Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Allen describes her years teaching at the University of Chicago. By day, she taught traditional undergraduates from privileged backgrounds, while her night students were often overworked, underpaid, and managing childcare and public transit to attend class. Both groups read the same texts, and in both groups, substantive and transformative discussion took place. Allen recalls that her students used close reading of texts to change their relationships with the world and themselves. Each group considered the nature of autonomy in Greek tragedy, the role of ghosts in Toni Morrison’s work, and the beauty in poetry and songs. Both groups taught Allen as well—her day students brought new interpretations of texts, while her night students reminded her that progress and learning are “mysteries” and that it is impossible to predict when and how people improve as thinkers and writers.

Allen originally assigned the Declaration of Independence to her night students for practical reasons—it is a brief work they could all manage. Eventually, she realized that equality was essential to interpreting the document correctly. Allen admits that this reading may strike some people as controversial, since “the text, after all, declares independence” (35). However, the work begins and ends with equality—the colonists assert that their new nation is equal to other nations and conclude with a mutual pledge to one another. For Allen’s night students, this encounter with the Declaration’s promise of equality within political communities changed their lives, as they “found themselves suddenly as political beings” (35). Allen herself gained a new appreciation for the document’s language and its deep commitment to equality. She asserts that the Declaration belongs to her, as it does to her students.

Allen opens with a series of questions related to her previous assertion that the Declaration of Independence is a shared inheritance and not merely the legacy of the politically sophisticated or economically powerful. She admits that this may strike some readers as strange, especially as the Declaration was written by white male elites and she is “a mixed-race (but aren’t we all?) African-American woman” (36). 

Allen sees the Declaration’s commitment to freedom in both sides of her family history. On her father’s side, an ancestor left the Caribbean in search of a better life and found himself enslaved in Florida. Later ancestors fought for the Union, and her grandfather joined the NAACP. Her own father left the South to avoid systemic discrimination. All of their efforts were a search for more freedom. Her maternal legacy included ties to the suffragette movement and Progressive education. Both sides of her family were committed to education and reading—her mother was a librarian and her father became a college professor. Her family read the Bible twice through, with each member taking a chapter over dinner. Allen calls this practice “slow reading. This too is my patrimony” (37). Her parents insisted that reading and debate were key to personal growth, and the family did discuss the Declaration of Independence. However, Allen’s first experience with “slow reading” that text came with her night students. She notes that it’s “cliché to say that we fell in love, but we did” (38). Out of this relationship, Allen and her students discovered how the text situates freedom and equality as mutually reinforcing.