Abstract
This chapter extends Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist challenge beyond formal criteria and a preoccupation with normative grounds by highlighting the insights of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Richard Rorty for practicing philosophy in the service of social justice. These two very different thinkers offer a model of intellectual agency oriented to fostering a moral commitment to the reduction of suffering through the generation of collective action. Their insights come together in recognizing that the motivation to commit insurrectionist acts or engage in advocacy of just causes is a function of the strength of our ties to concrete others and that counteracting dehumanization requires cultivating positive sympathies. Rather than compromising normativity, their accounts rely on an alternative understanding of it as situated within communal, affectual relations to others, instead of decontextualized justification or warrant of concepts. This alternative view prioritizes the motivational over the conceptual side of Harris’s insurrectionism, foregrounding the imagination and building resistance struggles. Moving beyond the framing of insurrectionism and pragmatism as an either/or, I argue that responding to the range of racial injustice, from historical legacies and institutional racism to implicit biases and microaggressions, demands a multidimensional strategy like Wells-Barnett’s, which included appeals to economic self-interest, to affect, and, ultimately, to armed militancy, if needed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Medina similarly insists that pragmatism “must create conceptual and motivational space for insurrection” (2017, 203).
- 2.
- 3.
While beyond the scope of the present essay, Carter’s (2013) argument for a distinctly feminist insurrectionist ethics no doubt is important as well.
- 4.
- 5.
See, for example, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Rorty (2007).
- 6.
See Voparil (2014).
- 7.
See Voparil (2011).
- 8.
See, for example, Medina (2017, 211). Medina’s take on Rorty’s position on solidarity, like many, is a caricature.
- 9.
Curry (2012) makes a compelling case for the influence of T. Thomas Fortune’s agitationist philosophy on Wells-Barnett and for her commitment to the radical agenda of the Afro-American League, especially with regard to the economic dimensions of white opposition to Black progress that spur lynching. This is an important corrective that gives us a fuller, more accurate picture of both the historical genealogy and the critical content of her ideas. In places, Curry may risk reducing Wells-Barnett to Fortune’s ideas. As I argue here, there are other dimensions of her project that fall outside Fortune’s agitationist thought, even if his ideas are the best frame for interpreting her antilynching interventions. In suggesting Wells-Barnett might be read as an insurrectionist pragmatist, I follow Joy James in interpreting Wells-Barnett as “merg[ing] Black feminism and Black nationalism” (qtd. in Bogues 2003, 67), such that Fortune’s agitationist philosophy is augmented by the particular concerns of Black women. See also Aptheker (1982), who suggests that “the antilynching crusade of Black women was also a movement—a Black women’s movement—against rape,” that used the resources, ideas, and paradigms available to Black women at the time (54). Similarly, Carter reads Maria Stewart as practicing a distinctly feminist insurrectionist ethics (2013, 55).
- 10.
These dimensions are present, either implicitly or explicitly, in Medina’s rich and nuanced account. My aim here is merely to capture these dimensions in a different way without having to stretch the epistemic label so far that it is no longer practically helpful. See also Dotson’s (2013) call for greater attention to epistemic conditions.
- 11.
Ramberg has characterized such philosophical approaches more broadly as reducing humans to “subservient responders” to the nature of things (2008, 444).
- 12.
Harris’s exemplars of an insurrectionist morality, including David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry David Thoreau, and Lydia Child, with the exception Walker’s “a secular and theological basis for insurrection,” find their motivations for support of insurrection elsewhere than in their philosophical commitments. See Harris (2020, chaps. 10–11).
- 13.
Harris likewise recognizes the need for creating a personal sense of stability given constantly changing, radically shifting, and incongruous conditions” (2020, 202).
- 14.
- 15.
As Curry (2012) establishes, this is one of T. Thomas Fortune’s key insights.
- 16.
- 17.
As she puts it, “The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effective than all the appeals ever made to his conscience” (2002, 51).
- 18.
For an in-depth discussion of Rortyan normativity, see Calcaterra (2019).
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
For Harris’s critique of Dewey’s appeals to intelligence, see, e.g., (2020, 183, 202).
- 22.
See also Rorty (1987).
- 23.
Calcaterra, likewise, holds that on Rorty’s picture of normativity, “any interpersonal and intercultural relationship is not only ‘sentimental’ but also contains an interpretative process of the reasons of others” (2019, 97).
- 24.
Similarly, Medina argues that repairing the refusal to come to terms with a violent and unjust past demands “developing an adequate sensibility for American racial injustices” through “a long and difficult process of rethinking values, ideals, institutional arrangements, and practices” (2017, 200).
- 25.
Here Rorty’s insistence on the importance of unwarranted assertions, combined with Llanera’s insights about fundamental conversions of belief through “redemptive relationships,” suggest a program for attaining the transformation Harris’s “wakefulness” invokes. See also Turner (2012).
References
Aptheker, Bettina. 1982. Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.
Bogues, Anthony. 2003. Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals. New York: Routledge.
Calcaterra, Rosa M. 2019. Contingency and Normativity: The Challenges of Richard Rorty. Boston: Brill-Rodopi.
Carter, Jacoby. 2013. The Insurrectionist Challenge to Pragmatism and Maria W. Stewart’s Feminist Insurrectionist Ethics. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (1): 54–73.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2002. Introduction. In On Lynchings, ed. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 9–24. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Curry, Tommy. 2012. The Fortune of Wells: Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Use of T. Thomas Fortune’s Philosophy of Social Agitation as Prolegomenon to Militant Civil Rights Activism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48 (4): 456–482.
Dieleman, Susan. 2013. The Contingent Status of Epistemic Norms: Rorty, Kantian Pragmatisms, and Feminist Epistemologies. In Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics, ed. Alexander Gröschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, 31–48. New York: Bloomsbury.
Dotson, Kristie. 2013. Querying Leonard Harris’ Insurrectionist Standards. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (1): 74–92.
Gbadegesin, Segun. 1999. Values, Imperatives, and the Imperative of Democratic Values. In The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education, ed. Leonard Harris, 277–290. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hamington, Maurice. 2005. Public Pragmatism: Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells on Lynching. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19 (2): 167–174.
Harris, Leonard. 1994. A Response to a Conversation: Richard Rorty. Sapina: A Bulletin of the Society for African Philosophy in North America 5 (2): 14–16.
———. 2020. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader. Edited by Lee A. McBride. New York: Bloomsbury.
Kaag, John. 2013. Transgressing the Silence: Lydia Maria Child and the Philosophy of Subversion. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (1): 46–53.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1986. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James W. Washington. New York: HarperCollins.
Koopman, Colin. 2017. Contesting Injustice: Why Pragmatist Political Thought Needs Du Bois. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 179–196. New York: Oxford University Press.
Llanera, Tracy. 2017. Richard Rorty and the Concept of Redemption. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 82 (2): 103–118.
———. 2019. Disavowing Hate: Group Egotism from Westboro to the Klan. Journal of Philosophical Research 44: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.5840/jpr2019108139.
Locke, Alain. 1989. Values and Imperatives. In The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris, 34–50. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
McBride, Lee A. 2013. Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (1): 29–45.
———. 2020. Editor’s Introduction. In A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader, ed. Lee A. McBride, 1–10. New York: Bloomsbury.
Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2017. Pragmatism, Racial Injustice, and Epistemic Insurrection: Toward an Insurrectionist Pragmatism. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 197–213. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ramberg, Bjørn. 2008. Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America. In The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, ed. Cheryl Misak, 430–448. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1987. Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein. Political Theory 15 (4): 564–580.
———. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books.
———. 2000. Universality and Truth. In Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom, 1–30. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
———. 2003. Some American Uses of Hegel. In Das Interesse Des Denkens: Hegel Aus Heutiger Sicht, ed. Wolfgang Welsch and Klaus Vieweg, 33–46. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
———. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 4. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2010a. Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises. In The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 389–406. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2010b. The Fire of Life. In The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 520–521. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Taylor, Paul C. 2017. An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Injustice. In Pragmatism and Justice, ed. Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 215–230. New York: Oxford University Press.
Turner, Jack. 2012. Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Voparil, Christopher. 2011. Rortyan Cultural Politics and the Problem of Speaking for Others. Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1): 115–131.
———. 2013. Pragmatist Philosophy and Persuasive Discourse: Dewey and Rorty on the Role of Non-Logical Changes in Belief. In Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy, ed. Jacqueline Ann K. Kegley and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, 133–151. New York: Lexington Books.
———. 2014. Taking Other Human Beings Seriously: Rorty’s Ethics of Choice and Responsibility. Contemporary Pragmatism 11 (1): 83–102.
———. 2020. Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility. In A Companion to Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski, 490–504. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 2002. On Lynchings. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Yancy, George, and Judith Butler. 2015. What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’? The New York Times, January 12. Accessed January 16, 2015. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Voparil, C. (2023). Responding to Racial Injustice: Insurrection and Social Justice Pragmatism in Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Richard Rorty. In: Carter, J.A., Scriven, D. (eds) Insurrectionist Ethics. African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16741-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16741-6_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16740-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16741-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)