"Racial Greatness" Reconsidered: Race Theory, Masking, and Pragmatism in Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio

Abstract:

This essay situates Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) as a pragmatic intervention in Jim Crow-era discourses around Black Nationalism. Highlighting Griggs’s instrumentalist relationship to race theory in both Imperium and Guide to Racial Greatness (1923), this essay argues that his works are fertile sites for examining a distinctly African American tradition of philosophical pragmatism that sought to conceptualize racial solidarity in nonessentialist ways. It further suggests that Griggs’s pragmatism, responding to the unique pressures of the Jim Crow period, emphasized the need for emancipatory efforts to be masked and embedded within the very structures they sought to dismantle.