Is the Black Prophetic Corrective of Political Pragmatism's Theodicy of the Self Successful?

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Interrogating Democracy and Pragmatism: Race, Identity, Curriculum, and Public Education (Table 9)

Abstract

Cornel West’s neo-pragmatism synthesizes the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist leanings of Marxism with prophetic Christianity’s praxis in a “form of indigenous American oppositional thought and action” that seeks “fundamental change and transformation.” Attending to West’s Black prophetic pragmatism, its critical genealogy of pragmatism, and, in particular, its “American religion” of the evasion of philosophy, this paper problematizes its theodicy of the self. I argue that Black prophetic (BP) pragmatism’s social analysis falls short of productively problematizing the intergenerational struggle of classes of individuals like race or its intersectionality with socioeconomic status.
West’s analysis offers incomplete possibilities for Dewey’s social psychology of the self to underwrite a political understanding of the significance of race and racial identity in the United States.

Author

• Sheron A. Fraser-Burgess, Ball State University