Democratic Indignation

Abstract

This essay argues that black Americans writing from outside or at the margins of the democratic polity shed important light on the nature of human dignity and on the political emotion that offers—to oneself and to others—the surest proof of the existence of such dignity: indignation. I focus in particular on four insights of this body of black American political thought: that the presumption of dignity is the basis on which citizenship is conferred, while its denial is the justification by which citizenship is withheld; that dignity’s existence within a person is vouchsafed most effectively by indignation, a flash of emotion that arises in response to the insult of its denial; that even though dignity feels woven into one’s innermost being, it is always vulnerable to social denial and therefore stands in need of social confirmation; that indignation can and should be transformed into a self-opposing disposition that resists complacency and seeks continual reconfiguration, or enlargement, of the demos and of its democratic theory.