Lost in the absurdity of existence, civil society continually attempts to eradicate blackness to give itself meaning. The dominance of Eurocentric thought renders any attempts to break free futile, suffocating black bodies under a thin white veil – a racial contract.

The fact of antiblack racism, today, is less in need of demonstration than it is in need of enumeration and illumination. Antiblack racism remains the hue of mundane reality, at least in the United States, and its tentacles are well documented as having gripped the globe. How do ideals generated by peoples centuries ago continue to color our reality? Black people have always been able to see the contradictions of antiblack racist logics, but, today, are able to socially respond and make known in a variety of publicly discursive ways the contradictory nature of the illusions supporting the phenomenon. I do not find it difficult to ascertain the philosophical and moral illegitimacy of antiblack racism; however, there is difficulty in explaining a preponderance of fallacies from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and their legitimacy in the twenty-first. How does antiblack racism, which has been laid bare, dramatized, and satirized in plain view of the public, continue to dominate contemporary cultural realities? Veils have fallen, it seems, and yet antiblack racism persists; how can that be? Another way of asking this question is, “Why do antiblack racists insist upon the veil of white supremacist values so desperately?

I have come to exist within a world enshrouded by veils of modern European thoughts, philosophies, and perspectives, which smother my humanity in ideals of whiteness. These veils are so cold, so thin; yet I cannot breathe through them. I cannot believe these veils are sought, by some, in their quest for life, and warmth. I imagine that whatever the constructors of these veils were facing, they found it to be absolutely frigid, horrifying, and for them, ought to be avoided at all cost. What is that which antiblack racist ideals of whiteness seeks to cloak itself from? Pessimism and nihilism. Underneath antiblack racist veils of whiteness stands a nihilistic human being, responding to the fundamental existential conditions of Humanity, with weakness. Life beyond antiblack racism involves facing nihilism. “Nihilism” references the process of attempting to construct newer values in the place of fallen ones. I aim to show it is also a constitutive feature of antiblack racism. As a subject of European philosophical reflection, “nihilism” is genealogically akin to the historical emergence of antiblack racism in Western life; both proceed from the cultivation of existential categories pertaining to Enlightenment forms of imperial reasoning and colonization, or the construction of (European) “Man.”2 (European) “Man” has historically imposed himself upon the world by colonially establishing systems of white supremacist social, political, and cultural values, alongside antiblack racist institutions, structuring those realities. The result has been an attempt to make the ideals of (European) “Man” function like the primordial will of the universe, out of which black life might, perhaps, construct alternative realities in order to make this tragic fact of black existence bearable.3

The apparent permanence of antiblack racism challenging each of my attempts at constructions of selfhood is experienced, by me, to be as far reaching, vast, and inextricable from reality, as time and space. My positioning within the space of blackness in a white universe, on this level, is an existential and geographical affair. I write this book from a location physically centered in the middle of my city’s black space, or ghetto; I also read Charles Mills explain that the blackness of my positioning results, in part, from an ontological chasm dividing race in this society, one that is prescribed by moral, political, and epistemic norms, or a “racial contract.”4 In particular, Mills described an epistemological contract undergirding Western society, a tacit agreement among antiblack racists, wherein the sphere of human knowledge production is limited to white bodies and spaces.5 What would (European) “Man” say for himself regarding my encounter with this absurd dimension of his existence, out of which it seems, his chosen way of making life bearable demands that my life be made unbearable, if not completely erased? What are the fundamental features of the valuations of (European) “Man” that requires eradicating me as a source of value production?