EPILOGUE

“The Sentiment Left by Slavery Is Still with Us”

Thirty years after the cessation of the Civil War, the prolific Frederick Douglass continued to denounce the racial injustice that plagued the nation, chronicling the rising number of lynchings of Black people by White vigilantes. Douglass lamented that the emotional politics of slavery still cast a shadow over the South. He observed that Black people were viewed with a “suspicion and increasing hate” that was rooted in slavery, and that this antipathy led White legal authorities to turn a blind eye when Black people were lynched by vengeful White mobs. Douglass contended that it was no coincidence that White people could “justify murderous assault upon a long enslaved and hence a hated people.” White contempt for Black people was stoked over centuries of bondage and was considered justification enough for killing Black people for real or imagined crimes post-Emancipation. Douglass hinted that while it was supposedly White fears of Black rapists that motivated lynchings, it was Black Southerners who were left in a state of trepidation lest they or their loved ones become victims of a White riot. Watching as White resentment fomented a climate of terror meant to control the Southern Black population, the parallels to the emotional dynamics of slavery were unmistakable, leading Douglass to ruefully note that “the sentiment left by slavery is still with us.”¹

For Douglass both the dilemma and the answer were affective: Douglass argued that racial inequality should matter to all Americans, as “the solution” to racial violence and injustice “involves the honour or dishonour, the glory or shame, the happiness or misery, of the whole American people.”² Less than a decade later, author W. E. B. Du Bois expressed similar concerns about the role of emotions, particularly fear, in post-Reconstruction race relations. Du Bois warned that “on the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart,” culminating at the turn of the century, leading Du Bois to famously predict that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”³ Like Douglass, Du Bois implied that the “problem” at the heart of race relations hinged on emotions, from the affective norms that had “bowed the human heart[s]” of the nation for generations, to the “fear” used to preserve the emotional dynamics of bondage.

Enslaved people had long been expected to perform certain emotions and camouflage others, to maintain the façade of the happy slave in front of slaveholders who believed that Black people felt less acutely, if at all. Faced with these affective restrictions, enslaved people and free Black people implicitly and explicitly challenged the idea that they were unfeeling or lacked strong familial ties and insisted that Emancipation meant not just legal and political freedom, but emotional liberation. As free people they could cast off the racialized affective norms forced upon them in slavery. No longer compelled to suppress sorrow and anger, or feign contentment and deference, no longer subjected to affective discipline and the division of their families, formerly enslaved people actively pursued happiness and the right to lead unimpeded, full emotional lives. But, devastated by the dual losses of military defeat and Emancipation, many White Southerners fought tooth and nail to maintain antebellum racial hierarchies, including the affective norms and expectations that had reinforced slavery for centuries. As a result, the legacy of the emotional politics of slavery continued long after Emancipation. Postwar affective norms were not identical to those that existed in the slave South, but they incorporated as many of the emotional customs of the institution as possible. Just as it had been under slavery, fear remained the quintessential ingredient of the emotional politics of postwar race relations.

Fear and Jim Crow

Scholars who study the history of emotions have shown that fear is both a physiological response and a social construct. Throughout the nineteenth century prescriptive literature dictated that being afraid was at odds with rational thought, and therefore it needed to be surmounted.⁴ But during Reconstruction it became evident that when White Southerners inspired fear in free Black people it was not illogical, it was a systemic strategy for maintaining economic, political, and social White supremacy. Black Southerners recognized that White intimidation tactics were a deliberate backlash against the rights that African Americans had won in the years after war. In his memoir of his childhood in Mississippi, Richard Wright wrote extensively about emotions and race relations in the Jim Crow South, opining that when Black people “try to assert a claim to their birthright, whites retaliate with terror.”⁵ This White terror campaign was experienced by Black Southerners in ways both dramatic and mundane, knit into the cultural memory, linking the lived Black experience of past and present.⁶ Slavery was gone, but White supremacist violence was still the modus operandi for scaring Black Southerners into submission and for exorcising manifold White anxieties.

Throughout the Jim Crow era White elites wrote laws to limit the freedoms of Southern Black people, including disenfranchising them.⁷ These policies coincided with growing White nostalgia for antebellum affective relationships, all set against a backdrop of increasing national tensions around class, race, and the first wave of the Great Migration.⁸ In his 1908 work on American racial relations, journalist Ray Stannard Baker shared that “many Southerners look back wistfully to the faithful … cheerful, old plantation Negro, and deplore his disappearance,” making them “want the New South, but the old Negro.”⁹ One North Carolina lawmaker invoked that line of reasoning while defending Jim Crow and lynching, vowing that no Northerner could, in his words, “comprehend that ineffable, indescribable, unspeakable love that every southern man feels for the old black nurse who took care of him in childhood.” Just as in proslavery ideology the myth of the happy slave existed as a foil to nightmarish figures like Nat Turner, in the twentieth century the legal and illegal violence of Jim Crow was packaged with gauzy nostalgia, justified by delineating the spectrum from loving, memorialized mammy to savage Black rapist. In this way the supposed love, always framed as mutual, of Black women was used to condone violence against Black people who were perceived to transgress the color line, including its racialized emotional parameters.¹⁰ The increasing de jure segregation of public and private facilities went hand in hand with de facto social prescriptions that dictated the rules of interracial engagement, working in tandem to resurrect the affective hierarchies of slavery. Even decades after Emancipation Black Southerners were expected to embody deference and reverence toward White people at all times.¹¹ Authentic emotions, particularly negative feelings, were to be muted. Theories of racialized emotional differences, long championed by advocates for slavery, also persisted into the Jim Crow period. Civil Rights activist Jo Ann Robinson recalled in her memoir that in the Georgia of her childhood Black people were “still being treated as … things without feelings, not human beings.”¹²

No text demonstrates how the emotional politics of slavery were resuscitated better than Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy, in which he wrote at length about growing up in the suffocating affective environment of Jim Crow. Paralleling the internal journey described in so many slave narratives, Wright discussed both how he learned the affective norms of Jim Crow as a child and how he attempted to perform and censor feelings, before going North in search of emotional freedom. For some Black children, learning to navigate Southern race relations was synonymous with learning to fear White people. Wright detailed this process, recalling that before he was even ten the mere mention of “white people” triggered a flood of “anxiety,” until “a dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination.”¹³

Wright’s state of perpetual “dread” was exacerbated by knowing the consequences that awaited any Black people who upset the racialized emotional power dynamics of Jim Crow. Just as enslaved people knew they needed to appear happy and ingratiating to escape punishment, the racial etiquette of the South required that Black people suppress anger and sorrow, instead appearing meek and contented. Civil Rights activist Benjamin Mays saw those racialized affective performances constantly as a child in South Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century, explaining in his autobiography that in his town “most Negroes grinned, cringed, and kowtowed in the presence of white people.”¹⁴ Wright witnessed that daily emotional burlesque as well, but he voiced disdain for Black Southerners who enacted feelings for White audiences, including a Black coworker who “in the presence of whites … would play the role of a clown.”¹⁵

Still, Wright recognized that Black Southerners were caught in a trap, loath to adopt certain emotions but afraid to not meet White people’s affective expectations. Wright knew that many of his Black coworkers “hated and feared the whites,” but if a White person appeared they “assumed silent, obedient smiles” and “false heartiness.” Here was another way that the emotional politics of Jim Crow were internalized and built on the back of fear. Wright could profess contempt for the antics of his “clown[ish]” coworker, singing for White approval and money, but Wright, too, felt complicit in maintaining the affective hierarchies that White Southerners demanded. He knew that performing or hiding emotions was a matter of survival for Black Southerners, and also how much was at stake when choosing to counterfeit or cloak specific feelings. As Wright confessed, “The safety of my life in the South depended upon how well I concealed from all whites what I felt,” for if he were to “lose control” of his emotions it would be a “sentence of death.”¹⁶

In the Jim Crow South, Black people learned what feelings to feign and which to cover up based on direct and indirect feedback from White sources. At times the White press explicitly told Black Southerners which feelings to curb, and when. After a jury of White men dropped charges against a White man accused of raping a Black Montgomery woman in 1949, the local paper declared that “those colored people who have felt humiliated or angered over the Perkins case can now abate those emotions.”¹⁷ Black Southerners were also indoctrinated in the affective expectations of Jim Crow through more informal channels, primarily through their routine interactions with White people. Wright gleaned from conversations with White Southerners that they “did not like to discuss” a variety of topics including “Jack Johnson … the Civil War … the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.” Any remark that might be construed as praise for Black people, or that touched upon the subject of Black pride or courage, was to be avoided, leading Wright to deduce that White Southerners believed Black people should repress those feelings in particular.¹⁸ Like Wright, Rosa Parks was reminded of how threatening Black dignity was to White people after seeing the reception of Black World War II veterans who returned to the South proud of their accomplishments and hoping for equal treatment. According to Parks, “Whites didn’t like Blacks having that kind of attitude.”¹⁹ This suggests that what White Southerners wanted from Black people was less a performance of deference than a total absence of self-confidence.

From interactions with White employers, Black Southerners absorbed what emotions they should tamp down on the job. As an adolescent Wright needed to help support his struggling family, so he applied to do housework for a White family. In the interview Wright’s would-be employer told him firmly “we don’t want a sassy nigger.” Wright responded that he was “not sassy,” and he was told to return the following day at dawn to commence work.²⁰ This highlights what affective performances White employers found desirable or objectionable and what gradations of emotion were permissible for Black people. A Black employee should appear happy, but never verge on “sassy,” which carried connotations of too much confidence and too little reverence.

Because of the ubiquitous messaging about what emotions were appropriate, and because failure to affectively masquerade could be a death sentence, it speaks volumes that some Black Southerners still could not bring themselves to simulate contentment in the face of segregation and injustice. Mays knew many Black Southerners enacted the expected emotions, but he also saw others that would not, and that “those who could not take such subservience” escaped to nearby cities or fled North.²¹ This was Wright’s eventual trajectory, as he found that as time went on he could no longer adopt the compulsory racialized emotions of Jim Crow. After a White Southerner observed that Wright did not “laugh and talk like other niggers” Wright was well aware of the dangers of failing to comply, but he could not maintain his false cheer; he “would remember to dissemble for short periods then … forget” and “act human again.” It became even more difficult for Wright to fake happiness and cloak his contempt once he decided to leave the South. Worried that his intentions would be read on his face and perceived as traitorous, he tried to quash his true sentiments, and in their place he “smiled each day, fighting desperately … to keep [his] disposition seemingly sunny.” He suspected that this carefully crafted mask was slipping, and he worried that he was not fooling his White boss, even when Wright “laughed in the way” he was “expected … to laugh.” By depicting his boss’s “preoccupation with curbing [his] impulses … [and] expressions,” and how every night he was overwrought by his daily cache of “banked emotions,” Wright was harrowing proof that constantly affectively performing and self-monitoring was emotionally and physically exhausting.²²

Wright found some relief from the incessant barrage of dread when he moved from his rural Mississippi town to Memphis at the age of seventeen. He could still “detect disdain and hatred” in the way White people treated him, but it was less than what Wright was subjected to in rural Jackson. Yet even in Memphis Wright experienced life as a “continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety,” making him contemplate fleeing the South entirely to “escape the pressure of fear.” As nervous as he was to leave the South for the first time, Wright was also concerned about the extent to which he had internalized White supremacist affective expectations during his formative years. As he explained, growing up in the Jim Crow South, “I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there were feelings denied me … that more than anything else hurt.”²³ In the end what drove Wright North was the same impulse that compelled so many enslaved people to seek freedom: a desire for an emotional liberation that he believed was unattainable if he remained in the South.

But just as Harriet Jacobs and Douglass found that it took them time to unlearn the emotional dynamics of slavery, Wright was also surprised by how deeply ingrained the racialized affective norms of Jim Crow were when he arrived in Chicago in 1927. Having been “schooled to present an unalteringly smiling face” to White people, Wright found that he continued to perform emotions while his “true feelings raced along underground, hidden.” Like Jacobs and Douglass, Wright was also astonished to see that some of the affective hierarchies he associated with the South persisted in the North. Though he initially believed that in Chicago “there was no racial fear,” he quickly saw that “color hate” existed in the North as well, simmering just below the surface, like his own true feelings.²⁴ As Douglass and Du Bois predicted decades before, the racialized emotional caste system of Jim Crow was not exclusive to the South and would need sustained systemic attention if it was to be fully extinguished.

Fear and the Civil Rights Movement

Whether it was fueled by the confidence of Black veterans returning from wars abroad, or an emboldening effect from the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, there was an emotional shift under way in the South in the wake of World War II.²⁵ The omnipresent racialized terror that Wright worked to escape continued to stifle Black Southerners, but there was growing momentum among African Americans throughout the South to more openly resist segregation and disenfranchisement.²⁶ White Southerners were reluctant to lose their grip on power, so as a Civil Rights movement coalesced the South saw an upsurge of White supremacist terrorist violence. This included a rise in lynchings, cross burnings, and membership in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, in an effort to maintain the emotional politics of Jim Crow and intimidate Black Southerners who tried to vote or otherwise challenge the status quo.²⁷ Many White Southerners clearly worried that more rights for Black people meant a loss of rights for themselves. Once those White Southerners believed they were operating in a zero-sum political arena, their fears and anxieties were a volatile concoction, explosively triggered by even the inference of an interracial emotional transgression.²⁸

Few cases were more indicative of White anxiety over losing the affective norms of Jim Crow, and of the ways White fear was used to justify violence, than the murder of Emmett Till. Fifteen months after the Brown ruling heralded the beginning of the long journey to end de jure segregation, a fourteen-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to visit family in Money, Mississippi. The fact that he was from Chicago is often highlighted as a key component of the narrative, intended to convey that Till was not accustomed to the affective norms of Jim Crow, which dictated that Black men must be genial to, but never familiar with, White people, especially White women. It is unclear if Till winked, whistled, or made a cheeky comment to the White wife of a local grocery store owner; perhaps he did little more than exude cheer and confidence. Amid growing polarization over integration, even the slightest perceived infraction of the emotional politics of Jim Crow was, as Wright wrote a decade before, a “sentence of death.”²⁹ It may never be known what took place on that fateful day in the store, but it threatened the White Southern affective status quo enough that the grocery store owner and another White man kidnapped, tortured, and killed Till.

In a piece published almost a year after Till’s battered young body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and over eight months after Till’s self-confessed killers were acquitted, novelist William Faulkner wrote about the case and the role of White fear in resistance to integration. Though Faulkner initially theorized that White anxieties stemmed from the economic competition posed by Black people, Faulkner quickly acknowledged that the real threat was how much Black people had accomplished since Reconstruction, despite being disenfranchised. In Faulkner’s words, “That’s what the white man in the South is afraid of: that the Negro, who has done so much more with no chance, might do so much more with an equal one.” He believed that their underlying dread was that power structures that were rooted in racial inequality might dissolve. As more Black people migrated North to seek job opportunities and the vote, as the sharecropping system declined, and as more Black Southerners demanded rights and integration, White Southerners were afraid and manifested that fear on Black bodies like Till’s. Faulkner did not discuss the graphic details of Till’s lynching, but he parsed the emotional motives behind the murder, contending that the crime boiled down to the following “facts”: “two adults, armed, in the dark, kidnap a fourteen-year-old boy and take him away to frighten him. Instead of which, the fourteen-year-old boy not only refuses to be frightened, but, unarmed, alone, in the dark, so frightens the two armed men that they must destroy him.”³⁰

Political philosophers and historians alike have explored how despots wield fear as a method of social control.³¹ But in his summation of the case Faulkner identified a despotic dilemma: what happens when oppressors experience fear, when people in power feel threatened by those they have dispossessed? Faulkner hypothesized that though the murderers’ initial goal might have been simply to terrify Till, ultimately his White supremacist killers experienced terror themselves and then enacted those fears on Till. Faulkner went on to ask the reader “what are we Mississippians afraid of?”³² In 1950s Mississippi the answer to Faulkner’s question depended very much on race.

Till’s murder epitomized the fears of Wright and of so many other Black Southerners that failure to censure their emotions would end in death at the hands of White men.³³ But even if both Till and his killers felt afraid on that August night their fears were not seen as equivalent by society at large, nor were the stakes of their feelings the same. While being savagely beaten Till feared for his life, while his murderers merely feared for their way of life.³⁴ Moreover, his killers did not need to worry that there would be repercussions for their actions. Centuries of experience showed that they could act on their feelings with impunity, because killing a Black person based on White jealousy, anger, or terror had long been decriminalized in the South.³⁵ Because of those asymmetrical power dynamics, Till’s and his killers’ fears were treated differently, as were their respective abilities to invoke terror. In an essay about race, fear, and masculinity Robin D. G. Kelley acknowledged that it might seem empowering to be feared, even briefly, but he argued that “the power to scare is not real power.”³⁶ Till’s unwillingness to defer to White people may have frightened his attackers, but “real power” lay not in the ability to scare someone, but in being able to kill an unarmed adolescent and still claim one’s own fear, rage, or jealousy as a legal defense.

The Emotional Politics of Race in the Twenty-First Century

It has been over a century and a half since Emancipation, yet the residue of the emotional politics of slavery remains in evidence throughout the United States. The language of emotions still comes to the fore when people discuss race relations in America. Resorting to affective and relational language frames racial inequality and discrimination as a problem of personal enmity and individual prejudice rather than a systemic issue of racial inequality that has accumulated over centuries.³⁷ Phrenology may have fallen out of fashion but the belief that Black people experience and express emotions differently from White people persists as well. The notion that Black people feel lust rather than love, or cannot express certain emotions at all, is evident in stereotypes of Black people as “lascivious” and hypersexual and in critiques of the welfare system that depict Black women as inadequate mothers.³⁸ The phantasm of the happy slave is still resurrected by some White people to defend slavery and other past racial injustices, dredged up to serve as a false point of comparison for contemporary race relations.³⁹ Reflecting on race in America through the prism of his childhood in Louisiana, Phil Robertson, a reality-television star from the show Duck Dynasty, told a journalist he recalled that “the blacks worked for the farmers…. They’re singing and happy…. Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare … they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”⁴⁰ In a matter of sentences Robertson conjured up the myth of the happy slave, and he conflated that with nostalgic claims that Black sharecroppers “were happy” in the Jim Crow South. He then explicitly contrasted that idyllic, ahistorical era of Black contentment with the present by labeling the period “pre-entitlement, pre-welfare,” insinuating that African Americans were happier under Jim Crow. Robertson’s comments were widely criticized but offered a peek into the enduring fable that Black people were happier in some imagined, purely anecdotal past despite, or perhaps because of, the racial hierarchies of slavery and Jim Crow.

With the proliferation of social media, when the figure of the happy slave resurfaces the response from many journalists, bloggers, and internet commenters is swift, critiquing these iterations and explaining what is at stake when White supremacist myths are perpetuated. In 2014 a food blog reported outrage on Twitter and Facebook after cooking-show star Paula Deen’s Southern-style Georgia restaurant created an ad with an image of a smiling Black woman inviting people to eat by ringing a triangle. Critics claimed the advertisement invoked both the “mammy figure” and the myth that enslaved people were “contented, even happy.”⁴¹ In 2016 a children’s book published by Scholastic entitled A Birthday Cake for George Washington was roundly condemned for its “depiction of ‘happy’ slaves.” Scholastic pulled the book from shelves, conceding that without providing historical context about the harsh realities of slavery “the book may give a false impression … of the lives of slaves.”⁴² The author of the controversial book, Ramin Ganeshram, defended her work on the Scholastic website, asking, “How could they smile? How could they be anything but unrelentingly miserable? How could they be proud to bake a cake for George Washington? The answers to those questions are complex because human nature is complex,” and because not all enslaved people experienced bondage in the same way.⁴³ Ganeshram was correct that enslaved people felt ambivalent and even paradoxical emotions, but without portraying that “complex” spectrum of feelings her book’s affective portrayal of bondage parroted the myth of the “happy & content” slave that Washington himself touted over two centuries before.⁴⁴

Even in the twenty-first century Black people are still expected to censor certain emotions, particularly anger, or face harsh criticism, especially if they are in the public eye. Audiences may clamor for the popular realitytelevision trope of the angry Black woman, but First Lady Michelle Obama was denounced throughout her husband’s eight years in office for embodying the “angry black woman myth.” The implication was both that she was not in control of her emotions and that any passion she showed was excessive and irrational, never a righteous, earned indignation.⁴⁵ The same critiques dogged President Barack Obama, as he was variously accused of being angry, not condemning the anger of other Black people, or not being angry enough.⁴⁶ The notion that President Obama repressed his emotions, especially fury, was so widespread that it spawned a recurring sketch on the comedy show Key and Peele, in which Obama had a person on staff named Luther who functioned as his “anger interpreter” to help him vent frustrations he could not voice himself.⁴⁷ At its core the injunction against Black anger is itself based on fear, fear that after centuries of being compelled to suppress emotions African Americans might grow weary of masking rage at their continued unequal treatment and thereby express unreserved and well-warranted anger.

Half a century after the murder of Emmett Till, race-based fear continues to be a flashpoint for violence and a defense invoked in courtrooms and the law.⁴⁸ The shooting of a Black seventeen-year-old named Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman brought attention to Florida’s 2005 “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows the “use of force” in self-defense if one has “a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm.”⁴⁹ In the wake of Martin’s murder and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal, many have observed that such laws codify implicit racial bias and violate the civil rights of victims like Martin. In an editorial in the New York Times law professor Kenneth Nunn explained how these laws disproportionately impact Black men because they have historically “been constructed in popular culture as violence-prone and dangerous,” so “fear of black males, and consequently the use of deadly force against them, is ‘reasonable.’”⁵⁰ Just as slave states decriminalized the murder of an enslaved person by a slaveholder in a fit of passion, such laws offered more protection for White fears than for Black lives.

Public outrage over the Zimmerman verdict led many people of color to write about how young Black men in particular were still expected to perform certain emotions in interactions with White authority figures, while also bearing the blame for any fear they inspired in White people. Cord Jefferson explored this in an article he published less than an hour after the Zimmerman verdict was announced. He shared his own tale of being racially profiled in a Virginia hotel parking lot before asserting that the acquittal was further proof that “people of color … must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.” Jefferson lamented that to be “young, black and male in America” was to be simultaneously “aware that many people are afraid of you” and “apologetic for their fear.” He related this barrage of daily microaggressions to the Trayvon Martin case, saying that given this set of racialized emotional expectations the onus was on Martin “to apologize” for being scary, rather than the burden being on White people to question why they were ruled by fear.⁵¹

Zimmerman’s acquittal gave rise to the social movement hashtag #Black-LivesMatter, which in turn spawned a movement that has often asked why White fears rooted in racism have traditionally been privileged over Black fears of White supremacist violence. Though termed the Black Lives Matter movement, its founders, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, have been clear that their focus was not only on threats to Black lives, but also on the material ways that historical racial inequality endangers Black emotional lives.

Cullors, Garza, and Tometi portrayed emotions as a constant refrain in Black social movements in an open letter posted to Ebony.com just weeks after the murder of Freddie Grey, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, by Baltimore police, writing, “Today, our hearts swell with the same current of love that coursed through the veins of those who faced the billy clubs and tear gas in Selma, Alabama…. There are those who do not acknowledge that our rage is a symptom of our grief … this is what Black Lives Matter is truly about. We support all of our emotions, from our bliss to our anger to our grief. All of it is welcome, as this is what it means to be human.”

As they alluded in this short piece, it was not just the systems of oppression they were fighting that had historical roots; the emotions that accompanied those struggles against White supremacist violence had longer origins, too. Just as Solomon Northup had argued over a century and a half before, to be fully free was to have freedom to experience and express a litany of human emotions, including “anger,” “bliss,” and “grief,” and to acknowledge how this constellation of emotions could operate in concert to challenge racial inequality. As they explained, battles over civil rights and human dignity had not been won with fear, or through love alone, but also with a “rage” based in “grief.” One of the issues at hand was acknowledging the spectrum of emotions fueling the Black Lives Matter movement and the origins of those feelings. But according to Cullors, Garza, and Tometi, emotions were more than the reason to fight: emotions were also the means of resisting racial injustice. As they concluded, “We acknowledge that our uprisings are being fueled by the love we have for ourselves and for one another. A love that challenges silence, repression and death.”⁵²

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Slavery in the United States was formally abolished with the Thirteenth Amendment, but it has proven difficult to dispel the affective norms and expectations that have their origins in the emotional politics of slavery and thus have accrued in hearts, minds, and relationships for centuries. Studying the emotional politics of slavery and racial injustice more generally makes transparent the formerly opaque process of how authority figures use emotions and affective norms to shore up power and how historically marginalized people can also deploy feelings to negotiate with or challenge those elites. Emotions can unite people, forming the filament of our most intimate bonds, but affective norms can also be used to preserve inequalities and divide people, by dehumanizing groups of people and delineating their supposed emotional differences. As Douglass observed over a century ago, racial inequality was a problem that impacted the entire country on an affective level. Douglass warned that “the glory or shame, the happiness or misery” of the nation was at stake, until all Americans could truly and equally exercise their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Until the inalienable affective rights of all citizens are taken seriously, the question remains, what are we so afraid of?