GOVT 86.58 Black Patriotism in America: Politics, Philosophy, and History
Building on Frederick Douglass’s penetrating question—“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”—this interdisciplinary course explores American attitudes toward patriotism. What does it mean to be a patriot? How should one’s love of country be balanced with critiques of its injustices? What’s race got to do with it? We will trace the evolution of black political thought since the Revolutionary War against the backdrop of debates about patriotism in contemporary politics, culture, and philosophy.
By the end of the course, we will have surveyed a wide array of African American thinkers and their various interpretations of patriotism, including the radical thought of Malcolm X; the liberal ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Ralph Ellison, and Shirley Chisholm; the conservative convictions of Zora Neale Hurston, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice; the civic optimism of Barack Obama; and the pessimistic proclamations of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose parents spurned the Fourth of July as “marketed by the people who wanted to be white.” In so doing, we will recognize how re-examining the history of the United States through the eyes of the African Americans who labored to redefine its founding principles might illuminate new pathways for progress in our present age of polarization and moral relativism. Ultimately, we will consider a variety of answers to questions of how influential African Americans understood patriotism and what their insights might mean for the future of race relations in the United States.
Department-Specific Course Categories
Government