The plan demands the “durable fiat” of an ahistorical dream – anti-ethics is your paradigmatic imperative.

The Fiat of Dreams: The potentiality of whiteness—the proleptic call of white anti-racist consciousness— is nothing more than the fiat of an ahistorical dream. A command ushered before thought engages racism, before awareness of the world becomes aware of what is actual. This is forced upon accounts of racism where whiteness is morally obscured from being seen as is. [w]hiteness as is partly determined by what could be, since what is was a past potentiality—a could be. The appeal to the sentimentality, morality, the moral abstraction/distraction of equality—both as a political command and its anthropological requisite—complicate the most obvious consequence of anti-Black racism, namely violence. This moral apriorism urges the Black thinker to conceptualize racism as an activist project rooted in the potential of a world filled with non-racists, a world where the white racist is transformed by Black activity into the white anti-racist. But this project supposes an erroneous view of the white racist which occludes the reality of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As Robert F. Williams argues in Negroes with Guns, “the racist is a man crazed by hysteria at the idea of coming into equal contact with Negroes. And this mass mental illness called racism is very much a part of the ‘American way of Life.’” The white racist is not seen as the delusional individual ostracized from society as a result of their abhorrent social pathologies of racist hate. Rather the white racist is normal—the extended family, the spouse, the sibling, the friend of the white individual—the very same entities upon which the inter/intrasubjectivity nexus of the white self is founded. The white [he] experiences no punishment for his longing for Black servitude and his need to exploit and divest the Black worker here and then of [his] wealth. The white [she] has no uneasiness about her raping of—the destruction of generations of Black selves—mothers, children, and men—and today usurps the historical imagery of “the nigger,” to politically vacate Blackness and demonize niggers as beyond political consideration. She rewrites history, pens morality, and embodies the post-racial civil rights subject. As such, racism, the milieu of the white racist is not the exposed pathological existence of the white race, but rather valorized in white individuality, the individuality that conceptualizes their racism as a normative aspiration of what the world should look like, and even more damning, an aspiration that can be supported and propagated in the world. The white racist recognizes the deliberateness of the structures, relations, and systems in a white supremacist society and seeks like their colonial foreparents to claim them as their own. The Anti-Ethical as Paradigmatic Imperative: Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sidgwick’s claims, "any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings 'ought'—or what is right for them—or to seek to realize by voluntary action.” This rational procedure is however at odds with the empirical reality the ethical deliberation must concern itself with. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people should act justly, assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white person could possibly not be racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist, can be taken to mean that they are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute to historically racist institutions, and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated. This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history or evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, the only ethical deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing to write morality onto immoral entities. In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself , an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, the can ideally imagine an “if condition,” whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: “if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors. Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action, hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. These ethics, the ethics that result from this vitiated morality, are not arbiters of oppression at all. They are not a rational calculus that is capable of revealing a categorical imperative, rather they function as the Kantian constraints upon human experience; the synthetic apriori upon which the phenomena of whiteness is the landscape of thinking about Blackness under the Western anthropos. There is an implicit appeal to a hierarchy of being that is both empirical and universal—all man is superior to non-man. Hence, ethics emerges as the product of the overrepresentation of Western man thinking itself—projecting itself—into the future. These ethics, theorized away from the anti-Blackness not within it, only uphold an overdetermined virtue of whiteness. They hold within them no actual delineation between good or bad, only a Puritanical call to reason to turn its attention towards the other-ed created. This attention however relies on the perceptions and caricatures of Black torment that appeal to the whites’ self-assuring imagining of themselves, so that even when confronted with racism and their role as whites thinking about Black people incarcerated within a racist society and dying, these whites can claim that their conceptualization of racism itself, or (inter-sectionally) next to other injustices like poverty, sexism, homophobia, etc. makes them (whites) virtuous. It is the process of, the appeal to, “getting whites to recognize” (racist) oppression that allows the destruction of reality, Black death, to continue unabated, since it is the exact moment that whites are forced to engage racist problems in America, be it the anti-Black violence of American society, which animates the aversion of the justice system, the police state, the white citizenry, or the practice of American democracy itself—where the death of Black people/criminals/deviants/thugs remain normal and justified by whites—that they, the white(s) thinking about racism, get to impose upon Black reality, a racist moral maxim, namely that racism is not death and beyond –the end of--ethical calculus or moral evaluation, but ultimately contingent in America and of measurable consequence so much so that must be weighed next to the other democratic values that preserve this great white society: security, safety, individuality, property, profit, and freedom, the very values that when enacted by whites continue to perpetuate one ultimate end, the death of Blacks. Racism is not unethical simply because it is a moral affront to the allegedly generalizable Western/white/enlightenment notion of humanity extended to Blacks by the liberal synonymy of citizenship. Racism is unethical, immoral, because it re-presents—makes known in the present— and acts to capture the Blacks urging the acknowledgment of racism in the ontological entity of modernity’s greatest oppression—the slave; the non-human. To say racism is unethical is to say that it is outside of ethical deliberation, which is to say what is meant by ethics meant to rationally determine relationships between human beings. Because racism exposes the absurdity of Western ontology’s suggestion that the white/European human stands in moral obligation towards the non-human/Black/racialized other created by the Western notion of MAN, calling for “ethical deliberation” is a call to make the historical event of Black inhumanity introduced by modernity the referent of white rationalizations about Black death, and anti-Blackness. Such deliberation only offers the white mind the opportunity to reassert the social boundaries constraining Black life conceptually. It is the memory of slavery, which motivates the white’s attachment to the contingency of Black life, and ultimately concludes that racism, while unfortunate, is/was necessary for America/the West, the world to exist and humanity/the citizen to reach its historical/imperial apex. Thus, MAN, the onto-anthropological basis of humanity and the cultural values that are simultaneously birthed to project humanity into existence is the origin of the oppressive conceptualizations of the other. Oppression “as is” was born out of and sustained by the exclusive morality of white/Western humanity against the barbarism imposed on the Black/African. As such, the nigger born of racism is behind all oppressions, since “it” is the cultural/epistemological/historical ethic—the moral rock bottom of dehumanization. The oppressed is made nigger through dehumanization; the product of absolute debasement, while morality/virtue the valuations of ethics itself is reified perpetually by the activity of whiteness; its perpetual commanding of morality to conform to and justify their existence as the human. As Karen Gange writes in “On the Obsolesce of Disciplines” (2007), The shift out of our present conception of Man, out of our present “World System”—the one that places people of African descent and the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless, jobless, and criminalized damned as the zero-most factor of Other to Western Man’s Self—has to be first and foremost a cultural shift, not an economic one. Until such a rupture in our conception of being human is brought forth, such “sociological” concerns as that of the vast global and local economic inequalities, immigration, labor policies, struggles about race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and struggles over the environment, global warming, and distribution of world resources, will remain status quo. Anti-ethics; the call to demystify the present concept of man as illusion, as delusion, and as stratagem, is the axiomatic rupture of white existence and the multiple global oppressions like capitalism, militarism, genocide, and globalization, that formed the evaluative nexus which allows whites to claim they are the civilized guardians of the world’s darker races. It is the rejection of white virtue, the white’s axiomatic claim to humanity that allows the Black, the darker world to sow the seeds of consciousness towards liberation from oppression. When white (in)humanity is no longer an obstacle weighed against the means for liberation from racism, the oppressed are free to overthrow the principles that suggest their paths to liberation are immoral and hence not possible. To accept the oppressor as is, the white made manifest in empire, is to transform white western (hu)man from semi-deitous sovereign citizen to contingent, mortal, and un-otherable. Exposing the inhumanity of white humanity is the destruction/refusal of the disciplinary imperative for liberal reformism and dialogue as well as a rejection of the social conventions that dictate speaking as if this white person, the white person and her white people before you are in fact not racist white people, but tolerable—not like the racist white people abstracted from reality, but really spoken of in conversations about racism. The revelatory call, the coercively silenced but intuitive yearning to describe the actual reality set before Black people in an anti-Black society, is to simply say there is no negotiating the boundaries of anti-Blackness or the horizons of white supremacy. Racism, the debasement of melaninated bodies and nigger-souls, is totalizing.