A discussion of Angela Davis' essay "Lecture on Liberation," which examines the structure of self and collective liberation. In particular, I am interested here in how she takes Frederick Douglass' description of his fight with Covey as exemplary of the structure of negation, a structure that tells a story about how to retrieve a sense of authentic self and self- and collective-transformation of an antiblack world. The insight from this is that struggle is the crucial component to our sense of transformation, not simply a change in beliefs or broad social arguments and disputes. Confrontation, violent in so many ways, is critical to becoming who and what we are at our best, against who and what we are at our worst.