Black Masculinity Achieves Nothing without Restorative Care

Drawing upon My Bondage and My Freedom and Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, this chapter explores Douglass’s efforts to build a community with his black male peers during slavery and elucidates a black male ethic of care. It takes the example of Douglass and uses it to show how black males are capable of caring relationships that are distinct from traditional frames of caring relationships. Douglass’s speech “Self-Made Men” is used as a framework for looking at Douglass through an intersectional lens and chronicles how he moved from this hyperindividual stance to the more complex thoughts in Bondage. Going into the friendships Douglass kept in his youth, this chapter uses these examples to describe the “care giver” and “care recipient” roles Douglass took on in his restorative relationships.