Keidrick Roy's "American Dark Age"

Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2025, he will be Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on Black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison.

Roy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 examines the productive tension between W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1915 depiction of slavery as “American feudalism” and his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, which has become a foundational text in contemporary studies of racial capitalism. Juxtaposing these representations of slavery reveals an institution exhibiting paternalistic traces of medieval hierarchies on the one hand and an impassive system of economic exploitation on the other. The lens of “feudalism” and its associated concepts—which prominent African Americans intentionally used to describe their conditions during the nineteenth century—provides insight into aspects of slavery and prejudice that extended beyond economic domination. In particular, “racial feudalism” captures the varied theological, cultural, and philosophical commitments maintained by Southern enslavers and prejudiced Northerners that went hand-in-hand with their commercial interests in the subjugation of Black Americans.

Because racial feudalism is a central concept developed by American Dark Age, page 99 serves as an apt index of the larger purpose of the monograph. However—as this is a two-part book—the test did not reveal the second core theme of “black liberalism,” which I engage in subsequent chapters but will briefly outline here. In response to the ideology of racial feudalism promoted by Americans invested in a color-based hierarchy—what Frederick Douglass described as the “aristocracy of the skin”—several eminent Black Americans embraced and promoted (anti-feudal) liberal ideas such as individual freedom, political egalitarianism, moral universalism, and the possibility of progress in a slaveholding nation dominated by feudalistic hierarchies.

Though twentieth-century liberalism is often associated with selfishness and unfettered free markets, the early Black liberals I describe balanced their desire for individual freedom with commitments to the broader society. They were also more concerned with abolishing unnatural hierarchies that justified slavery, prejudice, and the financial pillaging of African American communities through force and fraud than deregulating markets for the sole purpose of maximizing personal profits. Ultimately, my book conceptualizes racial feudalism and antebellum black liberalism as useful ideas for understanding the development of American political thought, particularly in the wake of modern hate groups and violent extremists that continue to deploy feudalistic imagery and fanciful notions of a medieval past to justify their pernicious ends.

Visit Keidrick Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue