Antiblackness is distinct – a perpetual condition of invisibility violently subjugated to preserve the civility of whiteness. Blackness is cast out from society and forced to its underbelly to be purged.

Most people consider “racism,” in terms of what critical race theorists call, “racial essentialism,” which is an assertion of there being essential traits, essences, or ways of being, necessarily inhering in people, due to their race.3 Racial essentialism is the imagining of what races of people really are. They employ Aristotle’s conception of essence, where certain properties are deemed inherent to the meaning of an object, in this case, the “raced” person.4 From this perspective, “antiblack racism” merely suggests a qualifying of the object of reference. However, according to black existentialist approaches, the prefix, “antiblack,” adds more than a specification for a type of racism. “Antiblack racism” is an existentially descriptive term that designates the phenomenon of racism itself.5 In particular, “antiblack” connotes denials of one’s subjective capacities. “Black,” here, assumes an ontologically descriptive meaning, denoting situations of existential invisibility, where one is seen as a nonexistence in relation to normative conceptions of humanity, that is, “white.” Thus, terms such as “black existential life” resists charges of essentialism, because whether or not one exists as “black” is not, in an existential sense, a matter of personal identity formation. There are subjective dimensions of personal identity formation, or what one might call, phenomenal activity, involved in living blackness; there are also objective existential dimensions of blackness in spite of which one lives. Frantz Fanon illuminated the philosophical uniqueness of phenomenal perspectives developed from spaces of black existential invisibility, where critical dimensions of subjective capacities develop in relation to objective, lived, experiences of blackness.6

There is textual evidence of antiblack racism in European philosophy, dating back as far as the medieval period, through the “discovery” of the “new world,” and modern European colonization of Africa. There, one finds obsessions with the category of “Man,” understood as Humanity, but grossly reduced to the perspectives of (European) “Man,” understood as (white) Humanity. This reduction entails axiomatic conceptions of white-normative and antiblack racist ideals and is a consequence of (European) “Man’s” innermost existential struggles. I use a capital “H,” in Human being, and a capital “M,” in “Man,” to designate philosophies, descriptions, and thoughts developed and understood to be true of all Humankind. However, I use the parenthetical and quotations, in (European) “Man,” and (white) Humanity, to designate philosophies, descriptions, and thoughts developed and understood to only be true of European descended, racially white people. The results of those attempts are reflective of failures, and weaknesses, evident in the struggles and desires of (European) “Man,” which further resulted in European Enlightenment philosophies producing antiblack racist practices and institutions, all under the banner “civilized (white) Humanity.”

Disregarding the first paragraph of this book as “vulgar,” and perhaps being tempted not to read further, may indicate an appeal to traditions championed by people who, along with claiming to “know” philosophical ideals stratifying human beings along racial and sexual lines, also claimed to occupy a transcendent position from which to discern the vulgar. This amounts to the claim that certain forms of expression fail to beget any real meaning. The antiblack racist, for example, simply announces that expressions such as the ones above have no valuable meaning, and if they have any meaning at all, it is vulgar, violent, and unnecessary. This is another way of saying, “We should not care about what that person says; that person has nothing to say.” That someone who has just made an expressive utterance has nothing to “say,” depends upon the idea that what that person says is of no relevance; even worse, it implies that person thinks “nothing.”

Vulgar black rejections of antiblack racism suggest both a failure and an achievement. At the symbolic level, “vulgar” expressions of blackness might signal an achievement in resisting one’s presumed invisibility. If black people are signifiers of nonexistence in antiblack racist societies, then black “vulgar” rejections potentially become reasonable responses to an unreasonable situation. It is unreasonable to respond to unreason with reason. An attempt to reason with the unreasonable can lead to a debilitating neurosis. This is a crushing realization for one whose sole means of defending oneself against invisibility is the deployment of reason. Reason, it seems, must become creative.

Black people in antiblack racist societies are not simply a part of society. We are a part of society’s underside: the underbelly bolstering its frontal dimensions. We embody the cultural limits of antiblack racist societies, displaying everything they are, by virtue of what they are not. Black perspectives in the United States, for example, are typically seen as “vulgar.” “Vulgarity,” however, need not necessarily be associated with inarticulateness, ignorance, lack of thought, erudition, and/or perception. Black vulgarity in an antiblack racist society can also take the form of highly articulate, theoretical questions about the relation of black invisibility to the ontological and epistemological dimensions of Western society and humanist thought, in general.