The Douglassain Imperative

“Why Dehumanization at the Center of Power Demands Agitation”

This essay is part of the Justice Scholars project to recover traditions of public theology capable of confronting democratic crisis. Drawing on Frederick Douglass and the Black prophetic tradition, it argues that agitation is not chaos but the disciplined maintenance of dignity in public life.

When a society learns to laugh at humiliation, it is learning to tolerate abandonment. The recent dehumanizing rhetoric directed toward former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama is not an isolated lapse in decorum. It is a civic event with theological weight. It reveals a racial grammar embedded deep within American public life — a grammar that regulates who counts as fully human and whose humiliation can be normalized without consequence.

To call this merely “disrespect” is insufficient. Disrespect is interpersonal. Dehumanization is structural. It trains the public to accept inequality by first training it to tolerate contempt. That is why the moment demands theological interpretation and democratic response. It exposes a recurring fault line in American civic culture: the tension between constitutional equality and the habits that quietly erode it.

Public theology exists for precisely such moments. It asks not only what has happened, but what moral world makes such events possible — and what disciplined practices are required to interrupt their repetition.

Dehumanization as Moral Infrastructure

Within Black liberation ethics, dehumanization is not reducible to speech. It is a rehearsal of hierarchy. James Cone argued that racism is a theological contradiction — a denial of the image of God in Black existence. If Genesis insists that all humans bear divine imprint, then racial degradation is not only unethical; it is an assault on creation’s moral order. Kelly Brown Douglas shows that American racial imagination has long rendered Black bodies morally disposable, implicating theology itself in systems of exclusion. Democracies depend on shared recognition of dignity. When contempt becomes normalized, legal equality weakens because cultural recognition collapses.

Dehumanization narrows the circle of moral concern. It invites spectatorship in place of solidarity. Once a society becomes comfortable watching humiliation, it becomes comfortable tolerating abandonment. The prophetic tradition understands this danger. Scripture treats degradation as a distortion of perception — the refusal to see the other as neighbor.

Dehumanization is being elevated to a spectacle.

The Douglassian Method: Agitation as Ethical Discipline

Frederick Douglass understood that injustice survives not because it is hidden, but because it becomes tolerable. His contribution was methodological. He constructed a grammar of agitation designed to make tolerance impossible.

Moral exposure. Ethical disturbance. Conscience coercion. Strategic incivility. Narrative indictment. Rhetorical escalation. Public conscience formation. Douglass’ insight was surgical: injustice survives when it becomes familiar. Power yields only under pressure. Without organized agitation, hierarchy stabilizes itself.

Cornel West places this within a prophetic tradition that warns democratic decay begins when societies lose the capacity for moral outrage. Katie Cannon reminds us that habituated injustice is sustained through everyday practices that normalize inequality. Resistance, therefore, is discipline — not emotional reaction.

Agitation is not disorder. It is maintenance.

The Archive of Rehearsed Contempt

American history preserves a continuous archive of how dehumanization operates as a citizenship strategy. Reconstruction caricatures depicted Black legislators as animals. Jim Crow propaganda weaponized humiliation to rationalize segregation. These images were civic weapons.

Eddie Glaude Jr. warns that American democracy repeatedly reconstructs itself through racial forgetting, allowing past degradations to return disguised as novelty. Vincent Lloyd frames this as a crisis of dignity: traditions fail when they stop defending marginalized humanity. Martha Nussbaum shows that democratic life depends upon symbolic recognition of worth; contempt is not peripheral to injustice — it enables it.

History does not disappear. It waits.

Scripture and the Refusal of Neutrality

The biblical witness refuses neutrality in the face of degradation. Amos demands justice to roll like waters. Genesis grounds dignity as ontological fact. Jesus frames truth-telling as liberation.

The prophets disturb because disturbance is required. Civility without justice is choreography. Unity without recognition is theater.

Womanist Expansion

Womanist theology insists racial degradation is gendered. Delores Williams anchors liberation in survival and wholeness. Emilie Townes exposes how culture normalizes Black degradation. Katie Cannon insists ethics must account for embodied vulnerability.

Liberation without care is incomplete liberation. Womanist critique fulfills Douglass’ demand for recursive exposure: prophetic traditions must interrogate their own blind spots.

The Church as Archive and Laboratory

The Black church has historically functioned as both an archive of resistance and a laboratory of democratic imagination. Black liberation theology locates God in the struggle against degradation. At its best, the church forms citizens capable of confronting despair without surrendering clarity.

But prophetic institutions must expose their own contradictions. Agitation must turn inward as well as outward. Otherwise, it becomes performance.

The Prophetic Summons

Silence is complicity.
Neutrality is participation.
Normalization is surrender.

Agitation is a disciplined refusal. Democracies do not collapse only through crisis; they erode through tolerated contempt. The task is organized interruption.

Conclusion: Agitation as Democratic Repair

Agitation is not hatred of order. It is love of democracy expressed as maintenance. Without friction, hierarchy glides forward unopposed.

Expose what degrades.
Disturb what normalizes harm.
Escalate when evasion hardens.
Rebuild what contempt erodes.

Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.

Because dignity is not optional.
Because democracy is not self-correcting.
Because silence is never neutral.

Call to Action

This essay is an invitation, not a conclusion. The work of agitation belongs to communities willing to defend dignity in public life. Share this essay. Teach it. Argue with it. Bring it into classrooms, churches, organizing spaces, and civic conversations. Democracies survive only where citizens refuse normalization. The task is collective.

About the Author

Paris Lee Smith, Sr., is a Justice Scholar and public theologian working at the intersection of Black intellectual history, democratic ethics, and prophetic theology. Their work draws on the Douglassian tradition of agitation to examine how dignity functions as civic infrastructure. Through writing, teaching, and advocacy, they seek to recover moral languages capable of confronting modern injustice without surrendering to spectacle or despair.

“Justice Scholars Society” is committed to elevating voices that treat justice as a public discipline rather than a private sentiment.

Tags: Frederick Douglass, public theology, democracy, Black liberation theology, dignity, prophetic resistance