Responding to Racial Injustice: Insurrection and Social Justice Pragmatism in Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Richard Rorty

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.