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At the beginning of my second semester of CC, my professor asked us all to write down a response on an index card to the question “What do you hope to get out of this class?” My response was, “The books we are reading have been used for centuries to justify cruelty against people of color, like me. I want to read and analyze these books so that I can better understand the dangerous arguments these books were used to support.” When I read John Stuart Mill’s work On Liberty, I focused on the aspects of his text that would later be used to justify the stripping of liberty and freedom from Indian bodies. When I read Nietzche’s The Genealogy of Morals, I focused on how this book was used to argue that some were just born innately with a “slave morality.” The reason I studied these books was solely due to the ways they had been used in the past.
But a recent interview with Trevor Noah that aired this past weekend gave me pause. In the interview, Noah spoke of how the notion of a society is essentially the same thing as a social contract. In this social contract, everybody gets together and decides to uphold the same sets of rules and expected behaviors. Noah’s segment was a rebuke against all those criticizing the various forms of protesting we’ve seen in the past week— especially those who have only been fixating on the “looting” and “rioting.” Noah argued that we as a society are getting offended by the “looting” because we’ve all agreed to rules that have deemed such acts immoral. But, in his segment, Noah argued that the active and ongoing injustices against the African-American community meant that part of society wasn’t holding up its end of the social contract, as it wasn’t treating all of those in the society with the same rules. Thus, the contract was void and that’s why the “looting” and “rioting” was okay. Noah’s argument was met with praise on the internet, and I saw comment after comment speaking of how radical it was to view society as a contract. But as a student of CC, I didn’t find this equation of society with a contract to be radical. Instead, I immediately recognized this phrase as belonging to Hobbes, whose work I had read in class.
This caused me to re-think that answer I gave on my index-card. Maybe instead of reading these books to understand the dangerous arguments they were used for, I should consider how the same notions and ideals that were used in support of terrible crimes can be used in support of the causes I believe in. After all, when legal arguments are made in this country, they often cite the Constitution, a document that has been used to justify many cruelties. But because the document has been used for centuries as a text to be respected and supported, the text can’t be invalidated when you use it for a different purpose. There is power and strength in these texts that have been so beloved for so long, and I should be utilizing this strength when I’m arguing for causes that I believe in. The use of CC books shouldn’t just be to understand the texts that were used to build our nation 300 years ago. These books should be seen not just as an explanation of the past, but also books that can be re-interpreted to explain and envision the future.