Desmond Jagmohan

My current book project, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), studies the politics of deception under conditions of extreme oppression. Dark Virtues is a comprehensive study of Booker T. Washington’s political thought in four parts. Part I outlines Washington’s view of white supremacy as a resilient form of race-based oppression requiring a long and imperceptible siege (Chs. 1-2). Part II shows that he relied on dark virtues—or morally suspect conduct like equivocation (Ch. 3), concealment (Ch. 4), and deception (Ch. 5)—to survive and subvert white supremacy and defended them as necessary and permissible under conditions of extremity. Part III, drawing on several years of archival research, argues that Washington’s compliant public mask aided radical deeds: clandestine legal challenges to Jim Crow (Ch. 6), creating programs for economic empowerment (Ch. 7), and increasing civic capacity through autonomous black institutions (Ch. 8). Part IV considers the fate of his politics by turning to two of his critics, W. E. B. Du Bois, who emphasized the psychological harms of deception (Ch. 9), and Ida B. Wells, who defended candor as a virtue (Ch. 10). It concludes that Washington’s realism was quite tragic (Ch. 11). So, in addition to offering the first comprehensive study of Washington’s political theory, I analytically reconstruct and historically contextualize the role of deception in African American political thought between 1850 and 1915, from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois.  

In doing so, I enrich our understanding of the complex forms moral agency takes in conditions of extreme oppression. More importantly, the book approaches Booker T. Washington as an ethical case study in the politics of deception. It does so by situating his views of deception against those of Douglass (Ch. 5), Du Bois (Ch. 9), and Wells (10), effectively recovering the place of deception and dissimulation in the history of African American thought from 1850 to 1915. The views of Washington and Douglass are contrasted with those of Du Bois and Wells, both of which insisted on candor and courage as crucial political virtues. The project, then, is based on nearly a decade-long quest to recover those shards and put them into a coherent narrative and vision. 

My second book project is tentatively titled, Slavery & Subversion: The Political Thought of Harriet Jacobs. The book philosophically reconstructs Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by situating it within the discursive contexts of mid-nineteenth America. First, I argue that Jacobs sought to refute then prevailing proslavery arguments: property- (Ch. 1), natural-inequality- (Ch. 2), and paternalist-based justifications for racial slavery (Ch. 3). Second, I place Incidents within the abolitionist public sphere and read it against an empirical analysis of five-thousand slave narratives to contextualize and normatively explicate Jacobs’s descriptions of the strategies enslaved people relied on to endure and undermine their enslavement: tactical use of cunning (Ch. 4), practices of fidelity (Ch. 5), and bearing witness (Ch. 6). And I conclude that Jacobs broke new philosophical ground, that her ownership-based conception of slavery explains why slavery is a distinct rather than merely extreme form of oppression, and her argument for veiled agency asks us to reimagine the moral and expressive contours of resistance.