The Darkened Light of Faith is a work in the history of black political thought that speaks to contemporary challenges. It provides intricate reconstructions of David Walker’s rhetorical methods in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World; the democratic perfectionism of Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, and Anna Julia Cooper; Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany’s debate about the meaning and implications of civic republicanism for oppressed peoples; Ida B. Wells’s and Billie Holiday’s use of journalism and music to reeducate American moral sense on lynching; and W. E. B. Du Bois’s use of art as propaganda to call readers to higher character. Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin make cameo appearances. Rogers provides not only riveting intellectual history but also rigorous argument about the faith-based character of democratic transformation.

Rogers’s starting point is a sense of awe at the fact that African Americans have historically embraced the theory and language of republicanism and democracy even as their oppressors used that language to justify white supremacy. Though they could have dismissed republicanism and democracy as the master’s tools, black folks perceived early on that their oppressors missed the depth of republicanism’s and democracy’s egalitarian spirit. African Americans gambled that rhetorical appeals from republicanism and democracy could win converts to the causes of abolition and racial equality, as well as facilitate solidarity among the oppressed. But as they did this rhetorical work, the concepts themselves took on new meanings:

The starting premise of black democratic thought is that the meanings of democracy’s keywords are open-ended, subject to reappropriation and resignification. The key signifiers of democracy, freedom, and equality are also open to supplementation by concepts from America’s dark side: domination, slavery, white supremacy. When the two sets of terms are considered together, it becomes possible to revise democracy, freedom, and equality into ideas better calibrated to address the central place of slavery, conquest, and racism in the modern world. Democracy gets more realistic in black hands.

Underlying this transformative work is a formidable faith in the possibilities of personal and political transformation. The descriptive people, the people as they are, can become the aspirational people, the people as they ought to be. The keys are persuasion and conversion. Character can be improved through moral teaching and rhetorical appeal. Rogers merges old-fashioned concern with moral virtue with cutting-edge insistence that racial equality is a realizable ideal. Like Danielle Allen, he is an Aristotelian for racial justice.Footnote ¹ What challenges does Rogers’s politics face in an increasingly authoritarian world?

Rogers’s politics of conversion take place on a tripartite political field.Footnote ² At one end are democratic egalitarians—citizens of all races whose hearts are with equality, who believe that democratic norms and procedures are the best way to negotiate difference. Democratic egalitarians are racially egalitarian by definition—for Rogers insists that herrenvolk democracies are logically incoherent. Democracy and equality—in their proper senses—are morally universalist; neither admit of racial hierarchy.Footnote ³

At the other end are anti-black authoritarians, a group that is mostly white, but includes Latinos, Asian Americans, and even a small number of African Americans who believe that black people generally belong at the social bottom (but who also hold that “exceptional” black individuals should be admitted to the ruling class). Anti-black authoritarians are defined by (1) authoritarian tendencies, a belief that the strong should rule the weak, that the virtuous should rule the vicious (even and especially when their definitions of virtue are circular and self-serving) and (2) a belief that black people generally embody intellectual or cultural weakness and/or vicious character.Footnote ⁴

Between these opposite poles is a confused public—a largely but not exclusively white population whose political instincts are sometimes egalitarian, sometimes authoritarian, who waver between complacent acceptance of white supremacy and moral discomfort with it. Rogers’s project is to convert the confused middle to democratic egalitarianism and create a majority that can overrule anti-black authoritarians. “Here, the subjects of engagement are not the unfeeling actors, the heartless … but the ones whose hearts have not yet been touched” (17). Darkened Light showcases the rhetorical methods used by African Americans since the nineteenth century to do this work.

And what a breathtaking showcase it is—ranging from Walker’s demand that nineteenth-century black citizens perform their dignity and that white citizens adhere to the moral universalism of equality, to Hosea Easton’s and Frederick Douglass’s calls to white Americans to divest their identities of the need to dominate (129), to Ida B. Wells’s and Billie Holiday’s efforts to transfigure public sense and sensibility, to W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary efforts to cultivate sympathy and elicit shame. This is not to say that Darkened is centered solely on converting white moderates and their ilk. The book extensively considers how African Americans—and by extension, other subaltern peoples—should practice solidarity against racism as a form of civic virtue. Rogers, however, wants democracy to win, and that means that democratic egalitarians must become a majority. Given that only a minority of Americans are democratic egalitarians by conviction, how must they address the morally confused middle to create a majority?Footnote ⁵

Darkened Light places preponderant emphasis on ethos, but the book’s politics cannot escape the question of governance. Rogers is clear that public education—broadly conceived—must be the primary engine of transformation. Yet he does not address school systems or state power. Rather, he envisions independent cultural actors doing their transformative educative work in civil society, as Douglass, Wells, Du Bois, and Holiday did. Rogers is forthright about how radical “reeducation” must be: “the aim—that is, the content of reeducation—is to properly align the public’s intellectual and emotional senses with reality’s demand” (179). He spotlights informal, “noncoercive” forms of education—forms that seek “to persuade from within.” How far can these indirect forms of moral education take us without recourse to the public education system and the state’s coercive power? Rogers’s hope may be that moral reeducation will infiltrate the system indirectly, but as Ron DeSantis teaches us, it is a mistake to underestimate the importance of winning office and setting policy. In Bayard Rustin’s words, “It is institutions—social, political, and economic institutions—which are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments.”Footnote ⁶

To wield decisive influence in the public education system, democratic egalitarians must win elections and legislative power. This is where Rogers’s virtue politics runs into complications--for he does not specify how his politics of character and conversion will handle the moral compromises of electoral politics. Are Rogers’s politics Machiavellian enough to win the battle of democracy—especially when anti-black authoritarians lack Rogers’s moral inhibitions? What provision does he make for the defensive violence that may be necessary to prevent anti-black authoritarian takeover of the US government—as we came dangerously close to on January 6, 2021? That Darkened Light stops short of answering these questions does not diminish its intellectual achievement, but it does mean that it needs supplementation.Footnote ⁷

Achieving racial justice in America requires an ethics of power acquisition and defensive violence—for anti-black authoritarianism is ruthless and implacable. It took black and white men, dressed in blue and armed with guns, to bring us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and to enable the Republican Reconstruction coalition to plant a public school system in the South.Footnote ⁸ A democratic egalitarian majority must be a big tent, bringing prophets of democratic equality together with more temperamentally conservative citizens, pacifists together with militants willing to use force when anti-black authoritarians threaten to derail democratic procedures. Darkened Light does great work in showing how rhetoric can win more of a morally confused public to a democratic egalitarian coalition. Who within that coalition will take the next step of building upon Rogers’ politics of conversion a politics of victory?Footnote ⁹