There is no middle ground – black nihilism requires an unflinching, complete, and cold rejection of the whiteness that underpins the 1AC – no shared values with the white settler.

Black nihilism involves conflict between the strength of black wills versus the weakness of white wills in the same way that human existence requires tension between phenomenal willing and the givenness of the cosmos; insisting on black will means going against the entirety of the (white) metaphysical world. There is a Manichean relationship between these two competing forms of humanism. White people in antiblack racist worlds neither need nor desire black participation and recognition for their “truth.” For them, “truth” depends upon avoiding our gaze; they depend on denying our points of view in order to make their world valuable. They do not seek to make themselves known to black people; rather, they work to keep themselves concealed from black people. As Fanon put it, “What [the master] wants from the slave is not recognition but work.”27 It is from this space that black humanity confronts the master, who is bewildered, violently, abrasively, and suddenly removed. Any form of black liberation that does not aim to obliterate the philosophical conditions enabling black invisibility, to kill the white nihilism on which antiblack racists depend, misses the mark. White nihilism and antiblack racism do not admit of any mutual recognition between whites and blacks because of their paradigmatic dependence upon assaults, erasures, and denials of black consciousness. There is no middle ground for respect and dignity under these circumstances; there are no calm conversational working out of issues to be had. As Oladipo Fashina demonstrates, in “Frantz Fanon and the Ethical Justification of Anti-Colonial Violence,” for black people, “respect and dignity do not come from freedom unless freedom also results from conflict and risk of one’s life. Thus, in order to win genuine respect and dignity, the colonized must force the settler’s recognition through physical violence.”28 He went on to explain, for example, we shouldn’t misunderstand what Fanon meant when writing in Black Skin; White Mask as follows:

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been affectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend.29

According to Fashina, we should consider the above quote in terms of another, which Fanon provided in The Wretched of the Earth: “On the logical plane, the Manicheism of the colonists produces a Manicheism of the colonized. The theory of the ‘absolute evil of the colonist’ is in response to the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the native.’”30 Fashina’s explanation of the connection between the two passages supports my theorization that the recognition achieved through strong black nihilistic struggles for black liberation does not come from a shared conception of humanity between antiblack racists and black people.31 Strong black nihilists are neither, nor do they desire to be, “equally” human with white nihilistic conceptions of humanity. Black humanity precedes the impositions of antiblack racism.

We do not share a common conception of humanity with antiblack racists; rather, we insist upon the value of our humanity in spite of white desires to eviscerate it. There are no shared values between antiblack racist whites and black people. Here, there are opposing conceptions of humanity facing each other:

If we look carefully at Fanon’s own major writings on violence, the view that he called the colonized to violence in the name of human dignity is incorrect. Appeal to human dignity presupposes some general conception of humanity. But Fanon claimed that the colonized possessed no evidence of the existence of a common (general) humanity. Even if the colonized is concerned about dignity, for him this is not a concern about human beings in general. It was Fanon’s view that the colonized did not define their own humanity in the same way as the settlers defined theirs. This is because the settlers’ idea of humanity is embedded in values which the colonized reject, “mock at,” “insult” and “vomit up.” The only option to the colonized is to define his own humanity negatively, as the complete denial of all the values that characterized the settlers.32

On this view, it is absurd for black people to seek, or value, recognition from whiteness. No; the aim of Fanon as a strong black nihilist, for example, was to completely, utterly, coldly, and callously, categorically, dismiss the value of whiteness. Sartre acknowledged this in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth:

And if you mumble, sniggering awkwardly: “He’s really got it in for us!” you have missed the true nature of the scandal, for Fanon has got nothing “in for you” at all; his book, which is such a hot issue for others, leaves you out in the cold. It often talks about you, but never to you.33

Sartre continued, “For the fathers, we were the only interlocutors; For the sons, we no longer count: We are the object of their discourse.”34 Fashina demonstrated what can be called Fanon’s strong black nihilistic dialectic of liberation:

Since [The colonized] only defines his own humanity negatively (relative to the settler’s), it follows that the colonized will discover his own humanity only when he rejects the values of the settler. We may even suppose that he will discover his humanity, whatever that is, in his relationship with the settler. But none of these implies that the discovery of his humanity (or sense of self-worth) requires the settler’s recognition of him as human. It may be thought that violence will force a change of conception: it will force the settler to recognize that the colonized is human in the same way as the settler is. But it is more plausible, given the logic of Manicheism, that this recognition is unimportant to the colonized. Fanon seemed to be saying to the colonized: “You are, and you believe that you are human. But the settler denies that you are. Free yourselves from colonial rule and the process of social reconstruction that follows will show you how right you are about yourself.”35