“To Make Me More Efficient for Good”: Black Democratic Perfectionism and James W.C. Pennington

This chapter argues that Pennington can be regarded as one of the founding figures of a Black tradition of democratic perfectionism This tradition makes self-cultivation key to the achievement of racial justice. Attending to, cultivating, and perfecting Black selfhood is traditionally understood as a form of early respectability politics; in fact, this chapter shows that self-cultivation is a form of immanent critique of American society and the racism that pervades it. Black democratic perfectionism involves tending to one’s soul within a society that, in both ideology and practice, values some lives above others. Because of this social context, acts of Black self-cultivation, including the record of self-cultivation and the act of self-creation in authoring a slave narrative, are not just expressions of individual self-becoming. These acts of self-cultivation have moral and political implications. Putting Pennington in conversation with contemporaries such as Frederick Douglass, but also later thinkers such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin, the chapter tracks both significant continuities and differences within Black democratic perfectionism.