Reject ontological claims- “ought” claims have radical power to reshape the world, their K essentializes black scholarship

(George, Phil@Duquesne, Introduction: Black Philosophy and the Crucible of Lived History,” The Black Scholar, Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 5-10)

Although above I point to the middle passage as the matrix in terms of which black identity is shaped, we must be cognizant of how black identity and black subjectivity can be erroneously tethered to that moment in time and physical space, which then raises the issue of how a specific black historical narrative can function monolithically and thus exclude those black bodies that don't narrativize the middle passage in the same way or even at all. While I will not pursue this issue here, I want to be clear that there is a diverse "terrain of blackness" in terms of the changing landscape and meaning of blackness and that this change impacts differential experiences for those who consider themselves black people. Indeed, such differential experiences have an impact on how we think about the dynamics of black identity and black philosophizing, and the latter's key normative assumptions, modalities, and different morphologies of questions and responses that emerge. My point is to remain critically cognizant of the ways in which I privilege the middle passage and how that privileging might function as a historical gap for black people who nevertheless see themselves as black and yet whose experiences are shaped differently, though not incommensurably vis-à-vis other black people who contend with anti-black racism. Black philosophy and its role are fundamentally linked with existential struggle. The lived experiences of struggle and resistance (etymologically, "to take a stand") speak to the fact that the social ontological structure of the world is not a metaphysical fait accompli. Black philosophy acknowledges its historical conditionality and emergence against the backdrop of white racism, violence, colonialism, dehumanization, enslavement, oppression, and objectification. It recognizes this backdrop as constituted through lived embodiment and configurations of thought and action that were not necessary, but that are predicated upon contingent sites of power and hegemony that are linked to oppressive ideologies and the possession of material power to superimpose such oppressive ideologies. Hence, relevant to black philosophy is its clarion call: ''The world is not as it ought to be!" It is the power of "ought" that points to the openness of human history, agency, and counter-hegemonic praxis. The "ought" implies slippage, excess, lacunae, and the capacity to create. The subtext here is that one can reconfigure the world, reshape its direction, undo its normative repetitions, and create new and ever freeing forms of political formation, relationality, and performance. The role of black philosophy, then, having its point of origin within a matrix of oppression, even as this oppression was/is diasporic, is antagonistic and iconoclastic; indeed, resistant to claims of philosophical universality that are actually forms of discourse that are predicated upon a philosophical anthropology that is, in this case, underwritten by whiteness as the transcendental norm and that valorizes its vision of the world and the meaning of humanity at the exclusion of others. Hence, to engage in black philosophy on conceptual terms set forth here is to affirm one's humanity in the face of those who deem you a sub-person, ersatz, ontologically nugatory.