Black Dignity, Vincent Lloyd: Book Review

The following is a book review I wrote for class.

Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination offers a clear and challenging account of human dignity grounded in “the ideas animating today’s racial justice movement.” (34) Here is a philosophical-practical construal of dignity that is deeply informed by the experience of Black lives, from Fredrick Douglass to Samuel Delany, from Audre Lorde to Lauren Hill.

It is philosophical because it clarifies the “moral vocabulary” (34) of the Black Lives Matter movement and anchors all philosophy in the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Lloyd creatively appropriates Plato’s cave analogy to affirm that “philosophy begins in straining against shackles.” (31) Struggle brings clarity, clarity enables effective action, and effective action requires community organizing if it is to change the world. The philosophical task of this book is to name what would otherwise remain inchoate and messy since movements prioritize reaction over reflection. A key insight this book develops is that “Black dignity is the philosophy of Black Americans.” (23)

This leads to the practical side of Black dignity and a major contribution of the book to the historical discourse on dignity. Rather than seeing dignity as something inherited with a high position (i.e., dignitaries) or as inherent in a common possession (i.e., humanity or rationality), Lloyd offers a third typology of dignity as “something you do.” (2) Dignity is neither station nor status but practice—“dignity means the struggle against domination. The more struggle, the more dignity; the less struggle, the less dignity.” (8) This is “dignity in motion” (3), which emerges from indignation (45) and creates friction in the smooth-working and interlocking systems (101) that deny the humanity of Black Americans. While “Black dignity in its purest form” (6) is seen in Frederick Douglass fighting back against the Slave Scourge, Edward Covey, Lloyd highlights various forms of Black dignity’s performance, including “song, dance, jokes, sermons, or silence.” (8) Lloyd emphasizes the “need to resort to genres other than the expository,” (44) and throughout this book he amply illustrates the power of story-telling that out-narrates and unmasks domination’s normative illusions. (163)

The cultural genres of resistance and its vocabulary are explored under five concepts, which make up the heart of the book—Black Rage, Black Love, Black Family, Black Future, and Black Magic. These concepts, which are essential components of Black dignity, are analyzed by considering how leading activists embodied or articulated them. Black rage animates collective action and builds movements. (45) Black love of freedom motivates and binds together those who struggle. (58) Black family nurtures dignity by naming the porous intimacy of those who have embraced disinheritance. (77) Black future imagines a world without domination, reminding us that things can be different. (98) Black magic defines the spiritual dynamic that conjures up new possibilities in face of the impossible and which domination can never capture. (130) In the afterword, rather than “moralizing and policy prescription,” (34) Lloyd highlights a number of crucial virtues that provide moral orientation for the task of working towards a world without domination, including ascetic commitment, affective investment, responsive attention, creative agitation, and life-giving abolition. 

Black Dignity succeeds in offering a compelling argument for a new conception of dignity that is culturally sensitive and politically timely. The book is well organized and well conceived. After an thematic overture, the argument gains momentum, clarity, and depth as each chapter elaborates on the central claim by layering literary evidence and historical examples until a coherent vision emerges that challenges the reader to rethink their assumptions and reform their ways of being in the world. The book is notable for highlighting what is missing from standard accounts of human dignity. These include: the cleaving of dignity from respectability, which, according to Lloyd, justifies Black rage and substantiates Black future (5); the distinction between the ontic and ontological register of struggle that reframes the perspective away from mere instances of oppression to systems of domination (10); the linking of apparently disparate injustices to a “primal scene of domination” (13); the need for an “asymmetric style of analysis” of syllogism and song, discourse and dance, notion and narrative to render domination visible (6); and the contrast between Black dignity and multiculturalism (18), which Lloyd strongly critiques, testifying at one point that “multiculturalism took away my ability to talk about myself.” (x) 

When Black Dignity is compared with other declarations about human dignity, it is striking to notice the near total omission of race in these documents. For instance, the 2024 Roman Catholic statement, Dignitas Infinita, mentions the word race only three times and always in passing. Further, racism is not listed under the wide-ranging section enumerating “grave violations of human dignity.” The same is true of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) or the 2018 Declaration of Human Dignity. A major factor is the penchant of these documents to flatten and generalize their perspective, as seen in the prominence of the word everyone, which begins nearly every article of the UDHR. Lloyd contends that this homogenizing approach conceals the particularity of the Black experience. “Everyone” language fails to notice that “anti-Black racism… is at the center of everything, for everyone.” (xi)

The book is designed to provoke and rally to the barricades. It is replete with bald pronouncements and frank analysis, including correcting distortions and identifying counterfeits (151). Lines are drawn and decisions are demanded, for mobilization may start in the mind but it cannot stay there (50). Lloyd deftly translates the rowdy rhythm and activist energy of a political demonstration to the pages of a book as he engages in logical and historical demonstration (13), not the death-dealing logic of mastery that enslaves but the revolutionary logic of movement that can never be quieted or stilled, as Lloyd notes near the end of the book, peace “means coming to terms with the continuity of struggle.” (113-14) A bracing outlook but one that attends carefully (62) to messy on-the-ground realities that force us to recognize that dignity does not exist in a definition but in a struggle against domination, and wherever we find that, “we find what is human.” (157) Because this struggle is nowhere more visible than in the Black experience, “Black dignity is the paradigm of dignity.” (14)