Cornel West, American Pragmatism, and the Post-Obama Racial/Social Dynamics

Recent violent racial events in the United States, starting with the killing in Florida of Travon Martin by a white “crime vigilante” George Zimmerman, and followed in Fergusson, Missouri, by the killing of nineteen-year-old Michael Brown, by a white police officer, have provoked critical discussions about the issue of racial violence against young black males in US society. As a major crisis for black America, such killings have motivated cries about injustice from all quarters of society concerned with advancing social and racial justice. But while such calls have been made and outrage expressed in certain news outlets and by social activists “in the field” such as Black Lives Matter, there seems to have been an inaudible response from Cornel West, or one in which West deploys his theory of prophetic pragmatism as he does to certain issues he examines in Race Matters.