Reading the “Veil of Black” in Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson: Affective Legibility and National Belonging

The article places Frederick Douglass in the tradition of African American writers responding to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. In doing so, it reveals Douglass’s keen understanding of how visual racialized affect was bound up in questions of slavery, freedom, and citizenship. By displaying his own affective legibility, revealing that black affective illegibility is an accomplishment of consciousness rather than a natural racial distinction, and highlighting that white feeling relies on Jeffersonian racial vision, Douglass reimagines a nation in which shared affect, regardless of the body’s racialized visual aesthetics, becomes the basis for interracial American kinship.