In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America / Edition 1

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Overview

In this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation’s rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude’s mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics.
 
According to Glaude, Dewey’s pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life—or what we often speak of as the blues—can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, In a Shade of Blue seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Glaude argues that only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied, an argument echoed in the recent rhetoric and optimism of the Barack Obama presidential campaign.

 
In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary and to follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their cultural and political history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.
 

“Eddie Glaude is the towering public intellectual of his generation.”—Cornel West
 
“Eddie Glaude is poised to become the leading intellectual voice of our generation, raising questions that make us reexamine the assumptions we hold by expanding our inventory of ideas.”—Tavis Smiley

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226298245
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/10/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is theWilliam S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America and editor of Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Read an Excerpt

In a Shade of Blue

Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America

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By Eddie S. Glaude

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-29824-5

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Chapter One

In a Shade of Blue: An Introduction

Pragmatism is as native to American soil as sagebrush and buffalo grass. So is white supremacy. But classical pragmatists like Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey rarely took up the question of white supremacy in their philosophical writings. For them, race and racism remained marginal intellectual categories despite the long, looming shadow of slavery that framed their extraordinary lives. I am not convinced, however, that their failure to address white supremacy philosophically constitutes an unforgivable moral failing. Professional philosophy, after all, isn't the first place one looks for courageous social advocacy. And James and Dewey did in fact demonstrate in their daily lives a commitment, however limited, to antiracist politics (Peirce is a different story). We need to recognize that American pragmatism emerged in the context of a nation committed to democracy and slavery, to ideas of equality and to the insidious ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. American pragmatism indeed reflects the haunting duality at the heart of this country: a simultaneous commitment to democratic ideals and undemocratic practices. To say then that pragmatism is native to American soil is to acknowledge that it carries with it all the possibilities and limitations that have defined our fragile experiment in democracy.

One would hope that matters had changed among scholars who call themselves pragmatists today. But even now, most pragmatists fail to take seriously the issues of race in their philosophical work. Cornel West's account of pragmatism in The American Evasion of Philosophy inserted W. E. B. DuBois into the pantheon of pragmatist thinkers, and we have seen, due in large part to the indefatigable work of Leonard Harris, a resurgence of interest in Alain Locke. But too often DuBois and Locke remain mere personalities. Their insertion into the pantheon of American pragmatism is much like the use of gender-specific pronouns to draw attention to feminist concerns in philosophical writing: the impression it creates-that patriarchy, or in this instance white supremacy, has been seriously considered-is too often an illusion.

When, for example, Richard Rorty invokes the work of James Baldwin in his book Achieving Our Country, one expects more than a passing mention of the problem that so exercised Baldwin throughout his career. Instead, Baldwin stands simply as an exemplar of moderation-someone willing, unlike the leftists Rorty so vehemently chastises, to criticize America without rejecting it outright. This is interesting as far as it goes; Rorty's nostalgia for the old white left and his eloquent commitment to the ideals that animate the life of the country are hard to dislike. But Rorty evades the more fundamental challenge that Baldwin's writings present to anyone willing to engage them: that America must confront the fraudulent nature of its life, that its avowals of virtue shield it from honestly confronting the darkness within its own soul.

Rorty might claim that his liberal commitments offer adequate resources for addressing these concerns; that is to say, if good liberals are to be consistent they must condemn racism insofar as it denies the maximization of opportunity for individual variation. Rorty, like most good pragmatists, believes that the liberal goal of maximal room for individual variation requires "no source of authority other than the free agreement of human beings," that we must work to diminish human suffering and make possible the conditions for human excellence, and that we must commit ourselves to the goal that every child should have an equal chance of happiness. Nothing further needs to be said. But Rorty knows, as we do, that liberals have failed miserably in these areas, primarily because of their equivocation in the face of white supremacy's insidious claims. Pragmatists need to offer something more than assertions that "good liberals don't behave in this way." Sustained attention needs to be given to the kinds of claims and practices that frustrate the liberal vision Rorty commends. The same can be said about John Dewey, the consummate philosopher of American democracy: shouldn't he have engaged philosophically the ways in which white supremacy frustrated his philosophical claims about democracy? We know he did not, and Rorty, one of his most famous contemporary disciples, also has not. That kind of work is left principally to those of us who bear the brunt of such practices.

A Tradition of African American Pragmatism

We know African Americans have taken up the task. Not so much by participating in professional philosophical debates about truth and meaning as by tackling the complex problems of American racism. To be sure, the political philosophy of W. E. B. DuBois carries the imprint of pragmatism, and Alain Locke's theory of value and critical theory of race reflect pragmatic commitments. Both take up the pressing issues of American democracy in light of the history and political economy of white supremacy, which gives their pragmatism a timbre and tone different from that of Dewey and Rorty. But DuBois and Locke do not stand alone. One encounters in Anna Julia Cooper's magisterial work, A Voice from the South (1892), a pragmatic defense of religious belief in the face of a debilitating skepticism in which "all hope in the grand possibilities of life [is] blasted."

Several years before William James's classic 1896 essay, "The Will to Believe," Cooper argued for the necessity of belief as a source of what James called the strenuous mood. She recounted the story of a slave who attempted to escape to the North. "He believed that somewhere under the beckoning light, lay a far away country where a man's a man. He sets out with his heavenly guide before his face-would you tell him he is pursuing a wandering light? Is he the poorer for his ignorant hope? Are you the richer for your enlightened suspicion?" In Cooper's view, much depends on our belief in "the infinite possibilities of devoted self-sacrifice and in the eternal grandeur of a human idea heroically espoused." Such faith-that is, "treating truth as true"-compels us to work to transform our world and is essential, she argued, if African Americans are to rise to the challenges confronting them. Cooper closed her marvelous work with words much like those of William James but with the gravitas of someone struggling against white supremacy: "The world is to be moved one generation forward-whether by us, by blind force, by fate, or by God! If thou believest, all things are possible; and as thou believest, so be it unto thee."

We also find African American cultural workers during the Harlem Renaissance, alongside DuBois and Locke, drawing on the insights of pragmatism to formulate their claims about the beauty of black life. These formulations aided in their attempts "to explain America to itself" in light of the doings and sufferings, as well as the expressive traditions, of African Americans. Charles Johnson, the Chicago-trained sociologist and editor of Opportunity, thought of himself as a Deweyan of sorts, and his reading of pragmatism informed his conception of African American politics. In his "Notes on a Personal Philosophy of Life," for example, Johnson rejected a formulation of black community predicated on an abstract notion of racial essence, an idea of blackness antecedent to the actual experiences of black individuals. For him, meaning and the values that we come to cherish emerge out of transactions with our environment-out of experience: "Adherence to any body of doctrines and dogmas, based upon a specific authority, as adherence to any set of beliefs, signifies distrust in the power of experience to provide, in its on-going movement, the needed principles of belief and action. [Dewey] challenges to a new faith in experience itself as the sole ultimate authority." This view of experience led Johnson to emphasize the centrality of African Americans to the actual meaning of democratic community and social justice in the United States. Neither could be known, in his view, except by confronting candidly those who have been denied just treatment and access to democratic life.

Ralph Ellison makes a similar claim. He recognized that the grand democratic vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson was limited by his racial myopia, in the sense that Emerson failed fundamentally to recognize African-descended people as autonomous agents. In Invisible Man, for example, Ellison puts forward a profound reconstruction of Emerson's vision by drawing a circle, to invoke the title of one of Emerson's important essays, around his powerful but limited vision of American democratic life. Emersonian ideas of self-reliance and representativeness, both of which presuppose a white American subject, are recalibrated to provide those consistently marginalized in Emerson's "imaginative economy" a central and canonical place in the very construction of American identity. Indeed Ellison claimed to be an inheritor of Emerson's language. But in claiming that inheritance, he also makes an argument about the direction and meaning of American pragmatism. As Michael Magee writes, "In returning to Emerson, Ellison recalls the uncanny truth about pragmatism, that it is 'the partial creation of black people.'" This provocative formulation signals the extent to which American pragmatism is the direct reflection of the unique character of America itself, which is inextricably connected to the presence of its darker citizens-America's blues people.

There has indeed been a longstanding tradition of African Americans explicitly taking up the philosophical tools of pragmatism to respond to African American conditions of living. Cornel West stands in this tradition even though he has, over the years, distanced himself from the label. West's prophetic pragmatism, as expressed in The American Evasion of Philosophy, ushered in a formal articulation of the sensibility that I have generally outlined here. In his hands, pragmatism encounters the underside of American life, it grapples with the tragic dimensions of our living, it gives attention to individual assertion and structural limitations, and it asserts the need for a fuller grasp of the realities of white supremacy (and other forms of oppression) that inform our self-understanding. He rightly notes that American pragmatism "tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action" and that "its basic impulse is a plebian radicalism that fuels an antipatrician rebelliousness for the moral aim of enriching individuals and expanding democracy." But West knows of pragmatism's blind spots-that its commitment to expanding and enriching democratic life has been continuously "restricted by an ethnocentrism and a patriotism cognizant of the exclusion of peoples of color, certain immigrants, and women yet fearful of the subversive demands these excluded peoples might make and enact." Like those before him he takes up the task of attempting to explain America to itself, and we find that, when assessed in light of the history and political economy of white supremacy, pragmatism-whether Emersonian, Jamesian, or Deweyan-looks and sounds different. It has been colored a deep shade of blue.

Coloring Pragmatism

In a Shade of Blue is my contribution to the tradition I have just sketched. My aim is to think through some of the more pressing conceptual problems confronting African American political life, and I do so as a Deweyan pragmatist. I should say a bit about what I mean by this self-description. John Dewey thought of philosophy as a form of cultural and social criticism. He held the view that philosophy, properly understood as a mode of wisdom, ought to aid us in our efforts to overcome problematic situations and worrisome circumstances. The principal charge of the philosopher, then, is to deal with the problems of human beings, not simply with the problems of philosophers. For Dewey, over the course of his long career, this involved bridging the divide between science, broadly understood, and morals-a divide he traced to a conception of experience that has led philosophers over the centuries to tilt after windmills. Dewey declared, "The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life."

Dewey bases this conclusion on several features of his philosophy: (1) antifoundationalism, (2) experimentalism, (3) contextualism, and (4) solidarity. Antifoundationalism, of course, is the rejection of foundations of knowledge that are beyond question. Dewey, by contrast, understands knowledge to be the fruit of our undertakings as we seek "the enrichment of our immediate experience through the control over action it exercises." He insists that we turn our attention from supposed givens to actual consequences, pursuing a future fundamentally grounded in values shaped by experience and realized in our actions. This view makes clear the experimental function of knowledge. Dewey emphasized that knowledge entails efforts to control and select future experience and that we are always confronted with the possibility of error when we act. We experiment or tinker, with the understanding that all facts are fallible and, as such, occasionally afford us the opportunity for revision.

Contextualism refers to an understanding of beliefs, choices, and actions as historically conditioned. Dewey held the view that inquiry, or the pursuit of knowledge, is value-laden, in the sense that we come to problems with interests and habits that orient us one way or another, and that such pursuits are also situational, in the sense that "knowledge is pursued and produced somewhere, somewhen, and by someone." Finally, solidarity captures the associational and cooperative dimensions of Dewey's thinking. Dewey conceives of his pragmatism as "an instrument of social improvement" aimed principally at expanding democratic life and broadening the ground of individual self-development. Democracy, for him, constitutes more than a body of formal procedures; it is a form of life that requires constant attention if we are to secure the ideals that purportedly animate it. Individuality is understood as developing one's unique capacities within the context of one's social relations and one's community. The formation of the democratic character so important to our form of associated living involves, then, a caring disposition toward the plight of our fellows and a watchful concern for the well-being of our democratic life.

With these four general features in mind, Dewey's view is consistent, as one would expect, with the characterization of pragmatism provided by Williams James. In Pragmatism, James powerfully describes the pragmatist as one who

turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.... It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against ... dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality.

The good pragmatist, then, encourages a view of philosophy as social and cultural criticism, where the neat conundrums of the scholar's professional practice give way to a certain kind of responsibility in our intellectual lives, where we take the tools of our training and work to offer some insight into specific conditions of value and into specific consequences of ideas. In this view, philosophy becomes, as Dewey argued, "a method of locating and interpreting the more serious of the conflicts that occur in life and a method of projecting ways for dealing with them: a method of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis."

A sensibility or general temperament, to use James's language, informs this philosophical orientation: it places an accent on an open, malleable, and pluralistic universe, a view in which change is a central feature of our living, demanding of us variety, ingenuity or imagination, and experimentation in practical matters. It places a fundamental accent on human agency or powers. This can be thought of as a reflection of its Emersonian lineage. Pragmatists express a profound faith in the capacity of everyday, ordinary people to transform their world. There are certainly constraints, but it is through our various practical transactions that we work to make a substantive difference in our conditions of living.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
In a Shade of Blue: An Introduction

1. Tragedy and Moral Experience: John Dewey and Toni Morrison’s Beloved
2. “Black and Proud”: Reconstructing Black Identity
3. “Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands unto God”: The Problem of History in Black Theology
4. Agency, Slavery, and African American Christianity
5. Explicating Black Nationalism
6. The Eclipse of a Black Public and the Challenge of a Post-Soul Politics

Epilogue: The Covenant with Black America
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"An audacious attempt to wrestle with the significant theoretical and political challenges of race, religion, and reason in our contemporary moment."

Journal of the American Academy of Religion - Corey D. B. Walker

An audacious attempt to wrestle with the significant theoretical and polit
— Corey D. B. Walker

Journal of the American Academy of Religion