Britain because of their national privilege. The ground of responsibility, in this case, is in virtue of being a citizen in a nation that defends transatlantic slavery as a legitimate institution and not so much due to causal participation in enslavement. He saw himself as offering an African perspective, ‘an Ethiopian,’ to the British people to drive home that they partake in certain rights and privileges by virtue of their national birthright. They participate in a nation that either actively deprives black people of liberty or constrains them to toil in poverty like the free poor blacks who lived in 18th-century London.
When Cugoano invokes the charge of responsibility to the British people themselves, he is not making a claim about individual responsibility to which one could reply: ‘I don’t enslave people. This isn’t my responsibility.’ Such a response would be an indirect statement that one wants to preserve their privilege. Cugoano’s intention was not to demoralize white people but to motivate them to see that they were responsible for carrying out a collective project: ‘to restore that justice and liberty which is [the] natural right’ of black persons. The people of Britain were implicated in restorative efforts. What should motivate these restorative efforts is not hope for exoneration but vying for the political agency of blacks. This means self-determination for blacks that is free from any form of white paternalism.
Cugoano views responsibility as scalar in the sense that it varies depending on one’s political power and privilege. At minimum, a British person had the responsibility to cultivate an anti-racist ‘sensibility.’ It is likely for this reason that Olaudah Equiano – Cugoano’s political ally in the Sons of Africa – published his Interesting Narrative two years later as an argument to ignite ‘a sense of compassion.’ At the far end, responsibility is exemplified by abolitionists like Granville Sharp, who used the full extent of his privileges as a white man and lawyer to fight for the rights of black persons. So Cugoano argued that it was a duty for Britons to deploy the full extent of their privilege, to any degree they could, ‘to restore to their fellow-creatures the common rights of nature.’
Douglass and King also marshalled theories of collective responsibility. In 1857, in a speech over the Dred Scott Decision, Douglass argued against radical Garrisonists who advocated for seceding from the Union to end its complicity with slave-holders in the south. Douglass believed they missed the point about responsibility: the only path forward was joint abolition; secession would not help those who were enslaved. In one of his last speeches, King demanded that individuals, institutions, and the government share responsibility for racial justice. His appeal invited individuals to recognize their implication in a collective project. By being actively aware of discrepancies and privileges, King thought one could remain ‘awake’ to their duties to the ongoing struggle for racial justice.
Cugoano, Douglass, and King’s charge of responsibility was to eliminate the gap between moral knowledge – systemic racism is wrong – and political coalition. The distance between moral recognition and political change can breed passivity, indifference, and pessimism. The same is true today with regard to the recognition of anti-black racism and racial justice. One is thus implicated in this collective project of racial justice irrespective of what one believes about their own attitudes.
The problem of racial justice demands theorizing collective responsibility. Philosophers should accordingly forward a concept of collective responsibility that would appropriately address racial justice and challenge the public’s common-sense view of individual responsibility. Teachers, especially if they are pedagogues in the history of philosophy, have the duty and privilege to include texts and arguments from black philosophers like Cugoano in their classes.
Iziah Topete
Iziah Topete is a PhD candidate at Penn State University. He will defend a dissertation on Cugoano’s theory of responsibility. His research specializations are in 17th and 18th century modern philosophy and critical philosophy of race. You can find more about his work here.
