Abstract

Within David Walker’s Appeal to the Citizens of the United States (1830), I locate a robust morality of insurrection in contrast to the normative moral frameworks that serve to reinforce and preserve oppressive social orders by limiting the language, concepts, and virtues that liberation struggles can access. In this chapter, I explicate a framework for Insurrectionist Ethics and argue that, beyond justification of violence, Insurrectionist Ethics warrants a host of actions to resist hegemony as well as calls the unquestioned superiority of non-violent resistance to injustice into question.