THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#13, JUNE-AUG/2022
Ok, so let’s set this off with a slight provocation. Namely that any attempt to lecture on existential liberation critique is by definition an unfinished task. Indeed, for if we admit that socio-historical struggle for human liberation necessitates an open dialectic without end in sight, then insurgent thought that introduces ruptures towards sustaining potentialities of Revolt by disclosing the radical ontological freedom of human ‘being’ as the basis of emancipatory praxis, finds no shelter within a closed episteme.
And yet, what do we mean by existential liberation critique as an insurgent philosophical discourse? What happens when we delve into questions of existential liberation? No doubt then, the aim of this lecture is to introduce some fundamental questions that implicate existential liberation theory, and by engaging these questions, ultimately confront its discursive and socio-historical conditions of possibility.
What is human ‘being’? What is human subjectivity? These fundamental questions exert a tremendous emancipatory gravity upon lived Black experience as recurring interrogations of the human condition become continuously radicalized in the face of a western imperialist continuum that structurally disavows ethical human reciprocity when confronted with the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’. For since the onset of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum, philosophical thought has been stifled by the idea of Man as a racialized humanism of materialist determinism introduced by an overwhelming tyranny of murder. Modern humanism thus veils a profound spiritual forgetfulness of human ‘being’ that epistemically divorces human ‘being’ from the socio-ontological depth and diversity of our lived universality.
As a consequence, it proves impossible to pose the question of human ‘being’ without taking into account lived potentialities of human liberation against western imperialist power. In particular, existential liberation critique reveals a discursive vitality of emancipatory imperatives arising from the Revolt of human ‘being’ against chattel slavery, inasmuch as slave Revolt constitutes a socio-ontological phenomenon without geohistorical precedent.
So, to begin with, we can understand existential liberation critique as an insurgent philosophy. What this means is that it carries the weight of an epistemic impetus that originates from the underground of modernity towards interrogations of the Real and enunciations of Revolt against a western imperialist continuum, and therefore introduces disequilibrium within the normative gaze of established power.
Now, being of the temperament that if you spare the conceptual density that accompanies philosophical endeavor, you run the risk of hampering potentialities that engender philosophical thought, we should take this time to break down and introduce certain working definitions in anticipation of their appearing soon enough during the flow of this lecture.
Among these working definitions, and probably one of the most important with regards to existential liberation theory, is the concept of the normative gaze. Early philosophical engagements with what we now understand as the normative gaze can be gleaned from the thought of Frederick Douglass. In particular, Douglass discloses how systematically “shutting out the light of education from their minds”(or what we shall now term miseducation of soul), “and brutalizing their persons”(which is what we shall now recognize as objective violence), fundamentally combine towards constituting the normative gaze “in order to make the slave a slave, and to keep him a slave” in perpetuity.[1]
The consequence of such miseducation of soul, speaks to so much more than mere ignorance in the pragmatic sense of not being well-informed politically, of being ill-trained to earn a daily living, or of not being properly prepared in a manner that facilitates gaining a foothold in civil society towards navigation around or assimilation into the imperial mainstream. Rather, it is a term meant to capture a coerced spiritual incomprehension that facilitates ideological consent and coalesces into a profound abdication of human agency in relation to established structures of power.
And in conjunction with this, here let us think of objective violence as structural-inert violence. In other words, what we mean is a type of violence that is both present by its manner of composition, and absent through a mode of appearance that consistently receives sanction by established power, given that it expressly reproduces the sovereign legitimacy of established power and reaches such a repetitive degree of systemic frequency that it rationally escapes social notice and historical scrutiny because of its sheer familiarity.
Now, we should note that the term normative gaze, is itself conceptually introduced towards an insurgent philosophical discourse in the work of Cornel West.[2] Yet, for our purposes, the most important attempt to grapple with the normative gaze after Douglass can be located in the thought of W.E.B. DuBois through aspects of his conceptualization of double consciousness “which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”[3] The normative gaze is thus indicative of an elusive process by which established power continuously renews and reconstitutes itself through objective violence and miseducation of soul that structurally impose this “revelation of the other world” upon human ‘being’ towards generating “a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”[4]
As such, “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” should be understood as implying more than referring to an interpersonal phenomenon that exists in a vacuum outside of an already socialized deference to established power. Instead, it speaks to the lived positionality of Black subjectivity within an imperial topographical coherence, an imperial coherence that ideologically functions as “the tape of the world” which structures how we measure ourselves against the Real.
We should also keep in mind that by the Real, we don’t just mean reality. Rather, we mean that non-conscious plenitude and exhaustive materiality of existence that is drenched in nature, culture and history, and thus both situates the human condition and mediates against it. And, it is in this sense, that challenges to established power are often translated by the normative gaze as unwarranted irrational violence, as Revolt against not just established power, but against unarticulated structures of meaning, equivalent to an affront against the nature of reality itself, especially insofar as the Real is itself constituted by the normative gaze in harmony with Empire. To bring up Revolt in this context, not only conceptually builds upon slave Revolt as the resistance of human ‘being’ against the structural imposition of chattel slavery, but is also thus indicative of a social phenomenon that introduces ontological significance to historical rebellion.
There are also facets of the thought of Richard Wright that contribute towards our understanding of the normative gaze by revealing lived Black experience as akin to being relegated to “a psychological island whose objective form is the most unanimous fiat in all American history; a fiat buttressed by popular and national tradition, and written down in many state and city statutes, a fiat which artificially and arbitrarily defines, regulates, and limits in scope of meaning the vital contours of our lives, and the lives of our children and our children’s children.”[5] This passage makes it quite clear that with the normative gaze, we are confronting an unreflective imposition of established power upon situated consciousness that coercively limits the social range and historical possibility of our actions through objective violence and miseducation of soul.
A clear example we can put forth to understand the normative gaze is the very notion of ‘race’ itself, as a rational signification of subhumanity and biopolitical alterity that has no basis in Truth, yet is as Real as the neo-colonial police mob assault of Rikia Young.[6] Young is a 28-year-old mother and home health aide who just happened upon a massive horde of neo-colonial police while merely attempting to drive home one evening in the vicinity of organized protests and social demonstrations against the accumulative slaughter of Black people by police. The Fact of Blackness[7] means that it doesn’t matter to police what she is actually doing, rather, her very being, as an assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’, is understood as an ontological offense, a biopolitical danger that threatens the structural stability of the normative gaze of modernity.
Therefore, instead of actually being of service to humanity by ensuring and protecting the well-being of Young and her family, dozens of neo-colonial police encircle her vehicle without warning and start smashing out the windows. Young is then savagely dragged out of her car and severely beaten alongside her 16-year-old nephew. As the brutal attack by rampaging neo-colonial police against Young continues, her two-year-old son, who is also in the vehicle, is accosted and separated from his mother by police officers who then immediately use the toddler as a physical prop, “an object in the midst of other objects”,[8] towards ideologically sustaining the normative gaze of established power.
Leaving no opportunity wasted, “the nation’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, posted an image to social media Thursday of a white Philadelphia police officer comforting a young Black child, pushing the image as further evidence of police benevolence in the face of demonstrations that have led to violence.”[9] The police union literally claimed that “This lost child was wandering around barefoot during the violent riots in Philadelphia. The only thing this Philly police officer cared about was protecting this child. We are not your enemy. We are the Thin Blue Line. WE ARE the only thing standing between Order & Anarchy.”[10] Here we can clearly see how the preemptive coherence of the normative gaze is constituted in tandem through objective violence and miseducation of soul towards the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’.
And yet, what does it mean when racist dehumanization against an innocent mother, nephew and son discloses structural-inert tyranny that allows mob violence, as policing against human ‘being’, to be upheld as an unimpeachable example of the altruistic heroism and staunch preservation of the imperial mainstream that defines the contemporary nature of neo-colonial police activity?
No doubt, the normative gaze of Empire constitutes the order of things, through objective violence and miseducation of soul, as a preemptive coherence that ensures the sovereign legitimacy of established power while demarcating social limits and ontological boundaries between imperial mainstream-as-civil society and underground of modernity that anthropologically designate who among us merits human consideration, ethical treatment and legal redress. And whose appeals to human consideration, ethical treatment and legal redress are structurally suppressed and can therefore be denied with impunity.
As such, the normative gaze effectively preempts both the enunciation of spontaneous thought in ordinary discourse and the articulation of formal rationality within academia, as an epistemological self-justification and ideological frame of reference towards constituting the topographical coherence of the Real in legitimating concordance to the imperatives of a western imperialist continuum.
Now again, as Black people, the Fact of Blackness within the normative gaze of modernity positions the human ‘being’ of Rikia Young, her nephew and her son at a different socio-ontological register of existence – a lived positionality to western imperialist power that we can phenomenologically describe as belonging to the underground of modernity, or the wretched of the earth, whom the normative gaze posits as subhuman foils against which the imperial mainstream defines its legitimating claims of universality to represent humanity in the absolute.
As displaced ontological rabble and socio-historical outcasts, the underground of modernity are condemned by western imperialist power to suffer through coloniality as a perpetually underdeveloped, underprivileged, undereducated, underrepresented underclass. Here again, DuBoisian thought provides us with some insurgent philosophical insight into the socio-historical dynamics which inform the imperial mainstream and underground of modernity. “Modern imperialism and modern industrialism are one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree. The race problem is the other side of the labor problem; and the black man’s burden is the white man’s burden. . . . remembering always that empire is the heavy hand of capital abroad. . . . This almost naïve setting of the darker races beyond the pale of democracy and of modern humanity . . . involves two things – acquiescence of the darker peoples and agreement between capital and labor in white democracies.”[11]
Now, it is our lived relation of radical intentionality to the “acquiescence of the darker peoples and agreement between capital and labor in white democracies” that ultimately distinguishes insurgent discourse from oppositional thought. Meaning that insurgent philosophy enunciates Revolt “of the darker peoples” and calls into question the structural integrity of any “agreement between capital and labor in white democracies”, “democracies” that are obviously and entirely dependent upon our “acquiescence” for the preservation of such an “agreement”. Indeed, does not such an “agreement” provide the basis for ‘white’ identity itself?[12]
Oppositional thought, on the other hand, being so focused on making sure capital honors its “agreement” with labor towards preserving “white democracies”, in effect disregards the coercive “acquiescence of the darker peoples” upon which such an “agreement” is structurally based as a necessary evil, or perhaps maybe even as just the collateral damage of modernity itself. Thus, in dialogue with Frank B. Wilderson III, “we have to come to grips with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself – rather than its abuses or shortcomings – is a state of emergency.”[13]
Consequently, existential liberation critique disallows us from thinking through modernity without bringing up coloniality, as globally structured relations and socio-ontological intermediations between the imperial mainstream and the underground of modernity. This is possible by conceptually building upon the Black radical discourse of Harold Cruse[14] and Eldridge Cleaver,[15] while engaging the thought of Anibal Quijano[16] towards recognizing Black community as being afflicted by racist dehumanizing structures of colonization, that not only have their equivalence on the international horizon, but their very origin in the global hegemony of western imperialist power. As such, by coloniality we are referring to a deterritorialized positionality of racist dehumanization as violent structural-inert relations of power inscribed within modernity itself that sustain and define hierarchal intermediations of everyday life between imperial mainstream and underground of modernity.
Now, although it is quite popular, and even somewhat accurate, to speak out against racist oppression in terms of a fight against ‘white’ supremacy, from an insurgent philosophical perspective, such a description at times mystifies what it intends to confront. And here we engage with the work of historians like Eric Williams whose research confirms that “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”[17] Thus, western imperialist power is not born from white supremacy: rather, white supremacy is a consequence of western imperialist power. By interrogating the Real, existential liberation theory sustains discursive openings towards enunciating Revolt against western imperialist power, and thus undermines the very basis of ‘white’ supremacy itself.
So as far as its heuristic method is concerned, existential liberation critique draws its discursive vitality, hermeneutic edge and conceptual vocabulary from engagements with the existential Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the decolonial phenomenology of Frantz Fanon as discursive imperatives of epistemic potentialities that justify a return to mine from and build upon insurgent features of Douglass’ thought towards disclosing an anti-slavery dialectic wedded to long term emancipatory trajectories of lived Black experience in Revolt against a western imperialist continuum.
Before we continue on though, let us not mince any words here, by western imperialist continuum, we mean the socio-historical continuity of heavily administered power structures of racist dehumanization and coloniality in all their varied manifestations and consistent reconfigurations, spanning from the invasive so-called discovery of America in 1492 on through the present day in our contemporary world of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization.
This existential liberationist approach to Douglass, Sartre and Fanon pivots around the philosophical work of Lewis R. Gordon as a precursive catalyst that sets the discursive tone of existential liberation critique – “Although it is correct that Sartre can be better understood in terms of Fanon, it will be instructive to see to what extent Fanon makes sense in terms of Sartre.”[18]
Indeed, radically thinking through this Gordonian orientation of existential philosophy allows for a discursive back and forth, an ongoing dialogue between Sartre and Fanon, through which we may return to emancipatory aspects of Douglassian thought as a radical beginning that introduces epistemic potentialities towards disclosing the dialectic movement of Revolt against human slavery as the very basis of insurgent philosophical endeavor itself. So, although beginning to engage Fanon necessitates beginning again to engage Sartre, this process must be understood as necessary theoretical groundwork preparing us for an even more radical beginning, as a return to engage Douglass from which then to continue a fundamental questioning of the human condition from an existential liberationist orientation.
No doubt, for when what confronts us is the very question of epistemological bearings and philosophical approaches of socio-historical movements towards human liberation from our interrogations of human ‘being’, the stakes are understandably high. In dialogue with Sylvia Wynter, “one cannot ‘unsettle’ the ‘coloniality of power’ without a redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of the human, Man, and its over-representation (outside the terms of the ‘natural organism’ answer that we give to the question of the who and the what we are)”.[19] We must therefore proceed critically and with serious caution with regards to any philosophical discourse that anthropologically implicates itself through an apologetics of racist dehumanization that aid towards continued epistemological reconfigurations of a western imperialist continuum.
Take David Hume for example, whose profound skeptical empiricism never impedes his racist disregard of human ‘being’.[20] Or Immanuel Kant, whose racist disregard of human ‘being’ is never overcome by the speculative genius of his transcendental idealism.[21] And yes Friedrich Nietzsche, who brilliantly casts suspicion upon the authoritative claims of both religion and science as absolute, yet nowhere in his entire corpus does he question the absolute claims of a western imperialist continuum, even going so far as to philosophically validate the aristocratic coherence and morality of the slavemaster.[22] Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean we should refuse to even engage the full scope of their theoretical contributions – far from it. However, are there reasons other than lazy scholarship or complicit interlocution, that justify ignoring the fact that when we look at the philosophical implications of such racist dehumanization, it discloses a spiritual poverty of thought that coercively limits the epistemic framework and working metaphysics of their discursive trajectory?
With this question in mind, might theoretical insights disclosed by interrogating discourse committed to the Revolt of human ‘being against chattel slavery, yield more insurgent relevance and epistemic integrity befitting socio-historical potentialities of human liberation against Empire? This is why any contemporary and authentic dialogue about human ‘being’ and human liberation, must at some point return to the more radical emancipatory aspects of Douglassian thought.
Indeed, the anti-slavery dialectic of Douglass frees the ontological question of human ‘being’ from epistemic chains of passive ‘objecthood’ and materialist determinism through existential Revolt of human ‘being’ against slavery that introduces insurgent philosophical imperatives towards a “radical revolution in all modes of thought that flourished under the blighting slave system . . . Liberty of a part is never to be secured by the enslavement or oppression of any.”[23] Behold, the exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity that compels the emancipatory trajectory of Black liberation towards an unprecedented universality.
No doubt, precisely because “the question forced upon us at every moment of our generation has not been . . . how shall we adorn, beautify, exalt and ennoble life, but how shall we retain life itself. The struggle with us was not to do, but to be.”[24] What Douglass discloses here, is that the struggle to do allows for an unreflective background sense of identity, within a fixed order of things upon which the active freedom such doing is based, to veil the constitutive freedom of our own capacity to encounter human ‘being’ as ‘being’ for whom whose rhythm as ‘being’ is ‘being’ perpetually in question.
However, due to an immediacy of lived experience arising as resistance against the geohistorical weight of structural-inert violence that works to coerce human subjectivity into ceding the radical ontological freedom that characterizes human ‘being’, the struggle to be is indicative of not having the luxury of a lived positionality to established power that allows for the possibility of ignoring or forgetting human ‘being’ as ‘being’ for whom whose rhythm as ‘being’ is ‘being’ perpetually in question. For such spiritual ignorance or forgetfulness of human ‘being’, in effect, works in concert with a systematic biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ towards endorsing identity as ‘objecthood’ at peace with the Real as a vast harmonious aggregate of materialist causality.
As such, the very severance of the struggle to do from the struggle to be in the form of racist dehumanization imposed upon human ‘being’ by the normative gaze of established power, introduces the conditions of possibility by which resistance to a western imperialist continuum arises as a lived rhythm of praxis that bears witness through lived Black experience to a dynamic unity between the struggle to do and the struggle to be by constituting human subjectivity upon the basis of a kinetic distance of interiority that Revolts against any authoritative sense of materialist substantiality or ontological stability that introduces a structural-inert forgetfulness of human ‘being’.
Divorcing the struggle to do from its constitutive relation to the struggle to be, would have us forget that the observer is implicated in the act of observing, and deny that the knower is implicated in the act of knowing. As such, the struggle to be, as the very condition that makes the struggle to do possible, reveals human ‘being’ implicated in the act of slave Revolt as the genesis of human subjectivity.
Lived Black experience thus makes tremendous allowances for a radical questioning of the human condition, precisely because the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum structurally coerces Black subjectivity outside of the ontological register of contemporary human consideration. As such, there is no emancipatory basis for epistemic fealty to traditional discourses of humanism that reify positivist conceptions of Man within an imperialist anthropology of biological determinism as ‘race’ towards fundamentally obstructing and murdering the possibility of human subjectivity-as-lived universal. “We must let go of our dreams from previous life and abandon our old beliefs and fellowships. Let us not waste time in sterile litanies or nauseating mimicry. Let us leave this Europe that never ceases talk of Man, yet slaughters Man upon each encounter, murder on every street corner, and massacres at every corner of the world.”[25]
And so here we must ask ourselves: how do we approach and interrogate this struggle to be against biopolitical pacification by western imperialist power as it was then constituted through direct human slavery? And ultimately then, based on the scope of our questioning, what might the struggle of human ‘being’ against chattel slavery that still informs questions of Black liberation tell us about human ‘being’ today? In other words, what does the struggle to be against the enslavement of human ‘being’ reveal about the human condition itself?
Indeed, the struggle to be that characterizes Black subjectivity reveals human ‘being’ as situated consciousness that is indistinguishable from a lived experience of radical ontological freedom as kinetic distance of interiority that is characterized by constitutive self-determination that introduces meaning into the world, relentless transcendence that surpasses the situated present, and spiritual upheaval that uproots the constituted past. For according to Douglass, “to be shut up entirely to the past and present, is to the soul, whose life and happiness is unceasing progress, what the prison is to the body – a blight and a mildew, a hell of horrors.”[26]
The struggle to be, as disclosed through the singularity of lived Black experience, removes the veil of human ‘being’ as “a stable substance which rests in-itself, but rather a perpetual disequilibrium”[27] as lived rhythm of praxis against the Real of socio-historical circumstance that conspires towards the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’. This lived rhythm of praxis that constitutes human subjectivity out of the radical ontological freedom of human ‘being’ is always already engaged in the social horizon as movement towards the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another. It does not depend upon the solipsistic certainty of isolated individual contemplation, but rather originates in the socio-ontological resistance of situated consciousness redeeming the irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real against the crushing immediacy of historical gravity as response of human ‘being’ to the call of adversity.
Without question, the socio-ontological disaster of chattel slavery upon human ‘being’, as a systematic attempt to eradicate our “metaphysics, or, less pretentiously,” our “customs and the sovereignty to which they correspond . . . because they were in conflict with a civilization that” we “did not know and that imposed this tension upon” us,[28] introduces the very conditions of possibility for a radical beginning as human subjectivity arising from emancipatory praxis as Revolt against the enslavement of human ‘being’ in the world. For slave Revolt not only destabilizes the materialist reduction of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’ as the absolute ground of epistemic certainty, but dispenses with the will to substance that upholds the positivist humanism of an empirical self-as-rational animality.
Human ‘being’ both anchors the world and is anchored in the world, as such, the Real is crucial to our understanding of human ‘being’, especially insofar as affirmation of human ‘being’ coincides with renunciation of ‘objecthood’ as resistance to the Real. The world is the condition of possibility that inaugurates the Real against which human ‘being’ exists as the irreducibility of agency and its irreconcilability with the Real. As such, consciousness is always already situated against the Real, a lived dynamic tension that affirms the existence of human subjectivity as renunciation of reducing human ‘being’ to a stable substance of materialist determinism as “an object in the midst of other objects”.[29]
Consequently, we should never forget that slave Revolt is necessarily socio-ontological. It is a form of emancipatory praxis that at once liberates ontological potentialities of human ‘being’ as lived tension of dynamic unity that discloses the irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real through socio-historical struggle as the very basis of a lived rhythm of praxis. This struggle introduces new conditions of possibility for the development of human subjectivity: “Thus my freedom is perpetually in question in my being; it is not a quality added or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the dynamic of my being; and as in my being, my being is in question, I must necessarily have a certain comprehension of freedom.”[30] As such, lived Black experience speaks to a more profound horizon of radical universality towards constituting human ‘being’ and human community as revealed in Revolt against human slavery and inherently manifest through the Blues metaphysic.
Now, what we mean by the Blues metaphysic is that non-stop ontological rhythm arising from continuous social movement of historical disequilibrium, going beyond that which is evident towards the Divine, as an ever more fundamental and ever more unfolding genesis of struggle against the Real. The Blues metaphysic constitutes a vast reservoir of emancipatory creativity, imagination, thought, aesthetics and discourse, that begins with the call and response of lived Black experience to the disaster of history, as a constant improvisational search for provisional foundations of upheaval from which to approach essential questions of reality, freedom, universality, justice and the human condition without recourse to prior instantiations of plentitude, confirmation of social equilibrium, guarantee of historical stability, or necessity of imperial coherence.
That’s why, in dialogue with brother West,[31] we begin from the disaster of history, the disaster of chattel slavery, the disaster of colonization, the disaster of modernity itself as imposed by western imperialist power, thus initiating interrogations of the Real that ultimately disclose the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as an exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity within the normative gaze of modernity. This means that the disaster as constituted by a western imperialist continuum that structurally disregards Black humanity, renders the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ as harbinger of a universality of the human condition itself that cannot even be postulated by the normative gaze of modernity. Indeed, Fanon reveals that “The disaster of the man of color is to have been enslaved. The disaster of white inhumanity is to have somewhere committed the murder of Man. And still today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally.”[32]
Due to the disaster, Fanon claims that no ontology is possible within a situation of coloniality. Or as he puts it, “every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. . . . Ontology, once we finally admit that it sets existence aside, does not allow us to understand the being of Black subjectivity.”[33] So what happens when we do not set questions of existence or liberation aside? What happens when questions concerning fundamental structures of being and the nature of reality itself are mediated by a socio-ontological orientation that situates consciousness against the Real of nature, culture and history as the very condition of its possibility?
Well, let’s set it off like this – there is no ontology, with its metaphysical focus on ‘what there really is’, that is not implicated by its relation to the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum. It should then come as no surprise to us then, that “this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question” insofar as they remain within the epistemic confines of the normative gaze of modernity as the very basis of posing “the question”.[34]
However, this leads us back to that exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity “in the Weltanschauung of a colonized people”, as “an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Perhaps this is arguably the case with every individual, however, such an argument merely conceals a fundamental problem”.[35] Therefore, although this exceptional antagonism introduced by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ reveals “a fundamental problem” that is actually shared with “every individual” under Empire, due to the coercive structure and violent consistency of the normative gaze, it is lived Black experience that brings this “fundamental problem” to the forefront in all its radical universality. Here Sartre discloses an intimately close discursive affinity with the Blues metaphysic, in that “Consequently the resistance that freedom reveals in the existent, far from being a danger to freedom, results only in enabling it to arise as freedom. There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside this engagement, the notions of freedom, of determinism, of necessity lose all meaning.”[36]
How can we therefore begin to approach this fundamental problem now that according to Fanon the ontological perspective is found wanting? Well, this speaks to the necessity of a socio-ontological orientation that consistently binds questions of ontological consequence to socio-historical relevance. Indeed, whereas Man-as-western bourgeois subjectivity[37] constitutes itself in harmonious positionality to the normative gaze of modernity and experiences anguish in the face of a radical ontological freedom towards potentialities of authenticity that suggest resolution within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, dread accompanies the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ that introduces disequilibrium within the normative gaze of modernity towards potentialities of defiance that undermine the sovereign legitimacy of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society itself.
Thus, Black subjectivity constitutes itself as insurgent in positionality to the normative gaze of modernity and experiences dread in the face of a radical ontological freedom towards the possibility of defiance that invites socio-historical persecution by western imperialist power which sustains the imperial mainstream-as-civil society at the expense of suffocating human ‘being’. Indeed, the exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity that informs lived Black experience threatens a western imperialist continuum with an ever more radical universality of the human condition than the normative gaze can structurally sustain. Or as Wilderson discloses in dialogue with Fanon, “Blackness is a positionality of ‘absolute dereliction’, abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions.”[38]
And so, in the face of the disaster, as organized racist dehumanization that structures the Real of our contemporary world, we return to Douglass who enunciates the anti-slavery dialectic of Revolt, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man.”[39] Douglass’ anti-slavery dialectic is set in motion through the irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real of overwhelming socio-historical oppression that severely mediates lived Black experience, though never determines Black subjectivity.
For as Fanon discloses the dialectic scope of this exceptional antagonistic reciprocity of Black liberation as ongoing “battles” and being “battled” while further revealing that “we can be sure that nothing is going to be given free. There is war, there are defeats, truces, victories.”[40] The Revolt of human ‘being’ against chattel slavery thus reveals new potentialities of the human condition that introduce ontological momentum to socio-historical liberation as an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity towards transforming imposed ‘objecthood’ and social death[41] into human subjectivity through emancipatory praxis. As such, if slavery is social death, slave Revolt is a rebirth of socio-historical possibility.
Existential liberation critique, as an insurgent philosophical engagement with lived Black experience that interrogates our perception of human ‘being’ in dynamic correlation towards conceptions of human liberation, marshals thought towards sustaining the possibility of overcoming social death by confronting western imperialist power, and thus begins by engaging the anti-slavery dialectic, as implicated response of human ‘being’ to the situated call of history and its violent imposition of ‘objecthood’ through socio-ontological Revolt. Revolt that repudiates materialist determinism as the foundation of emancipatory praxis.
Consequently, Douglass makes it unmistakably clear that “The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things”[42]. Existential liberation critique thus begins with a singular purpose towards disclosing precisely just what “those characteristics . . . which distinguish men from things” are, and proceeds with discursive emphasis towards upraising “those characteristics” of human distinction to emancipatory prominence against the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ into ‘objecthood’.
Therefore, is not the struggle to be that Douglass reveals as “the question forced upon us at every moment”, precisely the socio-ontological foundation of the human condition itself that distinguishes human ‘being’ from ‘objecthood’? ‘Objecthood’, as the reduction of human ‘being’ to “inert matter”[43], exists in complete harmony with the Real, and as such, does not struggle to be, it cannot struggle to be, it just is. Indeed, human ‘being’ is disclosed as the struggle to be by the same means of oppression that seek to “mar and deface” it, precisely because human ‘being’ aint a damn thing, or as Sartre characterizes the human condition with his typical flair for conceptual clarity – “a being which is not what it is and which is what it is not”.[44]
And nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated, than in the existential Revolt of enslaved human ‘being’ against chattel slavery. Thus, socio-historical liberation, and indeed whatever means by which we intend to achieve it, is ontologically rooted in the irreducible agency of human ‘being’ that we experience as radical freedom, and as such is the very condition of possibility for Revolt against established power.
However, the irreducible agency of human ‘being’ we experience is situated by the Real, even as the human condition, by introducing consciousness into existence, is irreconcilable with the very Real that situates us in the world. This irreducibility of human agency and its irreconcilability with the Real is what we experience as radical ontological freedom at the most fundamental rhythm of our existence. For consciousness simultaneously unites renunciation of ‘objecthood’ with affirmation of human ‘being’ as a singular praxis of intentionality.
As such, the very Truth of human ‘being’ is, only in so far as it aint a damn thing. Now, the damn,[45] in that aforementioned conceptualization is no mere gratuitous slang. For to state that human ‘being’ aint a thing does not fully convey the fact that Black subjectivity is not only condemned[46] to be free, but ultimately condemned to a lived positionality in relation to western imperialist power, as the socio-ontological forefront of movement towards human liberation. Black subjectivity is weighted down with the geohistorical responsibility of radical universality that accompanies such an exceptional emancipatory imperative.
It therefore becomes irresponsible to avoid thinking through the original paradox of chattel slavery, a paradox disclosing the precedential metaphysics of intersubjective resonance that exists between one human ‘being’ and another. For in order to be so structurally consistent and systematically effective at enslaving human ‘being’, the slavemaster must indeed, before all else, not only recognize, but thoroughly prioritize the humanity of the people he intends upon brutally enslaving. The more successful the slavemaster, the more comprehensively has the radical ontological freedom of the enslaved been taken into account. “It is the interest and business of slaveholders to study human nature, with a view to practical results, and many of them attain astonishing proficiency in discerning the thoughts and emotions of slaves. They have to deal not with earth, wood, or stone, but with men; and, by every regard they have for their safety and prosperity, they must study to know the material on which they are at work. So much intellect as the slaveholder has around him, requires watching. Their safety depends upon their vigilance. Conscious of the injustice and wrong they are every hour perpetrating, and knowing what they themselves would do if made the victims of such wrongs, they are looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution of justice.”[47] Addressing the racist dehumanization inherent in the imposition of slavery upon human ‘being’, Douglass drives home this point that “the very questions raised against him confirm the truth of what they are raised to disprove.”[48] This is precisely where the anti-slavery dialectic of Douglass intervenes significantly against being chained in discursive affinity to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.
To be clear, whereas Hegel’s thought focuses on an allegorical master-slave dialectic struggle for recognition that births self-consciousness as dependent upon generating social death by elaborating on the moment that slavery is imposed upon another human ‘being’, the anti-slavery dialectic struggle of resistance disclosed in the thought of Douglass restores the primacy of slave Revolt to discursive prominence by enunciating the existential dynamics of human ‘being’ historically overcoming social death through emancipatory praxis as introducing the conditions of possibility for human subjectivity-as-lived universal.
So, although in both Douglass and Hegel we see correlative and corresponding elements of recognition, reciprocity and struggle, it becomes quite obvious that there are different anthropological wagers placed upon the human condition at work here. No, we’re not just talking about two different approaches that can be reconciled as working under the same imperial hubris, towards the same liberal summit of modern humanism. Forget what you heard, what we’re suggesting here is something with much more radical implications.
Now again, according to Hegelian thought, self-consciousness achieves that necessary confirmation of spiritual autonomy as the act of enslavement by imposing the normative gaze through life and death struggle resulting in the biopolitical pacification of another human ‘being’.[49] In stark contrast, Douglassian thought posits that self-consciousness manifests spiritual autonomy as the act of Revolt against enslavement through life and death struggle against the slavemaster, all towards resisting the imposition of the normative gaze that simultaneously constitutes and sustains the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ as ‘objecthood’.[50]
Douglass discloses the incompatibility between emancipatory praxis and seeking recognition from the normative gaze of established power during his attempt to find succor from the savage violence of his overseer Covey. In a moment of sheer desperation to find protection from the unavoidable violence of a confrontation with Covey, Douglass thinks he might be able to appeal directly to the material self-interest of his slavemaster Capt. Auld. And yet ultimately, Douglass discovers that he cannot even rely upon the normative gaze to safeguard his well-being. This is because the normative gaze structurally stabilizes the humanism of the slavemaster by balancing its sovereign legitimacy upon the fixed identity of ‘objecthood’ that locates the lived positionality of Douglass through the biopolitical alterity of ‘race’ within an imperial topographical coherence that defines him as a slave. No doubt, “My master, who I did not venture to hope would protect me as a man, had even now refused to even protect me as his property.”[51]
Now, imagine if the slavemaster had indeed decided to extend his protection to Douglass “as his property”. Such an act by the slavemaster, not only severely limits, but fundamentally threatens to potentially stifle the existential liberationist trajectory of Douglass’ commitment to Revolt. For although temporarily alleviating the immediate and admittedly savage violence Douglass faced at the hands of Covey, whose unparalleled reputation as a slave breaker was the very basis of Covey’s social standing, such reliance upon the benevolent excess of tangible results as wholly dependent upon the slavemaster’s concern for his own material self-interest, simultaneously reproduces the sovereign legitimacy of the slavemaster’s will towards renewing western imperialist power as it was then constituted through chattel slavery.
Indeed, finding shelter from the structural-inert violence of slavery, though often at times strategically necessary, is no substitute for concerted resistance against slavery. For slave Revolt as socio-ontological resistance, transforms the exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity that defines lived Black experience into an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity towards a horizon of emancipatory praxis that calls into question the sovereign legitimacy of western imperialist power itself.
Human subjectivity is thus constituted through a struggle of resistance to the normative gaze, not in a struggle of seeking recognition from the normative gaze. Seeking recognition from the normative gaze may indeed yield identity, though it can never bestow human subjectivity. For as Douglass discloses about resisting Covey the slavebreaker, “I was a changed being after that fight”, so much so, that such resistance initiates “the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me.”[52] This is the crux of the anti-slavery dialectic of Douglass in sharp contrast against the master-slave dialectic of Hegel. In Hegelian thought, there is no imperative to Revolt, for the slave is able to realize the truth of spiritual autonomy as self-consciousness through working and toiling for the slavemaster.
Now, although in his early critique of Sartrean thought, Fanon effectively and accurately accuses Sartre of being a “born Hegelian”.[53] When we engage with certain facets of Sartrean discourse as he writes without remorse that “never were we more free than under the German occupation”[54], might there not be an existential liberationist affinity here that speaks more to Douglass than Hegel? “Man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not at all.”[55]
Indeed, the radical ontological freedom espoused by Sartre as the capacity of human ‘being’ discovering the dynamic rhythm of human subjectivity through resisting organized torture[56] enacted by policing campaigns of biopolitical pacification during both the Nazi Occupation of France and the French colonization of Algeria, finds itself enunciated as Revolt against direct human slavery disclosed in the emancipatory thought of Douglass more than a century earlier in the fight against the slavebreaker Covey. “He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, or hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. . . . After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form.”[57] Why then should it come as a surprise that Sartrean existential discourse discloses potentialities of radical ontological freedom as a “fact” of “resisting” even under the “form” of the Nazi occupation of France or the “form” of the French colonization of Algeria? Returning to Douglass through Sartre and Fanon reaffirms the anti-slavery dialectic at the heart of existential liberation critique.
Slavery itself is not only the condition of possibility for the historical triumph of modernity as imposed by western imperialist power, but also a potent source and exemplification of coloniality in the Raw. And although we should by no means equivocate between fascism and its historical precedents of direct human slavery, here let us at least be honest enough to admit that fascism is but coloniality visited upon the imperial mainstream-as-civil society. Indeed, is it not Fanon, building upon the thought of DuBois and Aime Cesaire, who reminds us that “Nazi Germany transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony”[58]?
As an unremitting dynamic tension between possibility and necessity implicated by temporality, human ‘being’ discloses lived experience as radical ontological freedom situated by the Real. Human ‘being’, though veiled by culture in the face of mortality, is constantly mediated by the call of adversity, as the motive force of history becomes manifest through the response of human ‘being’ to such adversity. Adversity thus awakens human ‘being’ to the irreducibility of our agency and its irreconcilability with the Real.
Douglass reveals the existential dynamic that distinguishes human subjectivity from “all other animals” as “resistance, active and constant resistance, to the forces of physical nature.”[59] As such, human subjectivity arises from human ‘being’ through struggle and resistance against the Real, manifest as a lived rhythm of praxis that confronts nature, culture, history and ultimately mortality itself as correlative movement towards the world and intersubjective resonance towards one another. Or as Fanon discloses without reserve, “man is motion toward the world and toward his like.”[60]
As a consequence, we now find ourselves returning again to Douglass and the struggle to be that informs lived Black experience within the context of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum. We have already shown how this struggle to be is not the master-slave dialectic in the sense of an ahistorical allegory of struggle to become the Master by enslaving another human ‘being’ that speaks to an Idealist development of self-consciousness as in Hegel.
Rather, this struggle to be is an anti-slavery dialectic indicative of the historical struggle of human ‘being’ resisting the violent structural imposition of enslavement by western imperialist power, as socio-ontological resistance that reveals the irreducibility of human agency which characterizes the human condition and ultimately confronts the constitutive structures of social death which define slavery itself. Thus, the anti-slavery dialectic discloses existential dynamics towards constituting human subjectivity through Revolt against not only “the idea of our being property”, but against “the whole machinery of society” that “planned and operated to making us . . . spiritless”.[61] Douglass elsewhere describes this spiritlessness as resulting from the structural-inert violence of enslavement intent upon reducing human ‘being’ to “inert matter”.[62]
Now, what are the anthropological implications of this spiritlessness that is structured against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ by, as Douglass puts it, “the whole machinery of society”? Indeed, does not lived Black experience explicitly disclose human ‘being’ as a recurring self-reflexive question, as ‘being’ in constitutive reference towards constant potentialities of decision and commitment to just what exactly human ‘being’ means?
As such, although “human reality may be defined as a being such that in its being its freedom is at stake because human reality perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom”,[63] the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ intervenes against any understanding of “human reality” that claims to divorce itself from the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum without committing itself towards emancipatory praxis. Indeed, with regards to human ‘being’, the fact that “in its being its freedom is at stake”, is itself violently compounded by socio-historical situation and lived positionality to established structures of power.
Consequently, for Douglass, in engaging this question, the lived wager of singularity is significantly severe enough in its assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ that its radical universality even overwhelms the capacity of Soren Kierkegaard’s existential grasp. So much so, that although Kierkegaardian thought clearly enunciates that “the human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself.”[64] And yet, Kierkegaard’s existential orientation evidently lacks even the theological resources necessary to overcome the racist dehumanization inherent in modernity by still assuredly suggesting that “a colored man . . . cannot be supposed to represent esprit”?[65] How is it, one might ask, that racist dehumanization provides such an immense discursive gravity around which even the thought of Kierkegaard and Hegel find a rare moment of epistemic reconciliation in their shared fealty to the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum?
This speaks to the fact that the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ is an exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity that cannot be assimilated by the normative gaze of modernity as imposed by a western imperialist continuum. Why? Precisely because the contours and standards of modern humanism are socio-historically constituted and ontologically structured upon the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ into ‘objecthood’ exemplified in chattel slavery. Black liberation thus introduces ruptures against a western imperialist continuum by opening potentialities towards the possibility of constituting human subjectivity as the basis of human community beyond the confines of the normative gaze of Empire.
Existential liberation theory thus begins with Douglass, and not Kierkegaard, because Black subjectivity does not wrestle with the same anguish of Man-as-western bourgeois subjectivity in search of a life fulfilling mode of authenticity in either aesthetic or ethical spheres of existence within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.[66] For lived Black experience, each sphere of existence coincides with a struggle of resistance that confronts the human condition with dread, that in reaching for such authenticity signals defiance against the imperial mainstream consensus that informs civil society by calling into question the very premise of the normative gaze of modernity. And therefore welcomes naught but the impending prospect of structural-inert violence and biopolitical persecution against the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’.
Indeed, the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ constitutes an exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity against a western imperialist continuum “for the very reason” that according to Hegelian thought, “in reference to it, we must give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the category of Universality.”[67] Now of course, we can see that this reveals the absolute spirit and depth of Hegel’s racist dehumanization. However, in this instance, let us not be theoretically distracted by the obviousness of Hegel’s racism. Mainly, so as to not perhaps miss something much more profound that is disclosed through actually engaging Hegel’s significant discursive contributions of speculative racist Idealism to the normative gaze. For there can be no doubt, that even Hegel’s thought, which is so intimately, epistemologically and spiritually wedded to “the category of Universality”, is discursively overthrown by the radical universality made manifest by the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’.
Alexandre Kojeve’s interventions in Hegelian thought almost anticipate as much, even suggesting that “the Master can never detach himself from the World in which he lives, and if this World perishes, he perishes with it. Only the Slave can transcend the given World (which is subjugated by the Master) and not perish. Only the Slave can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free.”[68] And yet, Kojeve unfortunately remains true to Hegel in that “the Slave achieves this only through forced and terrified work carried out in the Master’s service” that “creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition”.[69] However, Douglass discloses that this “liberating Fight for recognition” from the normative gaze ultimately suffocates the possibility of slave Revolt as “the liberating Fight” of socio-ontological resistance to the normative gaze of western imperialist power. “Therefore, it is indeed the originally dependent, serving, and slavish Consciousness that in the end realizes and reveals the ideal of autonomous Self-Consciousness and is thus its ‘truth’.”[70]
Clearly, historical imperatives of Black liberation introduce ruptures against socio-ontological boundaries of universality steeped in Empire. As such, Black liberation discloses an exceptional antagonism of ascendant humanity that confronts the normative gaze with a lived universality of human subjectivity towards resisting assimilation into a western imperialist continuum that continually posits itself as the sole basis of such universality.
So what happens, when the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ – which is distinct from certain claims of Black identity – does not seek to coalesce with or find its proper place within the prevailing liberal standards of modern humanism, but rather introduces slave Revolt as heralding epistemic ruptures of radical possibility that initiate disequilibrium within the normative gaze of modernity towards new horizons of human ‘being’ through emancipatory praxis against western imperialist power?
As a consequence, what does it mean when sparks generated by the neo-colonial police of murder of George Floyd stimulate protest-as-resistance and spontaneous rebellion as insurrection-in-itself that disrupts the socio-ontological equilibrium of a world encompassing archipelago of imperialist metropoles, and thus undermines the sovereign legitimacy of Empire with an unprecedented force and geohistorical scope during the worst stretch of a crippling global pandemic?
Indeed, when activists, protesters and freedom fighters clash with neo-colonial police in the streets, it is all about enunciating Revolt from the emancipatory basis of that struggle to be as Douglass made quite clear. But it’s also so much more than that. Lived Black experience in our contemporary world is the socio-historical frontier, the ontological horizon upon which the scope of a truly radical universality of the human condition itself is being decided.
So now, let us interrogate the thought of Karl Marx – a contemporary of Douglass – who discloses the geohistorical consequences of this biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’. Marx situates the structural impact of chattel slavery through its socio-economic correlation to modernity during his infamous polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.”[71]
Indeed, so what happens when we come to grips with the fact that the entire socio-ontological impetus of modernity itself, which is historically subsidized by chattel slavery, rests upon the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’ into ‘objecthood’? What happens when the violent systematic reduction of human ‘being’ to “inert-matter”[72] that inscribes modernity itself is confronted with the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’?
No doubt, this violent reduction of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’ reveals the extent to which the irreducible agency of the human condition, and its irreconcilability with the Real, is structurally coerced and rationally regulated to cede human subjectivity through the behavioral embrace of an explicit biological determinism that socially coalesces into materialist significations of ‘race’. Consequently, ‘race’, as an epistemic codification of biopolitical alterity, substantiates dehumanizing violence as an ahistorical harmony that positions western imperialist power as ultimate authority and arbiter of the Real.
As such, what is human ‘being’? And just what is human subjectivity? Equally as important however, what does it mean to be engaged in the questioning of the meaning of human ‘being’ today? For it is not the isolated act of contemplation, but rather ever present socio-historical threats and imperialist structures of biopolitical pacification, that radically and repeatedly confront lived Black experience with fundamental questions regarding the meaning of human 'being' and human subjectivity.
Existential liberation critique is thus charged with this untimely task of radically questioning the meaning of the human condition and, as such, introduces ruptures against the normative gaze of modernity as emancipatory imperatives that compel us towards a continuous discursive return to the anti-slavery dialectic of Douglass, as the starting salvo from which to begin again asking the question of the meaning of human liberation in our contemporary world.
(this is a reworked and expanded version of a keynote lecture entitled "Black Existence, Black Liberation" that I delivered in dialogue with LaRose T. Parris on October 30th 2021 from Lehman College in New York City for the 26th Meeting of the North American Sartre Society Online Conference.)
[1] Frederick Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.1, (New York: International Publishers, 1846, 1950) p.157.
[2] Cornel West, “The Genealogy of Modern Racism”, Prophesy Deliverance!, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) p.53.
[3] W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1903, 1994) p.5.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Wright continues on, “This island, within whose confines we live, is anchored in the feelings of millions of people, and is situated in the midst of the sea of white faces we meet each day; and, by and large, as three hundred years of time has borne our nation into the twentieth century, its rocky boundaries have remained unyielding to the waves of our hope that dash against it. The steep cliffs of this island are manifest, on the whole, in the conduct of whites toward us hour by hour, a conduct which tells us that we possess no rights commanding respect, that we have no claim to pursue happiness in our own fashion, that our progress toward civilization constitutes an insult, that our behavior must be kept firmly within an orbit branded as inferior, that we must be compelled to labor at the behest of others, that as a group we are owned by the whites, and that manliness on our part warrants instant reprisal.” Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices included in Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright & Michael Fabre, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1941, 1997) pp.160-1.
[6] “He Was Petrified”, Anna Orso, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec 3rd, 2020. https://www.inquirer.com/news/a/walter-wallace-protests-philadelphia-police-brutality-suv-20201203.html
[7] Referring to the title of Chapter Five in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967) pp.109-140. The title of this chapter in the original French is – “L'expérience vécue du Noir” – which is more accurately translated as – ‘Lived Black Experience’ – rather than ‘The Fact of Blackness’. However, conceptually, ‘The Fact of Blackness’ more accurately communicates the ‘objecthood’ that is imposed upon ‘Lived Black Experience’ by the normative gaze, whereas ‘Lived Black Experience’ distinctly emphasizes potentialities of Black subjectivity in resistance to the normative gaze.
[8] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.109.
[9] “Philadelphia Cops Attack and Beat Woman, Steal Her Two Year Old, And Post Photo of Themselves ‘Protecting’ the Child”, Elliot Hannon, Slate.com, Oct 30th, 2020. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/police-union-posts-propaganda-photo-white-officer-comforting-black-child-during-philadelphia-wallace-protests.html
[10] Ibid.
[11] DuBois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”, The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, (New York: Touchstone, 1925, 1997) pp.386,402-403. Emphasis mine.
[12] DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, (New York: Free Press, 1935, 1998). Joel Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004).
[13] Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s Silent Scandal”, Social Justice, Vol.30, No.2, 2003, included in Warfare in the American Homeland, edited by Joy James, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) pp.23-34.
[14] Harold Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American”, Rebellion or Revolution?, (New York: Apollo Editions, 1962, 1968) pp.74-96.
[15] Eldridge Cleaver, “Domestic Law and International Order”, Soul on Ice, (New York: Delta, 1968) pp.155-165.
[16] Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America”, Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3, included in Coloniality At Large, edited by Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) pp.181-224.
[17] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) p.7. Robin Blackburn’s research that builds upon the radical implications of Williams’ work in this vein has proven invaluable. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, (London: Verso, 1988) and The Making of New World Slavery, (London: Verso, 1997). However, it is important to note that we vehemently disagree with, and take exception to, Williams’ emphasis on chattel slavery as ultimately dying out from a slow natural death of unprofitability.
[18] Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, (New York: Routledge, 1995) p.14.
[19] Sylvia Wynter, “Towards Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”, CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2003.
[20] “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up among us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” David Hume, footnote from “Of National Characters” included in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1748, 1963) p.213.
[21] “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous. . . . There might be something here worth considering, except for the fact that this scoundrel was completely black from head to foot, a distinct proof that what he said was stupid.” Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1764, 2011) pp.58-61.
[22] “Every elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society – and it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences of worth between man and man, and needs slavery in some sense or other.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (New York: Penguin Books, 1886, 1990) p.192.
[23] Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol.3 p.292.
[24] Douglass, Vol.4, p.181.
[25] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963) p.311. modified translation mine own.
[26] Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, (New York: Collier Books, 1892, 1962) p.156.
[27] Jean-Paul Sartre, Search For A Method, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963) p.151. italics mine.
[28] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.110. modified translation mine own.
[29] Frantz Fanon, p.109.
[30] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1943, 1956) p.566. modified translation mine own.
[31] Cornel West, “Prophetic Fragments, Existential Blues”, The Brotherwise Dispatch, Vol.2, Issue#23, March-May 2017.
[32] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.231. modified translation mine own.
[33] Fanon, p.110. modified translation mine own.
[34] Fanon, p.109
[35] Fanon, p.110
[36] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.621.
[37] “it constituted its own inertia. But this inertia itself had violence inscribed in it, as the violence of a hurricane or a cataclysm. Bourgeois humanism as a concept crumbles and disappears; as a practical inertia, it is a passive activity of exclusion and rejection. . . . Bourgeois humanism, as a serial ideology, is solidified ideological violence.” Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London: Verso, 1960, 1991) p.753. “Bourgeois ideology, however, which is the proclamation of an essential equality between men, manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub-men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie.” -Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.163.
[38] Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s Silent Scandal”, Social Justice, Vol.30, No.2, 2003.
[39] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1845, 2001) p.50.
[40] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.221.
[41] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982).
[42] Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery”, My Bondage and My Freedom, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 1850, 1855, 2005) pp.328-9.
[43] Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol.3, p.192.
[44] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.79.
[45] It is worth noting that in the original French, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is Les Damnes De La Terre which can also be translated into English as The Damned of the Earth or The Condemned of the Earth.
[46] Sartre, p.567.
[47] Douglass, Autobiographies, p.307.
[48] Douglass, Vol.3 p.353. Douglass revisits this theme throughout his writings – “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.” Douglass, Vol.2, pp.190-1.
Sartrean thought echoes this account “However, the slave acquires his animality, through the master, only after his humanity has been recognized. . . . This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man. The concealed discomfort of the master is that he always has to consider the human reality of his slaves (whether through his reliance on their skill and their synthetic understanding of situations, or through his precautions against the permanent possibility of revolt or escape), while at the same time refusing them the economic and political status which, in this period, defines human beings.” Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, p.110-111.
[49] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, (New York: Harper Torchbooks,1807, 1967) pp.229-240.
[50] Douglass, My Bondage, My Freedom, pp.178-188.
[51] Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p.178.
[52] Douglass, p.187 emphasis mine.
[53] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.133
[54] Sartre, “The Republic of Silence”, The Aftermath of the War, (London: Seagull Books, 1944, 2008) p.3-7.
[55] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.569.
[56] Sartre, “A Victory”, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, (London: Routledge, 1958, 2006) pp.75-88.
[57] Douglass, Autobiographies, 1845, 1855, 1881, (New York, Library of America, 1994) p.591.
[58] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.81.
[59] Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Vol.4, p.181.
[60] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.41.
[61] Douglass, p.181.
[62] Douglass, Vol.3, p.192.
[63] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.568.
[64] Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, (London: Penguin Books, 1849, 2004) p.43.
[65] Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, (New York: Schoken Books, 1967) p.62.
[66] Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, (New York: Penguin Books, 1841, 2004).
[67] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, (New York: Dover, 1837, 1956) p.93.
[68] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1947, 1969) p.29.
[69] Ibid.
[70] Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p.30.
[71] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1847, 1995) pp.121-2.
[72] Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol.3, p.192.
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