21st century conservatives, of course, excise the specific historical context of Douglass’ words; the Banks-Lincoln reconstruction policy in Louisiana, the Emancipation Proclamation, and black (male) suffrage and choose to run with the portion of the paragraph beginning with "What is freedom?" as a (conservative) justification of everything from the meeting of "freedom" to the demonization of all manner of social programs to the supposed pernicious influence and interference of government in people's lives.
When Justice Clarence Thomas used the Douglass quote in his dissent from the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, he drained Douglass' statement to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society of all meaning and context. Given what Thomas's ultimate dissenting argument is, given that Thomas makes repeated references to "racial discrimination" in his Grutter V. Bollinger dissent, Douglass' simple short statement in his 1866 Atlantic essay, Reconstruction, would have sufficed:
Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color.
And while that statement, too, would be taken out of context, at least it has the added value of actually being somewhat consistent with Douglass' views on the Constitution.
21st century conservatives seem to love Frederick Douglass.
Even the current occupant of the Oval Office dared to utter Mr. Douglass’ name.
If Donald Trump wants to utter Mr. Douglass’ name and if 21st century conservatives want to quote from What The Black Man Wants, then Republican and conservative views and actions need to be reconciled with this statement from that very same speech:
I believe that when the tall heads of this Rebellion shall have been swept down, as they will be swept down, when the Davises and Toombses and Stephenses... there will be this rank undergrowth of treason...You will see those traitors, handing down, from sire to son, the same malignant spirit which they have manifested, and which they are now exhibiting, with malicious hearts, broad blades, and bloody hands in the field, against our sons and brothers. That spirit will still remain; and whoever sees the Federal Government extended over those Southern States will see that Government in a strange land, and not only in a strange land, but in an enemy’s land.
Not only has the “malignant spirit” of “this rank undergrowth of treason” been handed down through generations; it continues to be harnessed and deployed in the ugliest of ways by the 21st century Republican Party and Donald Trump; so much and so effectively that what Douglass called this “rank undergrowth of treason” now occupies the White House and an additional branch and a half of the federal government.
In the 21st century.
I don’t think that even Frederick Douglass could have imagined the literal possibility that “this rank undergrowth of treason” would have included the giving and accepting of “aid and comfort” to and from a foreign power such that a foreign power could have any influence on this country’s national elections.
The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.
African Americans “living in hell” as they dodge bullets on the way to and from the corner store?
“Bad hombres?”
A “nasty woman?”
(And we can add to the list. Chances are, we will be able to add to the list today.)
That playbook is old.
Let’s not forget the very specific subject matter that Douglass addresses in What The Black Man Wants; the connection between emancipation and suffrage.
I can well imagine Mr. Douglass’ own views to Mr. Trump’s megalomanical claims that millions of people (undocumented immigrants, dead, and otherwise) voted illegally or otherwise “hung out” on voter rolls as if they were a street corner and committed an almost nonexistent crime called voter fraud.
Of course, the 21st century Republican Party has been and continues to be in the forefront of voter suppression campaigns throughout the country, most recently and brazenly in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, Dodge City, Kansas, and the 9th congressional district of North Carolina (just to name three brazen incidents of voter suppression off of the top of my head!).
Many African Americans (rightly in my view) criticized Mr. Pence’s need to mention President Lincoln during Black History Month last year.
While there are a variety of things, positive and negative, that one can say about President Lincoln (yes, America, Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist), there is one fact about the 16th President of the United States that is irrefutable.
President Lincoln took an assassin’s bullet three days after stating, in his final public address, that blacks and Creoles in Louisiana should be given the right to vote; a proposal that, if followed upon and enacted, would have meant “nigger citizenship” according to Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
21st century voter suppression has the backing of large majorities of white evangelical Christians like Mr. Pence; a first or second cousin of a brand of Christianity that Frederick Douglass recognized and criticized in his day:
What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest, possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
Frederick Douglass, Appendix to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845)
No amount of selective quotation by 21st century conservatives can minimize or alter the radical impact of Frederick Douglass's activism on the behalf of black American citizens (or all American citizens, for that matter) then or now.
I am confident that were Frederick Douglass able to time travel into the 21st century and to look at the Republican Party, he wouldn't recognize it.
Frederick Douglass would recognize and name 21st century conservatives and Republicans exactly as they are now.
Frederick Douglass would recognize and name the 45th President of the the United States as exactly who he is.
In fact, Mr. Douglass already named it. All of it. Long ago.
