White reality assumes the nonexistence of blackness deemed meaningless by civil society – black values are trapped in existential invisibility and a double-consciousness always seen through the racist gaze of whiteness.

Black nihilism undertakes the project of value creation through the additive experience of black existential invisibility. Black invisibility is the phenomenon of experiencing one’s being through a reality that coalesces around presumptions of one’s nonexistence. “A feeling of inferiority; no, a feeling of nonexistence.”6 The black nihilistic situation involves valuing against value structures of whiteness which render black values inherently meaningless. Black pessimistic devaluation of white nihilistic values is a first step toward producing strong black values. Black pessimism creates an opportunity for strong black nihilistic value projections, by rejecting not only white nihilism but all metaphysically affirmed ideals in public and political affairs. Seeking to establish political realities based upon values justified solely in terms of each human’s freedom and responsibility for constructing Human reality is the goal. The Promethean endeavor to transvalue white nihilistic humanity from the existential space of black invisibility is an utterly nihilistic task, and, indeed, the weak perish of it.7

Frantz Fanon’s work provides a descriptive account of black consciousness living through invisibility, experienced as a denial of human freedom, against people who refuse responsibility for the values they produce. Fanon’s thought deepened Sartre’s elucidation of human existentialism by analyzing the additive absurdity of the lived situation of blackness within an antiblack racist world. Fanon advocated for what I call a “strong nihilistic” response to antiblack racism. He announced the nihilistic strength of his position when he proclaimed, “I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances. Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said.”8

Fanon announcing that he does not come with “timeless truths” was a direct shot at the philosophies of (European) “Man.” The entire affair of modern European philosophy, from this perspective, is seen to be a smoke screen covering up colonial lusts for domination, rape, and murder, while being concerned with how to best hide these forms of pessimism and nihilism behind weak facades of universalism. When Fanon said, “My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances,” he signaled the earthly contextualization of his critical engagements with whiteness. When he said, “Nevertheless . . . I think it would be good if certain things were said,” he inverted the axiological schemas rendering such perspectives as valueless. By invoking the term “good” he announced himself as a determiner of value outside of modern (white) Human traditions. Fanon announced his strong black nihilism; then he offered a narrative that can be read as foretelling of the pitfalls encountered while maturing into this perspective. I will explicitly address this point in the final chapter. Here, we will cite Fanon in support of my general theorization that strong black nihilism is a healthy means for transvaluing the white nihilism underlying antiblack racism.

Fanon’s thought provides a healthy alternative to the options of black optimism and black pessimism as a response to antiblack racism. He would have been compelled to reject the “ultimate radiances” of West’s response to black invisibility, and perhaps would have challenged the strategic utility of Bell’s pessimism regarding the values of antiblackness. If antiblack racism depends upon unsubstantiated claims of God being on the side of whites, how long can unsubstantiated claims of God being on the side of blacks remain motivating? On the other hand, can treating antiblack racist values as permanent be a useful means for eradicating them, even if that strategy might allow for some relief? Fanon’s thought helps to identify strong black nihilism as an appropriate response to antiblack racism. His analyses insist upon a transvaluation of white nihilistic values through a strong black nihilistic response. He proposed nothing short of “the liberation of the man of color from himself,” for which, he said, “There are two camps: the white and the black.”9

The liberation of Humanity from white nihilistic ideals of antiblack racism is the goal of strong black nihilism. Fanon’s thought supports this mission. He employed a black existential understanding of human freedom in analyzing the lived situation of blackness. According to this approach, the existence of human consciousness is understood to precede its essence. Human essence is fundamentally indeterminable, or nonexistent, precisely because consciousness exists prior to experiencing questions concerning the meaning of itself.10 The essence of human being, so to speak, is to lack a predetermined meaning outside of freedom and nothingness through which it constructs value. Thus, there is nothing we may know a priori about the meaning of human existence aside from the fact of its freedoms in producing value. We simply found ourselves existing with others at some long-ago point; then, we came to question our meaning while constructing reality. Antiblack racism, however, is a direct injunction against the participation of black people in constructing reality. Existence precedes essence in the human world, but essence precedes existence in the antiblack racist world. In the antiblack racist world, Human reality is a construction, and so it is not unlike Paley’s clock. However, the intuition behind Paley’s analogy is that God must be the author of reality; the intuition behind antiblack racism is that whiteness must be the author of reality.11 Through weak nihilistic, bad faith conceptions of themselves, whites desire to be God, or at least godlike in relation to black people. White nihilism and antiblack racism introduce metaphysical ideals partitioning human existential spaces along racially somatic and semiotic lines indicating the presence or absence of full humanity. A complete rejection of antiblack racism, therefore, requires rejecting weak nihilistic conceptions of race and developing strong ones. Yet, nihilists have been regarded as scourges, the wretches of civilization, going as far back as Jacobi’s criticism of Fichte, precisely because they are perfectly willing to be viewed as “wrong,” in light of traditional values. This is why, as Nietzsche warned, the weak tend to perish of it. Strong nihilism requires valuing in the face of traditional values, normatively held and metaphysically affirmed. It means, sometimes, battling people who claim to have God, and the truths of the universe, on their side.

Blackness in an antiblack racist world is a peculiar space of nonexistence, within a universe of whiteness, that situates black subjectivities. The objectivity of the category of blackness, in antiblack racist worlds, contextualizes the subjectivity of each phenomenal black perspective. Blackness is thus, at first, not a choice but a predicament concerning how one will choose to live their life; it is a situation against which, and through which, people live and attempt to make their lives valuable. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wrote about black people in America living through denials of humanity, which he described as a “peculiar sensation”: 12

It is 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. One ever feels his twoness— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.13

What Du Bois described was an inability to function as the source of legitimacy for the value of his own being. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” ultimately implies white denials of black phenomenal existence. Fanon addressed black invisibility on a similar level, where the meaning of one’s existence becomes uncertain because it is not simply being determined through the eyes of others but being demanded by the other to not exist. “Colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question, ‘Who am I in reality?’”14 It is as a form of nonexistence that black humanity functions as an antithetical “No,” according to Fanon, in relation to the positive thesis of white humanity. But rather than become a “man of resentment,” a pessimist who treats antiblack racist values as immutable, or perhaps, a black optimist that requires belief in God’s benevolence to fight, Fanon attempts to live blackness as a “yes,” on the sole grounds that he insists upon himself. This is what I call “strong black nihilism”:

Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.15