this election cycle has only further clarified the antiBlackness of pragmatics and more specifically American pragmatism.

or to put it in Baldwinian terms, “one is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.” and here Baldwin even gets it too optimistically—if we’re to take this sans irony: the very set of choices is a “ruse of reason”, a “cruel optimism” if you will.

I sit this problem at the foot of American pragmatism for, with its posture toward truth, solution, science, clarity, and consequence, it’s empiricist moods aren’t as “radical” (James) as they seem. as a response to transcendentalism, it developed a truly American philosophy.

what is more American than critiquing the system from within the system particularly on the system’s behalf? the pragmatist holds empiricism and truth to task so to remain committed to a humanism that unfolds its ethics via and contra the Black.

there’s the relationship, I think, between say Quine’s “Two Dogmas...” in 1950 and the Civil Rights Movement that I think Cornel West reads romantically, which is brought into sharp relief in the Black Power Movement and even sharper relief in the current Movement for Black Lives

there’s this irreconcilability pragmatism believes itself to have reckoned with via fallibilism and it’s more general resistance to transcendentalism. this belief allows it to account for the given unknown variables at hand and still make the most reasonable, ethical decision.

however, I think that—besides the spotlight an era of “alt-facts” puts on epistemological uncertainty—what the BLM epoch has taught us is that there is no relationship, for the Black, between evidence—even in its preponderance—a clear hypothesis, and ethic(al analysi)s.

which is to say that the results on election night, should they go in the favor of the DNC, will reentrench a more insidious antiBlackness present as the bedrock of neoliberalism: the antiBlack fiction that there is a calculus by which ethical outcomes are produced for the Black.