Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness (original) (raw)

Rhetorical Criticisms of Anti-Blackness; Interrogating Ontology Before Sociality

Racial rhetorical criticisms should not be conducted through race-focused means. In 2016, L.A. Flores termed the three-step process by which scholars should conduct rhetorical criticisms with a framework of tracking, unpacking, and rendering intelligible "manifestations of both race and racism" (pg. 16). This process has been replicated numerous times in the mere four years since Flores' publication with a variety of applications. Most notably, the concepts have been applied to Black church burnings (Houdek 2018), Donald Trump's rhetoric and "demagoguery" (Johnson 2017), and white feminism as a result of the #metoo movement (Moon & Holling 2020). Proving to be an effective mechanism through which to conduct a rhetorical criticism (Baugh-Harris & Wanzer-Serrano 2018), this project takes up the task of such process with two distinct differences; replacing race with blackness and racism with antiblackness. These distinctions, when utilized in a rhetorical criticism, serve as mechanisms by which non-black, specifically, White scholars can simultaneously atone for their ontological existence being predicted on the alienation of Blackness while serving as workers for the abolition of white society as constructed by an inherently whitened rhetorical situation. To do so, this section serves as a review of three literature bases whom contribute to the overall call to action stated above regarding avoiding racial frames for rhetorical criticisms; afro-pessimism, rhetorical criticism studies, and rhetorical situation studies. Through these authors, this section provides the warrants for the two distinctions made from Flores' original process: replacing race with blackness and racism with antiblackness. Literature Review Diverging from Flores. The distinction between race and blackness is important as it defines the foundation through which this work theorizes the relationship between Black and non-Black persons. Numerous authors have contributed to the claim that the term 'race' is one that was created for the sole purpose of displacing conversations regarding genocide and exploitation to the realm of innate facets of being.

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2020

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. These articles are about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black in black letter law. They examine the semiotic relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and the law. While Furtive Blackness is primarily concerned with regimes of policing—both by badged officers and deputized citizens—Strict Scrutiny examines how the reconstruction amendments have been deployed and redeployed to strictly scrutinize Black presence and appeals to justice and make them unintelligible, irrelevant claims without justiciable and therefore outside of law the concern of law. Strict Scrutiny is a riff on the phrase of judicial review that is primarily concerned with the Court’s inversion of the term to tightly regulate and foreclose Black access to legal redress, as well as the police practice of strictly scrutinizing Black presence and movement in public and private places. In essence, the ascription of furtivity makes way for strict scrutinization; while the Black interior strategy of furtivity and refusal creates a survival praxis that allows for a reprieve in the wake of these indignities. These articles are an interpretation of the law as a tool of anti-blackness and an exposition of Black thought and deed in response to anti Blackness, both in black letter law and day to day life. Both articles are descriptive, interdisciplinary and rooted in traditional law and accented by Black queer and feminist theory, critical race studies, performance studies and literary analysis. Specifically, Furtive Blackness engages the Fugitive Slave Law, Black (and Slave) Codes, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments jurisprudence and current cases of racialized and gendered policing to develop an analytic to Fourth Amendment law, criminal procedure, and policing as practiced by officers of the law and deputized white citizens. This analytic seeks to shed light on how Black and BlaQueer (LGBTQ) people—and bodies—have come to exist both in and outside of law; reachable through its policing arm, yet unreachable by many of its fundamental protections. In other words, this work seeks to articulate a framework that maps how American jurisprudence renders Black and BlaQueer people furtive—what I am titling “Furtive Blackness”—and how this furtivity exists as an afterlife of slavery and operates as a social and legal pretext for police encounters. Furtive Blackness is primarily interested in how Black culture, flesh and movement come to operate—well outside the auspices of the Fourth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment—as bodies of evidence for probable cause, reasonable suspicion and the logics for the deployment of quotidian searches, excessive force and mass incarceration; Strict Scrutiny is primarily concerned with how Black presence appeals to justice are turned aside and viewed skeptically as always, already faulty and often, outside of justiciability. As such, I’m also interested in how this experience with being rendered furtive simultaneously marks Black citizens as outside of the protection of law, yet easily and routinely within its disciplinary reach.

Review: Critique of Black Reason - Rethinking the Relation of the Particular and the Universal

This article reviews the 2017 English translation of Achille Mbembe’s book Critique of Black Reason. It suggests that a key to understanding the work concerns the theme of the double, for instance, the critique of the double discourse on Blackness which explains the title of the book. Despite some passages of the text being overly poetic and difficult to understand, Mbembe’s critical contribution in this work, to not only the philosophical debate on otherness but also critical race theory, is the attempt to rethink the relation of the particular and the universal, or in this instance Africa and the world, in order to think more critically about the responsibility of repairing the dignity of humanity in thinking our shared world beyond race and racism.

Charles W. Mills - Blackness Visible Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998)

1998

Cornell University Press strives to utilize environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are also either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. tive features of such a philosophy By drawing a comparison between the Cartesian sum, that classic statement of European modernism, and the radically different sum of Ralph Ellison's classic novel of the black experience, Jnvisible Man, I try to get at some of these differences. This essay first started me thinking systematically about the subject and introduced many of the topics and themes that I later developed in other essays. Appropriately enough, the novel also provided my title, dedication, and epigraph: this is a book about making the black experience philosophically visible, in part through attempting to remove the conceptual and theoretical cataracts on the white eye. The chapter that focuses specifically on epistemological issues is "Alternative Epistemologies. ,> Though it is now somewhat dated in its references (I have added a few sources), the concerns it addresses are still very much with us: the notion that subordinated groups have a privileged epistemic position, and the attempts to defend this claim and adjudicate competing claims of privilege. Written in a period less thoroughly post-Marxist than our own, it compares different varieties of "standpoint theory"-the original Marxist model and feminist and black variants-and argues, against postmodernism, for a situated objectivism. I still endorse this position, my sympathies being generally realist. And in light of the obvious divergence between black and white perspectives on the world, it remains true that the task of constructing and defending a "black" epistemology is an important one that has yet to be seriously tackled by black philosophers. Issues of personal identity have been around at least since John Locke. In "But What Are You Really?' I examine the "metaphysics" of race, explaining the ways in which race is "real" and showing how conflicting criteria may generate interesting issues of racial identity. The point in part is to make plausible the idea of race as "ontological" and to sketch, correspondingly, a set of background realities that needs to be taken more seriously by mainstream social and political philosophy. (My title was inspired by Anthony Appiah's In 19941 was invited to Toronto to participate in a public symposium and lecture series on black-Jewish relations in the city. The lecture I gave there, "Dark Ontologies," introduces the idea of white supremacy as a system both local and global. I argue that this idea should play in critical race theory the same role that class society and patriarchy play in Marxist and feminist theory, respectively. In other words, one should look at race as systemic and objective rather than primarily in terms of attitudes and values. "Revisionist Ontologies" explores this idea in greater detail, from what is more of a Third World perspective. (The original paper was presented in Mexico to the Caribbean Studies Association.) I focus on the idea of a "subperson," first xvi Preface raised in "Non-Cartesian Sums? and make some suggestions about the rethinking of political philosophy that are further developed in "The Racial Polity" The point of all three essays is that racial domination should be seen as a kind of political system, whose workings need to be recognized and theorized if normative political theory is to be guided properly. Some interesting work has been done on the idea of "naturalizing" ethics, in line with the older project of naturalizing epistemology In "White Right" I examine a naturalized ethic of a Herrenvolk variety; that is, the moral code one would get in a social order explicitly or implicitly predicated on white supremacy. This type of analysis may yield insights into the typical structuring of white moral consciousness that are not so readily available from the perspective of conventional ethical theory. Since progressive social change in respect to race will require the understanding and transformation of this consciousness, the failure of mainstream ethics to pay more attention to its characteristic features is an important omission, one that reflects a broader failure to appreciate the centrality of race in our society. Finally, the last chapter, "Whose Fourth of July?" brings these issues together by considering the question raised by the great Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 speech, a question that still reverberates in the United States and elsewhere these many years later-whether blacks will ever be included on fully equal terms in the polities created by the West in the "New World." If we are to hope that one day this question will be answered in the affirmative, the issue of race must be honestly faced rather than evaded, and philosophy can play a key role in this enterprise. This book is my own small contribution to the project of expanding that set of paradigmatic philosophical images cited at the start, so that one will also think of W. E. B. Du Bois's black cave dwellers, trying desperately to make contact with the white world above; Ellison's invisible man in his basement wondering whether he exists; James Weldon Johnson's ex-colored man passing into the white body politic and so changing his racial identity; Kant's actual racial contractarianism, in which white persons give disrespect to nonwhite subpersons; Frantz Fanon's wretched of the earth and Du Bois's global color line as the unhappy outcome of European expansionism; Huck Finn's dilemma of having to choose between turning Jim over to his mistress and helping him to escape, between a Herrenvolk ethics and race treachery; the cognitive possibility that as a slave, as an aborigine, as one of the colonized, one may actually have been ideologically fed a false picture of one's history and reality.... Visible can be seen as a companion volume to The Racial Contract, published by Cornell University Press in 1997. It covers some of the same territory but explores it in greater depth and detail. The Racial Contract is a high-flying overview; Blackness Visible is closer to the ground. The two complement each other as different perspectives, long distance and close up, on philosophy and race. I gratefully express my appreciation to Alison Shonkwiler of Cornell University Press for coming up with the idea of an essay collection in the first place and for guiding it carefully through its various phases, from conception to completion. The conscientious comments, criticisms, and suggestions of the two readers for Cornell have assisted me greatly in improving the original manuscript. My thanks to the University of Oklahoma for a junior faculty summer research fellowship in 1989, when I first tentatively began to think about the issue of philosophy and race. Some of these essays were written or revised in my year as a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the whole manuscript was put into its final shape during a semester's sabbatical here. As before, I am indebted to John Biro and Kenneth Merrill of the University of Oklahoma and to Richard Kraut, Dorothy Grover, and Bill Hart of UIC, department chairs, for their support of my research, and to Bernard Boxill, Dave Schweickart, and Robert Paul Wolff for their referees' recommendations for the UIC fellowship. Charlotte Jackson and Valerie McQuay, the UIC Philosophy Department's administrative assistants, have continued to provide invaluable service, and without Charlotte's electronic expertise I would doubtless still be trying to format the manuscript to Cornell's satisfaction. (Her photographic talents with an unprepossessing subject are on display on the jacket of The Racial Contract.) Feedback and criticisms on various of these chapters have come from Linda Alcoff,

The Pursuit of Being: Reflections on Blackness

Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 2020

The Black Register calls for the uprooting of a world structured by the systems of oppression imposed by whiteness throughout the centuries. Colonialism, imperialism, and racism have long been weaponized against black-skinned peoples, denying them life and voice. In this book review, the author analyzes Tendayi Sithole’s propositions to establish a new world system where blackness will not be lifeless or voiceless anymore.