The first major intervention into insurrectionist ethics, a term taken from esteemed African-American philosopher Leonard Harris, this book addresses the intersectional oppressions of race by putting these concerns in direct conversation with the tradition of pragmatism. It identifies the types of moral intuitions, character traits, reasoning strategies, and methods required to galvanize us to strive to attain the liberation of oppressed groups. The emphasis is on the liberation of people from various oppressive and debilitating boundaries; boundaries that impose and enforce racial, gender, and class categories or that deny access to dignity, or social and material capital. It is only by facing those existing conditions which cause or sustain oppression, injustice, and degradation that we may overthrow them and create a more equal society.In order to address these divisions and inequalities, McBride defines what insurrectionist ethics is based on four basic tenets. These are: a willingness to defy norms that sanction or perpetuate injustice or oppression; a conception of personhood that mobilizes moral action against obvious injustice or brutality, justifying militancy and radical action on the behalf of persecuted peoples; the promotion of social agency to work toward positive changes in institutional and material conditions; and finally an esteem for insurrectionist character traits such as anger, irreverence, or guile.McBride argues that this insurrectionist ethos can be located in American philosophy from Henry David Thoreau to Angela Davis, and that the approbation of insurrectionist character traits influences the demeanor, behavior, bearing, and manner in which the oppressed person conducts themselves. This opens new avenues of resistance, new articulations of self and new imaginative scenarios of emancipation.

Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed PDF

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