Richard Rorty does have something ‘to say to [Black Americans]’ and to their racially conscious nonblack allies in the sense that his understanding of liberalism, his prophecies about the future and his urgent appeals to the American Left all paint a picture of a white middle class fully prepared to make life increasingly miserable for Black Americans unless it is ‘protected from catastrophe’. Rorty hopes that this group will undergo a moral transformation that enables it to see past its narrow (...) group interests, but doubts that it will. He, nevertheless, prescribes a politics of hope and appeasement as a hedge against both despair and backsliding. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the availability and the suitability of an alternative ‘racial realist’ (and tragicomic) posture vis-à-vis American liberalism inspired by thinkers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell. This alternative enables racially conscious Americans to respond to the intransigence of (certain) white Americans with cunning rather than by escaping into fantasies of a ‘dream country’ unmarked by the damage caused by racism and its long-lingering effects. I uncover and explore this alternative through Rorty’s warnings regarding the white middle class, a somewhat surprising consistency between Rorty’s brand of class politics and Bell’s understanding of ‘racial fortuity’, and, finally, through a development of Bell’s ‘racial realist’ posture combined with Baldwin’s ‘uses of the blues’ resulting in a ‘hard-eyed’ tragicomic sensibility sufficient to effectively pair continued struggle with creative consolation and resilience. (shrink)

This paper examines conceptions of truth and “the human” in an effort to engage contemporary discussions of neointerventionism. A central question in the paper is whether one facet of the self‐justifying structure of neointerventionism is an operative framing of theories of truth underlying the explanans sought by foreign policy officials and state actors. To address this question, I turn to an unlikely source within philosophy of language, neopragmatist theorist Richard Rorty, to offer an example of an antirepresentationalist and nonobjectivist description (...) of truth that may help explain the terms and stakes of neointerventionist policies. My claim, however, will be, following the critical insights of Cornel West, Chantal Mouffe, and Sylvia Wynter, that neopragmatist efforts of the sort outlined by Rorty, while sophisticated in their analyses of the nature of truth and forms of justification, fail to thoroughly engage the political conception of “the human” that orders and frames debates regarding objectivity and solidarity. I conclude by returning to the problematic of neointerventionism from Wynter’s framings of what she calls the “coloniality of truth” and “embattled humanisms.”. (shrink)