lecture 3: Professor Jacob Adeshei Carter

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Death by a Thousand Cuts: Insurrectionist Ethics in a Present less Oppressive than the Past
Jacoby Adeshei Carter, Howard University

Abstract: This essay is intended to provide a new definition of insurrectionist ethics that cuts in many ways against the grain of positions already engraved in the literature. That is done by considering the various elements of a novel definition of insurrectionist ethics. One that treats fundamental, structural, and systemic oppression as the conditions that give warrant to an insurrectionist response. A notion of necro-depictions is articulated as an essential conceptual tool to understanding the duty to insurrect or resist oppression. It is here argued that insurrectionists ethics is an anti-ethical position that operates from an understanding of the severe ethical constraints under which oppressed people are forced to deliberate about the appropriate ends to seek through voluntary action. Insurrectionist ethics requires the transvaluation of existing values, and radical reformulation of conceptions of personhood, humanity, and liberation, among others, to render comprehensible its radical aims of social transformation, and abolition of present conditions of oppression. 

Keywords: abolition, advocacy, anti-ethics, duty, fundamental oppression, necro-depiction, structural oppression, systemic oppression,  

Introduction
Social justice is an ideal. It is an ideal assertion contrary to fact that envisions a world guided by conceptions of justice that may not be realized, populated by persons of sufficient character to act on conceptions of justice that serve to realize desirable living conditions of equity and fairness. But it is not for that reason any less a matter of existential importance. Lives are benefitted by the denial of social justice, as well as by its attainment. The crucial question for either alternative is not whether benefits accrue, but to whom and for what reasons.

The assertion that social justice is an ideal implies that the de facto state of affairs, the world in which people actually live is not one uniformly characterized by justice. Whether in practice, policy or theoretical construction, social justice, and correlative phenomena such as liberty, equality, diversity etc. are not ubiquitous, and rarely intended to apply universally. People are not by nature unbiased, even if no particular bias is universal. To be sure, theories of justice, principles of justice, or putative concepts of justice may be couched in universal language, but they are almost always, explicitly or implicitly, coupled with qualifications, demarcations, conditions and restraints that preclude universal scope and application whether as a practical or theoretical matter. 
…prescribes individual or coordinated actions on behalf of the oppressed…

Insurrectionist ethics is a framework for justifying actions by and on behalf of the oppressed. It aims to rationalize a range of oppositional responses to injustice. This much insurrectionist ethics has in common with all other programs of social justice. The aim of insurrection is not straightforwardly to provide a specific set of prescribed actions or categories of actions that advance social justice (Harris 1999, 230 – 233). Rather, insurrectionist ethics aims to provide warrant to a wide range of actions to combat the oppression faced by particular populations. 

Advocacy for specific oppressed populations is a central feature of insurrectionist ethics. John Brown was not a member of the racialized population for which he advocated, neither where Henry David Thoreau or Lydia Child. Membership in the population for which one advocates is not required. Leonard Harris has argued that insurrectionists regard the identity groups for whom they act as anabsolute. He explicitly attributes such a view to David Walker and seems to regard it as a characteristic feature of insurrectionist ethics (Harris 2020a; Harris 2018; Harris 2013; Harris 2002; and Harris 1999). 

Social aggregates are anabsolute. That is, social groups can appear solid and well defined, like classes, races or ethnic groups, but they are not well defined in reality. They are immanently objective. They can be conceived as ontological for purposes of explanation, but they are not objectively stable kinds; they are not material objects. Abstractions are misleading, including conceptions of the self as a kind of coherent abstract being (Harris 2020, 29).

Almost all insurrectionist activity is limited in scope. To be sure, one way to limit the scope is to identify a specific oppressed group, but there are other ways of circumscribing insurrectionist activity. Such groups may not be bounded by a shared identity. The specific groups for whom insurrectionist ethicists advocate may be demarcated by racial, ethnic, religious, class, or gender identities. That is, social identities that themselves result from or enable various forms of oppression may establish the group for which one acts. But there are other ways to limit the scope of insurrectionist activity. One may focus on particular systems or conditions of oppression. Think for example about prison abolition. If there is a specifiable social group that is advocated for in this context it is one that will cut across many of the putative social categories used by social justice advocates. Aside from the specific form of injustice people victimized by this form of oppression face there may be little else, if anything, that binds them all into a coherent social grouping.  

Some oppressive social categories exist solely for the purpose of forming oppressed groups. Races are a good example here. Others are oppressed for membership in the group, but the group itself does not exist principally for purposes of oppression. Religious communities or gender identity groups are illustrative here.  Any systematically oppressed group must be constructed as such. Even if the social identity with which they began was not one that made them the object of oppression, to face systematic oppression the group must be reconstructed, degraded, demeaned or vilified in ways that make its members targets of oppression. Insurrectionist ethicist need not think or act in terms of identities ascribed to them through oppressive social structures. Parity of an ascribed social identity with the assumed social identity of a dominate groups is not a necessary aim of insurrection.

Is this a divide that insurrectionist ethics can straddle successfully?

Do insurrectionist philosophies need to take a stance on the ontological status of the groups they advocate for?

Insurrectionist ethics is compatible with eliminativism, but does it require it in some instances? Particularly, those where the oppressive social category itself creates the oppressed population?

…in direct opposition to oppressive institutions, structures, systems or conditions of control…

Individual acts of insurrection and insurrectionist campaigns react to fundamental, structural or systemic forms of oppression. By fundamental is meant oppression that is basic within a given society across multiple domains be they economic, religious, political, social etc. Oppression that strikes at the most vital elements of life, the conditions that enable good health and delay premature death, the conditions that afford basic respect and dignity and the possibility of honor and esteem, the ability to accumulate and transfer wealth across generations, to form and secure meaningful familial bonds, is fundamental. It victimizes at the very foundations of physical, material and social well-being. Structural oppression is that conditioned by the political structure, laws, policies or institutions of a state, which simultaneously helps to shape the political, civil, cultural and economic operation of a state. Straightforward examples in the United States include slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Derecka Purnell notes in her recent book, Becoming Abolitionists, that “[p]olice manage inequality by keeping the disposed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed” (Purnell 2021, 4 – 5). She demonstrates that present-day abolitionists movements are a species of insurrectionists ethics when she adds “[r]eforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete” (Ibid, 5). Structural oppression is part of the basic structure of society in that it serves to determine in part the categories of persons to be exploited, various mechanisms of extraction, and the beneficiaries of exploitive extraction. Oppression is systemic when it constitutes a wide-spread mechanism of unjust social control and extraction. Each of these forms of oppression can operate separately or in concrete with other forms. They may target specific social groups, or even be constitutive of oppressed groups.   

Insurrectionist ethics is a reaction against forms of oppression that constitute the very basis of societies in which they function. The basis may be formal or informal, codified into law and social practice, or historically entrenched. South African Apartheid, Jim Crow, India’s caste system, are examples of fundamental, structural and systemic forms of oppression that are not merely accidental within a given society, but historically, culturally, religiously or legally embedded in the formation and operation of society. 

Insurrectionist ethics is not limited to white supremacist patriarchal societies, neither is racism the only form of oppression to which it is opposed, though both are common forms of oppression to which it is a response. The insurrectionist’s attitude is not merely one of defiance, but righteous indignation. The insurrectionist does not grant that a patently unjust social order places any justifiable moral demand on the oppressed for compliance with the strictures of that system. Clearly, such an order can compel comportment in accordance with its dictates. People are held in bondage, children are separated from their parents and confined in cages, forced ballots are cast for de facto dictators, political dissension is held at bay through imprisonment, torture, and involuntary confinement. But temporary or prudential compliance in deed under threat of state power or violence need not be read as tacit consent to state moral authority. It may only be a practical concession. The defiant opposition to state authority that is characteristic of insurrectionist ethics may not always be on display. Insurrectionists acts are not warranted in every instance, and it would be impractical to prohibit one to refrain from, or forego, acts of insurrection in specific circumstances.

..that generates a duty to insurrect or resist oppression…

Classically, insurrectionists begin with the conditions of oppression because they give warrant to the duty to insurrect. The case is perhaps best made by David Walker. “Walker believed that slaves had a natural intrinsic disposition to resist oppression, demonstrated or not” (Harris 2013, 96) writes Harris. “That disposition was a feature of human nature” he surmises then that “[t]his is Walker’s naturalism: the disposition to resist oppression and correlative duty are facts of existential being” (Ibid, 97). 

“Escapes and insurrection required tremendous courage and social sacrifice—a form of courage and sacrifice that was unreasonable for Walker to expect of anyone” (Ibid, 96). Both the duty to resist and normative framework of insurrectionist ethics are anti-ethical, that is, they arise and function within a normative context that places an unreasonable and unfulfillable normative demand on the oppressed (Curry 2017, 181 – 187). “The concepts that Walker used to describe slavery” Harris continues, “convey what he saw as racial slavery’s form of oppression, and it is that form that gives warrant to a duty to insurrect” (Harris 2013, 96).

Insurrectionist ethics’ duty to insurrect requires the development of concepts sufficient to make understandable and estimable, voluntary action, contrary to putative moral dictates, that is far more likely to produce negative and undesired material consequences than positive, beneficial, or desirable outcomes. For Walker it was the severity, the truly inhumane treatment that slavery inflicted on the enslaved that gave warrant to a duty to insurrect. It seems Walker simply could not conceive of the possibility of remaining a full person under those conditions. The physical, psychological, and material consequences of slavery would exact a degrading toll on one’s sense of self, autonomy, self-respect, and self-interest.

Harris writes,

Walker gave no account of the link between natural dispositions and duties. He did not provide a criteria, criterion, or principle from which to derive a duty to insurrect, nor did he use Scripture to warrant his view. However, if his descriptions of racial slavery are apt, a defensible ethical theory would require insurrection to be a duty….His descriptions are so compelling that I do not need a separate "theory" or neat algorithms of duty justification. We have a natural desire for filial and social bonds, a natural desire to be self-regarding and other-regarding. These are given in what it is to be a person. We do not need a theory to tell us that we have a duty to care for ourselves (Ibid, 97 emphasis mine). 

Necro-depiction is the visual, sonic and written representation of that which makes living a kind of death, the visceral presentation of absolute negation, a horrible inescapable confrontation with the reality that produces necro-being and necro-tragedy, a life devoid of health and due regard, the uncomfortable witnessing of the permanent impossibility of receiving honor or justice (Harris 2020). Necro-depictions are not simply visual representations of death and suffering. None of Walker’s necro-depictions are images. Readers are all likely familiar with the sorts of contemporary representations that constitute necro-depictions, to name but a few there are those of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, George Floyd, and Philando Castille. Depictions of their relegation to the status of necro-beings have been witnessed by millions. The tragic consequences of their victimization—children raised without fathers, parents forced to bury their children in the most unnatural of circumstances. Recognizing the visceral power of displaying the corporeal consequences of oppression, Emmet Till’s mother, Mammie Till, chose to have an open casket at her son’s funeral. She “wanted the world to see what they did to [her] baby.” Descriptions of lynching are apt illustrations of necro-depiction.

Arguably, necro-depictions motivate actions (Carter 2013, 54 – 73). Implicit in Mamie Till’s decision is a recognition that visual presentation of the effects of oppression on oppressed Black bodies is unavoidable in the sense that they demand a reaction of some kind. Necro-depictions prompt decisive action in response to what is perceived. The kinds of actions they motivate and the level of personal investment they countenance is however indeterminate. Necro-depictions confront the receiver with an existential presentation that demands a response that manifests facts about the recipient. Callousness, indignation, pity, privilege, compassion, a sense of justice, complicity, righteous indignation, are all discursively revealed through encounters with necro-depictions. As illustrated in the quotation from Wells-Barnett, necro-depictions do more than covey the nature and intensity of oppressed suffering, they can candidly reveal the character, phobias, beliefs, and dispositions of oppressors:

It will likely be objected that necro-depictions are a flawed starting place for a duty to insurrect. Visceral reactions in themselves cannot ground moral action. Absent the intervention of reason, emotions or psychological dispositions can lead to actions that go far astray of those that would be deemed permissible by acceptable moral standards.

Notice though that it has not been claimed that necro-depictions motivate moral action. There are important distinctions to be drawn between a depiction and what is depicted. Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, contains several representations of the horrors of slavery. Mary Church Terrell’s and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s descriptions convey the brutality of lynching and dispel many of the culturally imbedded myths racialized white people have about the phenomenon. Each develops concepts for understanding not only the material, but the spiritual, and psychological effects of these forms of oppressive violence as well as the specific kind of existential damage that is done to persons as such. But a depiction of slavery is not enslavement, any more than a description of lynching is akin to being lynched. Still further distinctions can be drawn between one’s visceral and immediate reaction to a necro-depiction or what it depicts, and one’s considered responses to either. Necro-depictions can be gut-wrenching, and in being so may move one to act, but what the insurrectionist acts against is not the depiction, but what is depicted. The depiction is perhaps best understood as connected to the motivation to act, what is depicted is likely better understood in relation to the conditions to, and within which, one acts. Necro-depictions provide a conceptual and perceptual bridge between the existential fact of forms and instances of oppression, and one’s inclination to act. Going further Harris writes,

Walker's depiction of the slave as wretched, yet responsible, vied against the prevailing abolitionist ethos of presenting slaves as due pity and invested with ascetic, benevolent, placid virtuous natures. He was criticized because his tone was menacing, incendiary and provocative and his text claimed that slaves, no matter how abject and wretched they were portrayed in Walker's APPEAL, were responsible bearers of self-regarding dispositions (Harris 2013, 98).

Necro-depictions do not merely represent states of immiseration and victimization, they may directly or indirectly present alternative and liberatory views of oppressed persons, or picture possible futures, estimable traits, frame felicitous criticisms, or promote prescient provocations. Purnell notes that “Black prison industrial complex abolitionists have developed alternatives to 911, created support systems for victims of domestic violence, prevented the construction of new jails, called for the reduction of police budgets, and shielded undocumented immigrants from deportation” (Purnell 2021, 6). A constant refrain by critics of insurrectionist ethics asks what if anything insurrectionists intend to replace existing oppressive structures. Some insurrectionist ethicists reject this question, believing that the onus is not on the victims of oppression to satisfy the beneficiaries of an unjust status quo that their class, gender, or racial privilege will be protected in the future. But despite that, some insurrectionists and contemporary abolitionists have “imagined and built responses to harm rooted in community and accountability.” “Abolition,” and insurrection, “is a bigger idea than firing cops and closing prisons; it includes eliminating the reasons people think they need cops and prisons in the first place” (Purnell 2021, 6). 

Is Walker’s attempt to ground the duty to insurrect in the natural inclinations of persons and the horrid conditions of slavery successful?

Is there only one justification of the duty to insurrect here or two?

…informed by a rejection of customary morality that gives warrant to seemingly impossible forms of oppositional being that make seemingly absurd valuations understandable…

Clear differences between insurrectionist ethics and other forms of social justice advocacy are not always drawn in the literature, and there is of course disagreement among philosophers who write about insurrectionist ethics on what precisely characterizes the normative framework of insurrectionist ethics. Lee McBride states that “[p]ractitioners of insurrectionist ethics exhibit a willingness to defy norms and convention when those norms sanction or perpetuate injustice or oppression” (McBride 2013; 2021, 54). McBride’s framing presupposes the moral neutrality of norms and conventions that undergird oppressive political orders. He recognizes that such norms and conventions can sometimes (perhaps even often) “sanction or perpetuate injustice or oppression” and it is when they do—supposing then that there are times when they do not—that a willingness to defy them is permissible or meritorious (McBride 2021, 54). 

Alternative approaches to insurrectionist ethics have a different starting point, contending instead that “[i]t is the process of, the appeal to, “getting whites to recognize” racist oppression that allows Black death to continue unabated, since it is the exact moment that whites are forced to engage racist problems in America…that animates aversion of the justice system” (Curry 2017, 183). Rather than holding out hope of the success of moral suasion or ameliorative programs of social justice, “the police state, the white citizenry, and the practice of American democracy itself (where the death of Black people/criminals/deviants/thugs remains normal and justified by whites” is understood to be the normative framework with which one begins (Curry 2017, 185). 

Some philosophers characterize insurrectionist ethics as an anti-ethical position (See Urquidez Chapter 8, this volume). Curry observes that,

Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sidgwick claims, “any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings ‘ought’—or what is right for them— to seek to realize by voluntary action.”59 This rational procedure is, however, at odds with the empirical reality with which the ethical deliberation must concern itself. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people should act justly assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white person could possibly be not racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist can be taken to mean that white people are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute to historically racist institutions and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated. This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history and evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, the only ethical deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing to write morality onto immoral entities (Curry 2017, 183).

McBride concedes the moral authority and agency of the perpetrators of injustice—such as racialized white people in a white supremacist society—even those who actively and intentionally engage in oppression when he writes that insurrectionists “are willing to challenge civic and moral authority when those authorities conspire to denigrate a population, allowing a dominant group to strip a subordinate group of its dignity, its property, or its efficacious agency” (McBride 2021, 54). “Such appeals” Curry argues, “lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of his or her racial group’s interest” (Curry 2017, 184) The problem is that “[w]hen morality is defined not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but by the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch” (Curry 2017, 184). Contrary to McBride, it is here argued that a key feature of insurrectionist ethics is a denial that witting or unwitting participants in fundamental, structural, or systemic oppression, for example, beneficiaries or proponents of patriarchal white supremacy, have any moral authority or agency to which the oppressed should appeal. The oppression of groups and individuals deemed non-white for the advantage of those deemed white is not pictured by insurrectionist philosophies as an aberrant, accidental, inadvertent, incidental, or unintended consequence of an otherwise morally benign, neutral, let alone, benevolent or praiseworthy, social order. 

White supremacy causes deficient moral sentiments among white people toward non-white peoples. Whites are conditioned either not to recognize non-white suffering or to view it as less severe than white suffering. This may be due to them seeing non-white suffering as different in kind from their own suffering. It is non-human or subhuman suffering. The being in question is less able to suffer the kinds of harms that a white person can suffer, they lack the capacity to suffer in ways that whites can. Or it may be claimed that aspects of their nonwhiteness, their racialized otherness, lessen their suffering; as for example it is believed by many white medical practitioners that Blacks experience pain less severely that whites (Mills 1999, 91 - 109). 

Oppression and degradation of peoples racialized as non-white, denial of their humanity, or regulation to subhuman status, exploitation of their labor, lives and bodies, destruction of their languages, cultures, and religions, dispossession of their land and assets, and the circumvention of their ability to produce and transfer wealth across generations, and still other systems and mechanisms of oppression are foundational features, the very pillars upon which oppressive societies are built. Insurrectionist philosophies have in common a critical recognition of the fundamentally unjust constitution of structurally oppressive civilizations. Insurrectionists like David Walker, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Fred Hampton, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), Mary Church Terrell, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur do not regard the injustice that is sustained or perpetuated by US norms or conventions as regrettable departures from an otherwise moral social order. All of these exemplars of insurrectionists ethical theorizing make absolutely no concession to the moral authority or agency of those who are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of the norms or conventions that underwrite white supremacist patriarchal subjugation. Pace McBride, the radicality of these thinkers and activists, their brand of insurrectionist ethics, which is decidedly not a quasi-insurrectionist ethics, cannot be reconciled with any version of pragmatism (McBride 2022). 

What is more, failure to appreciate the anti-ethical dimension of insurrectionist ethics is detrimental to the oppressed. “Hope,” Curry writes, “as the foundation of these ethics where oppression is thought to be mediated through a rationalized faith in the humanity of one’s oppressor, is nihilistic, at best” (Curry 2017, 182). Such hope essentially encourages the oppressed to misunderstand the way the world is, to get things wrong. Aside from the obvious deleterious effect such misunderstanding will have on the efficacy of oppressed people’s agency, “[s]uch hope paralyzes the oppressed through an a priori duty to the oppressor,” thereby confining “oppressed people to a faith in the potential of a not-yet-present white humanity that could learn to respect Black life without any evidence that this quality can or does exist within the dominant racial group” (Curry 2017, 182).

Putative moral theory fails to recognize some victims of oppression as moral agents due regard and subject to ethical treatment. Insurrectionist ethics proceeds from an understanding that advocacy is most efficacious when informed by a veridical understanding of the world. Laboring under moral suasionist delusions, in the face of continued oppression, or attributing undemonstrated moral qualities and sentiments to oppressors, is not commensurate with the insurrectionist attitude. Liberation, for the insurrectionist, neither requests nor requires the moral approval of oppressors.  

What are the normative constraints faced by oppressed people advocating for liberation?

Are victims of oppression and beneficiaries of oppression on equal moral footing regarding efforts to achieve social justice?

…motivated by a transvaluation of putative norms and values, or…

Undoubtedly, transvaluation is an essential feature of insurrectionist ethics and abolition. The notion of transvaluation that underwrites the work of many scholars working on insurrectionist ethics is derived from Alain Locke (Locke 1989). Locke would likely have distanced himself from, if not outright rejected, many aspects of insurrectionist ethics. Insurrectionist philosophies of this stripe argue that a radical reimagining of the traits of character that make one virtuous, is an essential element of insurrectionist ethics. Yet, transvaluations are possible that do not challenge in any radical way the status quo conception of values. Arguably, Locke’s notion of transvaluation describes transformation between traditional Western values, and did not radically reconceive values as such, nor go so far as to offer reasons for regarding putative vices as virtues (Locke 1989, 31 – 50). Virtues such as temperance, chastity, truthfulness etc. are understood as a social mechanism that helps to pacify the oppressed in the face of their immiseration. Moreover, those who advocate transvaluation of virtue as an essential component of insurrectionist ethics often argue that traditional virtues do more to impede struggles for liberation than to promote such efforts. Advocates of transvaluation argue for understanding such traits as guile, duplicity, assertiveness, tenacity, truculence etc. as virtues of character in a context of struggling against oppression and advocating for subjugated populations. But this lighter version of insurrectionist ethics does not completely and fundamentally reject moralism about those who struggle for liberation, or the actions they perform in pursuit of that objective. Curry writes,

For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting toward values such as freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves; they are merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow…Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values is not dependent on their moral aspirations for the world…hence, all ethical questions about racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness are not about how Blacks think about the world but about what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics (Curry 2017, 184).

Rather than proceeding from abstract philosophical speculation on the nature of value, as arguably is the case with Locke, insurrectionist accounts of transvaluation begin from the impossibility of some, perhaps all, forms of virtuous action, or positive value instantiation on the part of the oppressed within the dominant episteme. If putative virtues and values are unrealizable by the oppressed from the perspective of the dominate class, then aspiration to such virtues or values may result in either nihilism or a perpetual state of disillusionments and dissatisfaction. Insurrectionist ethics counsels a third way. In fact, much of Curry’s position seems commensurate with insurrectionist ethics in this regard, though he overstates the case in some ways. Oppressed peoples are not left unable to engage in moral deliberation, rather what is required of them is to shift the paradigm under which they contemplate responses to oppression. This is the impetus behind insurrectionist notions of transvaluation. It is a refusal to accept the parameters on ethical conduct prescribed and enforced by the beneficiaries of an unjust status quo. But more than that it is an effort to reimagine values and virtuous conduct that may promote a realizable liberation and freedom for the oppressed.    

McBride observes that “Harris argues that human virtues/excellences are always decidable, revisable and embodied” (McBride 2021, 48). What is intriguing about this observation, but left unanalyzed, is what seems to follow from it. If virtues and values are decidable, then they are assignable or deniable contrary to fact. That is, the decidability of virtues, the choice of which character traits count as virtues and which vices, and the choice of which human beings can embody them, leaves open the possibility of those decisions being made in arbitrary ways. Moreover, the subjective application of values to members of the dominate class and their denial to members of subordinate groups, is if not arbitrary, one of the ways that the power and privilege of dominate groups, and relative degradation and immiseration of oppressed peoples is effectuated. Virtue and good character have been assigned to the most racist, sexist, avaricious and murderous of American patriarchs, while viciousness has been assigned to the most freedom loving, egalitarian, and truthful resisters of white supremacy. Freedom, Equality, liberty, autonomy and patriotism have been the birthright and professed values of avaricious, deplorable, and ignorant citizens, while the underclasses’ quest for the same has been met with vitriolic xenophobia. It may be that this is changing in the minds of some, but that it has been the case is sufficient to make the point that who and what is determined to be virtuous or worthy of pursuing certain values need not track reality in any meaningful way. Perhaps does not track reality at all, but instead registers for particular traits, values and persons the putative episteme of a white patriarchal society. What choice then, besides nihilism or transvaluation? The decision for either is understandable to any but the most incredulous believer in the status quo.

A distinction is drawn here for argumentative purposes between transvaluation, on the one hand, and conceptions of personhood and humanity on the other, but the two are related. Given what has been said about necro-depictions a distinction needs to be drawn between transvaluation or necro-depiction and conceptions of personhood and humanity as motivational. That the latter motivate is dubious, but it has been argued that the former do in fact motivate action. Aversion to oppression is an existential fact of persons, more than a logical consequence of conceptions they may hold. If that is right, resisting oppression may well be a logical consequence of a given conception, but that may fail to motivate action. 

Is insurrectionist ethics committed to a version of transvaluation still embedded in the dominate episteme?

How radical is, or can, its notion of transvaluation be?

Even given that insurrectionist ethics entails a radical notion of transvaluation, is that sufficient to motivate advocacy on behalf of the oppressed? 

…predicated on radical reconceptualization of social, political and moral conceptions…

Adherence to the conceptual frameworks enabling oppression is untenable from the perspective of insurrectionist ethics. Charles Mills observed regarding the epistemological dimensions of The Racial Contract that “the governing epistemic principle could be stated as the requirement that—at least on controversial issues—non-white cognition has to be verified by white cognition to be accepted as valid.” He continues, “it is permitted to override white cognition only in extreme and unusual circumstances” (Mills 1999, 60). The claim that “conceptions of personhood and humanity…motivate moral action against obvious injustice or brutality” is dubious for several reasons (McBride 2013; 2021, See also Carter 2013). First, it is doubtful that notions of personhood or humanity motivate action generally, let alone moral action. Neither has tracked reality for much of the history of the modern world. Intelligent, autonomous, sentient, emotionally robust, and rational homo sapiens have been denied status and classification as human, denied personhood and the moral, epistemological, and political rights and agency that is supposed to attach to it. All the while, white women in the antebellum South who sexually exploited Black boys and men were deemed the paragons of white virtue, and white men who enslaved their own children, are heralded as “Fathers of the Nation”. Mills writes that, 

Linked with this personal struggle will be an epistemic dimension, cognitive resistance to the racially mystificatory aspects of white theory, the painstaking reconstruction of past and present necessary to fill in the crucial gaps and erase the slanders of the globally dominate European worldview. One has to learn to trust one’s own cognitive powers, to develop one’s own concepts, insights, modes of explanation, overarching theories and to oppose the epistemic hegemony of conceptual frameworks designed in part to thwart and suppress the exploration of such matters; one has to think against the grain (Mills 1999, 119).

Putative notions of personhood and humanity have served as conceptual, material, and legal boundaries circumventing the life chances and possibilities of those racialized as non-white, such that the assertion that they can be refashioned into conceptions that motivate justice and liberation for the very populations to whom their status was denied strikes one as fanciful, and ungrounded optimism. 

The problem is that members of the dominate class seem not to be motivated to act by the conceptions of humanity or persons that they hold. They seem not to be so motivated because advocates for the oppressed the world over have frequently lauded the professed values and notions of personhood, freedom, humanity, fraternity, equality etc. of dominate groups that were contended to structure the very societies in which populations were oppressed through denial, in fact, complete disqualification for participation in these social goods. So, either these dominate classes were victims of an empirical misunderstanding that caused epistemological deficits in recognizing the applicability of such concepts to those they oppressed, or the denial was intentional. But then, why were the efforts of oppressed advocates indicated above unsuccessful. That is, they had at their disposal epistemological tools necessary to correct any cognitive mistakes on their part. And it is only owing to other cognitive mistakes—to the extent that blatant racism and patriarchal misandry are cognitive defects—on their part that the lessons could not be learned. What is important here is that in either case the concepts in question did not motivate action on behalf of the oppressed. It failed it seems either because members of the dominant class were to ignorant, or to vicious, to comprehend the applicability of those conceptions to the persons they oppressed. 

But now one is compelled to ask, if these conceptions fail to motivate just, moral, or any action, in some cases, by members of the dominant class on behalf of the oppressed, why think that the very same conceptions would motivate action by the oppressed themselves? Likely it has not been the possession of a uniquely liberating conception of personhood or humanity that has motivated action against white patriarchal supremacy, rather it has been the existential critique from the perspective of the oppressed, demonstration not of a deep hypocrisy, but recognition of the intentional elevation of some, and subordination of others that is justified through conceptions of personhood and humanity that has carried motivational force. As such, it is the recognition of the role played by these conceptions in oppression and immiseration that motivates action, not the conceptions themselves. The distinction here is analogous to that drawn between necro-depictions and what is depicted. That a given instance, system or condition of oppression violates a particular conception of humanity or personhood may give rise to acts of resistance. It is a further question whether a given agent was motivated by the conceptions, or the existential reality of the injustice suffered. 

Which is it? DO conceptions of personhood, humanity, freedom, liberation etc. motivate moral action either by the victims, beneficiaries, or perpetrators of fundamental, structural, or systemic injustice?

Are the consequences of fundamental, structural, or systemic injustice, the very condition of being so subjugated sufficient warrant for insurrectionist advocacy?

And if the latter question is answered affirmatively, what does one make of the insurrectionist philosophies that proffer radical reconceptualizations of personhood, humanity, freedom, liberation etc.?

…aimed at radical transformation, abolition, or liberation from oppression.
Thus far the point has hopefully been sufficiently made that insurrectionist ethics addresses itself to fundamental, structural or systemic conditions of oppression. What remains to be elucidated is the aim of insurrectionists in addressing themselves to such concerns; that is, what they mean to accomplish. On the present view, the goal of insurrectionist ethics is radical social transformation that results in abolition of, or liberation from systems and conditions of oppression. No individual act need aim at such outcomes in toto; that is, particular actions or series of actions may only be constitutive of the ultimate goal. Moreover, there is a broad range of options in terms of what the eventual objectives of insurrection or abolition will look like. Some writers in this tradition have conceived the goal of insurrection as little more than exemption from present oppressive conditions (Harris 1999), others have coupled liberation with creation of new institutions and sources of community empowerment (Purnell 2021), and still others have understood the insurrectionists’ pursuit of liberation as a radical imagining of possible, yet unrealized futures (Harris 2018). 

Some writers on insurrectionist ethics take a less stringent position on its ultimate aims. Such writers contend that a more piecemeal and ameliorative approach to social justice is warranted and does not disqualify such positions as insurrectionist. The majority of those who take such a view work within the pragmatist philosophical tradition, so it is to tradition that arguments against an ameliorative approach to insurrectionist ethics are best addressed.

The desire to reconcile insurrectionist ethics with pragmatism results in an attempt to articulate a palatable quasi-insurrectionist ethics consistent with pragmatist fidelity to notions of democracy, freedom, equality, and liberalism. Notice first, that these values are not transvalued. A pragmatism for the oppressed is not one that undercuts, aims to abolish, reject, refuse, dismantle or destroy notions of democratic inclusion, freedom, liberty, economic viability, or equality as these concepts are understood in pragmatism, or any other Anglo-European philosophical tradition. Instead, the reader is offered the rhetoric of inclusion, expansion, recognition, and progressive growth in the direction of a broader fulfillment of these specious platitudes. Martin R. Delany and Alexander Crummell, were arguably insurrectionist ethicists, who unlike Frederick Douglass fundamentally rejected the belief that full and equal democratic citizenship in the United States was ever likely to be a reality for African descendant peoples. David Walker, remained circumspect that equal democratic civilization could obtain between European and African descendent peoples, not only in the US, but anywhere in the world. W.E.B. Du Bois, who continues to be lauded as an adherent to pragmatist philosophy, supposedly influenced by William James, abandoned American democracy, as a social environment that would ever allow the realization of full personhood and pluralistic democratic inclusion of Black peoples.

One cannot simply ignore this history of Black intellectual thought. One salient feature of certain strands in Black Intellectual and political theorizing has been the belief that racism and white supremacist patriarchy are endemic features of US civilization, and the best that racialized non-white peoples can strive for is continued opposition to the various forms of dehumanization and subjugation they experience. Pragmatism, nor any other Anglo or European philosophical tradition, has offered anything of consequence to the cause of social justice for oppressed peoples. It remains committed to the idea that American democracy is good and desirable, and inclusion in that society ought to be the aim of non-white racialized peoples. Insurrectionist-minded Black thinkers have not been, and are not presently, committed to the same political aims. Political theorists who advocate for the oppressed in an insurrectionist vein have not been committed to the same putatively democratic principles. This is a fact that cannot be warmed over in the absence of a compelling case that pragmatism can offer prospects for liberation from white supremacist patriarchy. 

Pragmatists are not insurrectionists, they cannot be, because the aim of their social and political philosophies is to usher in a kinder, gentler white supremacist patriarchy not to abolish it. The claims advanced by some that pragmatism is compatible with an insurrectionists ethics does not bear historical or empirical scrutiny. Where is the pragmatist philosophy, who was its expounder, that seeks the utter unapologetic abolition of supremacist patriarchal systems? To be sure, pragmatist social and political philosophies that advocate white racial empire can be, and have been identified, the complicity of pragmatist figures such as Josiah Royce and Charles Sanders Pierce in such philosophies has been documented. But contemporary pragmatists argue by means of mere conjecture and speculation for a view of social justice compatible with contemporary sentiments on behalf of the anointed heroes and heroines of pragmatism that defies empirical and historical understanding. Worse yet, is when contemporary pragmatists argue that genuine opponents of white supremacist patriarchy such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Alexander Crummell, or Anna Julia Cooper did so either because they were influenced by pragmatism, or its canonical figures (in which canonization they are rarely included), or that in doing so they struck such resonances with pragmatism or its canonical figures that their thought is best characterized as pragmatist. Some scholars have contested this misreading of the Black Intellectual Tradition in a pragmatist vein to little avail (Carter 2018). Non-white minority dissent is easily ignored in a white supremacist patriarchal order. And this has proved no less true in the world of pragmatism than anywhere else.

The revisionism of pragmatism, which suggests that its commitment to a perpetual reevaluation of existing social norms is wholly inadequate as a theory of insurrectionist advocacy. Openness to criticism and modification is two-sided; one can use it to devise more cleaver forms of oppression. That is, a philosophy that understands social norms to be perpetually open to criticism and revision, is not yet one that is sufficiently connected conceptually, nor in terms of its underlying motivations, to any emancipatory interest, let alone committed to advocacy of insurrection or radical social action in the interests of the least well-off or most viciously subjugated members of society. 

An even deeper issue involves the assumption that cooperative social action is the goal of either the oppressed group or the dominant group. Martin Delany advocated the voluntary though necessary immigration of African descendant peoples from the United States as the only possible means of liberation. He harbored no desire to live cooperatively with white American slave holders. David Walker advocated the complete and utter destruction of chattel slavery. Walker had no desire to cooperate with slave holders in any way. Angela Davis is an advocate for the abolition of prisons; not piecemeal, not in an indeterminate future, not as the result of rationally persuading violence workers of the error of their ways, but complete unmitigated abolition, immediately, and uncompromisingly. There is unlikely to be radical social change that is palatable to a willfully oppressive, or unwitting dominant group. Fundamental incommensurability is a fact of social life, especially in a world that creates Men-Not, and necro-beings. There is no racist white supremacist world in which necro-beings can exist as fully human, no masculinist anti-Black world in which the Man-Not is simply a man. This is to say, there are sources of conflict and struggle, immiserating conditions of degradation, deprivations of life, health, well-being, honor and respect that no amount of modification to existing norms will ameliorate. 

Are insurrectionists correct to avoid the question of what will replace the social structures they mean to disrupt or destroy?

Is insurrectionist ethics purely a negative project or are there positive implications of the view?

In what ways can insurrectionist ethics be a constructive project? Are there forms of creation, programs, institutions, policy etc. that are insurrectionist in nature?

Conclusion

This then is what the proposed definition of insurrectionist ethics comes to:

Insurrectionist ethics 1) prescribes  individual or coordinated actions on behalf of the oppressed 2)  in direct opposition to oppressive institutions, structures, systems or conditions of control 3) that generates a duty to insurrect or resist oppression 4) informed by a rejection of customary morality that gives warrant to seemingly impossible forms of oppositional being that make seemingly absurd valuations understandable 5) motivated by a transvaluation of putative norms and values, or 6) predicated on radical reconceptualization of social, political and moral conceptions 7) aimed at radical transformation, abolition, or liberation from oppression.

One might complain that the definition considered above seems a bit like an algorithm or a ten -point program, solely valuable for talking about social protest, nothing else. Some recent discussions equate insurrectionist ethics and abolition with justifying protest, and only that, too often limiting imagination to the here and now: not with apperception, new imaginations, avoiding bifurcations like civilized or uncivilized, valuation versus logic and reason, black or white. This is not the intent, nor what has been presented here. Given that Locke was right, we live by our imperatives, relative or not, this definition of insurrectionist ethics endorses tendencies, inclinations, orientations and value inclines that make possible a broad range of valuative vistas and reasoning strategies supportive of such (re)valuing.  A wide range of oppositional responses, reasoning strategies, and imperatives appreciative of diverse contexts and not limited to instrumental reason, and protest that need not issue in immediate liberation for the oppressed but enable seemingly impossible forms of oppositional being are warranted under this definition.

Readers of this volume may be compelled to ask: “How can I help it?” But, in the interest of justice, “We do have to start!” The reader may well ask, “Start what?” and taking heed of the immortal words of Amie Cesaire, “The only thing in the world worth starting: the End of the world, for Heaven’s sake” (Césaire 2001).

What does one make of this proposed definition of insurrectionist ethics? Does it capture or make room for all that should be included in and simultaneously distinguish insurrectionist ethics from other forms of social justice advocacy?

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