Feeling Racial Pride In the Mode of Frederick Douglass

Abstract:Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s arguments about racial pride, this article develops and defends an account of feeling racial pride that centers on resisting racialized oppression. Such pride is racially ecumenical in that it does not imply partiality toward one’s own racial group. This article argues that it can both accurately represent its intentional object and be intrinsically and extrinsically valuable to experience. It follows that there is, under certain conditions, a morally unproblematic, and plausibly valuable, kind of racial pride available to White people, though one that could hardly differ more from what is generally meant by “White pride.”