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The music that chronicles the African American experience is marked in profound but subtle and contradictory ways by the law, perhaps the most pervasive presence in black life since enslaved Africans arrived in the New World. From the mournful but veiled complaints of the sorrow songs to Jay Z’s boastful narration of a pretextual traffic stop, at the heart of so much of the music of black culture lies a wary appraisal, and often an outright rejection, of the “justice” of American law. This Commentary reviews the fraught relationship between the law and the tradition of African American music.

This essay explores the recurring figure of the traitor in African-American letters, arguing that literary portrayals of the crime of treason reveal the fundamental tension between black loyalty to the nation and the nation’s betrayal of the race, and indeed demand that we reconsider the terms of treason itself. In three nineteenth-century texts by African American writers—Victor Sejour’s 1837 “The Mulatto,” Frederick Douglass’s 1853 “The Heroic Slave,” and Sutton Griggs’s 1899 Imperium in Imperio—faithful black subjects are inevitably betrayed by racialized law and custom and the refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a black subject fully incorporated into the nation. Asking whether and how blacks writers can navigate the chasm between loyalty to race and loyalty to nation, this essay interrogates the twinned metaphors of patriotism and treason as literary responses to the seeming incommensurability of racial and national citizenship.