This dissertation arises from three related interests. The first is my interest in several 19th century Black American texts that describe the US’ egalitarian promise of equality as insubstantial and empty in the face of demoralizing anti-Blackness prejudice and practices, yet which also insist on working towards “equality” as a worthwhile aspiration. The second: my interest in Black Studies scholarship that focus on examining structures of power as expressed in relational forms and as relations, including works by Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, George Yancy, and Kevin Quashie, among others. The third is an interest in works in Feminist Philosophy / Ethics, specifically on “care work” and vulnerability, which conceptualize the construct of the “self” as animated by an inevitable condition of human interdependence (as opposed to the liberal conception of the self as “sovereign”). Overall, this dissertation argues that texts like Maria Stewart’s Meditations, David Walker’s The Appeal, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends foreground what I call practices of “egalitarian relating,” oriented towards realizing a relationally-rooted and vulnerability-attuned model of “equality.”