Introduction: A Rhizomic Trail

The graves of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are near neighbors at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. To walk from one to the other, you climb and descend rambling slopes, moving around an ancient esker, now a paved driving lane, and formerly the road that native Seneca people used to travel between Lake Ontario and the Bristol Hills. Along the way, reading any given inscription might bring a jolt of recognition, so crowded is the place with luminaries and supporting actors. Most days, you will find yourself nearly alone but for the urban wildlife, in a vast settling garden undisturbed by its historical standing. As Mount Hope sits atop retired catacombs and moves with the bustle of groundhog burrows, so too within the story of Mount Hope, active recesses are as likely to be found as they are to be found sealed over. The history we customarily acknowledge in Mount Hope is a sprout, sustained by unseen networks. This essay is about one of them: the lines between Anthony and Douglass and their political causes, which extended into the dynamics at work in the 2016 presidential election, and into the social and political activities that have followed it. More specifically, I will focus on the racial inequality Douglass and Anthony confronted, which lives on in our institutions, our appreciation of American history, and our tools of theoretical analysis. I utilize Friedrich Nietzsche's juxtaposition of three modes of interpreting history—monumental, antiquarian, and critical—to argue that the 2016 election and the predicaments in American social and political life that it laid bare indicate our need for a renewed critical history, as Nietzsche understood it and as Douglass practiced it, and for a racially relevant intersectional politics.

The story of Anthony and Douglass's friendship includes Douglass's support of women's rights conventions, including in Seneca Falls in 1848, where his defense of the resolution for women's suffrage helped secure its inclusion in the convention's program. This story remembers that Anthony and Douglass were allies when he died, having just spent an afternoon together. Less discussed is the record of Anthony's indignation at the possibility that black men would win suffrage before white women and their consequent falling-out over the Fifteenth Amendment.