Philosophical interventions into black histories are necessary to understand slavery and freedom as opposing but forever intertwined paradigms within racial capitalism.

The relationship between blackness and the philosophy of history began with disavowal. Amos Beman, a black reverend from Connecticut, was determined to find information on the history of Africa and its people. In 1843, he wrote to Noah Webster, the famous editor and dictionary compiler, no doubt hoping that one of the nation’s most learned men could give him the answers he was searching for. Webster replied, “of the wooly-haired Africans . . . there is no history and can be none.”3 Although Webster would not have been aware of it, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had systematized this rejection of the possibility for African history in a series of lectures at the University of Berlin in the 1820s. Hegel concluded, “The Negro Black. . . exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” and that Africa “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.”4 For Hegel, history “shows the development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and of the consequent realization of that Freedom.”5 This process unfolded across both time and space, beginning with what he described as despotism in the ancient Orient (freedom only for the despot), progressing through Greek and Roman antiquity (freedom for some), and culminating with the modern nations of Prussia and England (freedom for all). Hegel’s Negro, however, had “not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence” and could have no awareness of the nature of freedom; he thus stood outside of history, “only as on the threshold.”6 Despite his ejection of blackness, Hegel’s philosophy of history remains foundational to commonsense understandings of how history works. In fact, his sense of the link between moral and historical progression has at times seemed to speak especially to black history—consider Martin Luther King, Jr.’s paraphrase of the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”7 For Amos Beman and for many who came after, seeking out the archives of black history was not merely about correcting factual omissions or writing more complete narratives. The recovery of such histories would have moral force, providing crucial tools in the struggle for racial justice. These archives would write black history and, in doing so, write blackness into history, thus bringing black people closer to freedom. The collector and bibliophile Arthur Schomburg captured this sentiment when he wrote, in 1925, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. . . . History must restore what slavery has taken away.”8 Recovering black history would be the bridge between the slave past and a freedom yet to come. Nearly a century after Schomburg wrote these words, there is a body of work on black history more magnificent than he probably could have imagined. Yet there is little doubt that this work has not—and cannot—restore what slavery took away. While figures such as Hegel and Webster attempted to cast Africa and Africans out of history, the production of countless black historical narratives has seemed to militate against their ultimate success. It has been the tireless work of two centuries to recover the archives of black history and reject this foundational exclusion, rendering Africans and their descendants fit for the long march through history and toward freedom.9 Following this logic, black people enter history precisely (perhaps only) at the moment that they confirm its forward movement by claiming a place within its trajectory. Black history begins when there is progress from slavery toward freedom— recall Schomburg’s rhetorical opposition, “history must restore what slavery has taken away.” Even though this type of historical progress seems to combat the violence of being excluded from history, it nonetheless confirms Hegel’s argument that history consists of the very movement toward freedom. Although many aspects of black history are illuminated by adhering to Hegel’s framework (King did, after all, successfully organize actual marches for freedom), others, such as Smith’s and Douglass’s hesitations about emancipation, are obscured and rendered illegible. And accounts of black history that boldly claim Africans’ and Africa’s historical importance remain contentious when they would trouble the story of history’s forward movement.10 Thus, it might be instructive to dwell on what it means to linger at the threshold, remaining on the edges of history (at least certain kinds of history). If what links King and Hegel is a faith that through the unfolding of history a freedom yet unrealized will be forthcoming, it is a faith that cannot account for the intractability of blackness. In other words, the perpetual movement closer to freedom, the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice—these models of history are not the only ways, or even the most useful ways, for making sense of slavery and its abolition. Reckoning with slavery and what came after requires new philosophies of history. Saidiya Hartman has used the term “afterlife of slavery” to describe the ways “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”11 It is an apt formulation that suggests a different, counterintuitive relationship between past and present, slavery and freedom. To ponder slavery’s afterlife is to be open to the possibility that “the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath . . . then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead.”12 The notion of the afterlife is an interruption of progressive historical time. Things are supposed to live and then die, and if they live again or don’t quite die, it distorts any sense of proper sequence. That sense of distortion is productive. In the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “slavery here is a ghost, both the past and the living presence; and the problem of historical representation is how to represent the ghost.”13 Ian Baucom has argued that contemporary finance capitalism is a repetition or iteration of the financialized slave trade of the eighteenth century and that, by extension, “the present time . . . inherits its nonimmediate past by intensifying it.”14 Each of these philosophies of history is a reminder that history can move in a multitude of ways, whether cyclical, static, cumulative, palimpsestic, or something else entirely. It is important to emphasize that nothing inherent to black history is resistant to the movement toward freedom, and nothing inherent to blackness makes it coterminous with the unending violence of slavery. To insist otherwise would be to reinscribe Hegel’s beliefs about the historical stasis of Africa and the impossibility of black freedom. Rather, the historical formation of racial capitalism has bequeathed slavery an afterlife and rendered the forward movement of emancipation fraught. Racial capitalism places slavery within a broad, protean set of conditions that emerged out of but were not reliant upon slavery. These conditions continued to shape black freedom after emancipation. Racial capitalism’s adaptability—operating through the idiom of freedom as easily as it did through that of slavery—is what makes it so useful for theorizing a black philosophy of history. Using the language of racial capitalism to describe what came both before and after emancipation emphasizes historical continuities over breaks, without disavowing historical dynamism or making slavery itself the only determinant of black history. At times, the failures of emancipation were so great that black writers used the language of slavery even in its legal absence as a way of articulating a philosophy of history. Each emancipatory moment in the nineteenth-century British Atlantic world, whether in the U.S. North, the British West Indies, or the U.S. South, was premised on a form of freedom that transformed the primary vehicle for black subjugation from a relationship between capitalism and slavery into one between capitalism and freedom. Using an archive composed of black disappointment with freedom, the remainder of this chapter challenges the moral claims embedded within narratives about the progress from slavery to freedom and argues that racial capitalism ensured the transferability of systems of inequality beyond the slavery/freedom divide.15