How did universalizable Enlightenment ideas emerge from subordinated groups in a society strictly stratified along racial lines? Drawing from his forthcoming book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (2024), Roy outlines the pervasiveness of race-based notions of “feudalism” and the “Great Chain of Being” in the United States from the Revolutionary era through the Civil War. He describes how prominent Black American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper appropriated and transformed eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas in order to combat the forces of what he calls “racial feudalism.” Finally, Roy applies the liberal framework advanced by Black American Enlightenment thinkers to current debates regarding tensions between the promise of universal ideas and the particularity of group identity.