Theorizing anti-Blackness ontologically is necessary for Black well-being.

I close with a set of qualities I enacted to engage with complex, stirring arguments in an essay like Day’s. While the medium I use to demonstrate my approach is Day’s essay, what I discuss here is about the more everyday experience of being confronted by writing about “the ways the world is made up.” I allow performativity in practice to lead this research project. Traditionally, the purpose for a researcher to establish their ontological grounds is to allow them to have a sense of what they are and are not investigating, to ask how they know what they know, and to articulate the relationships between the components of the research project. Alternatively, I argue that the purpose of situating scholarly work in theoretical foundations can be beyond an abstract, haughty asking, articulating, or even sensing.

I assert that, for some, this project of establishing an ontological position is a highly personal, existential matter. In this essay, these concerns are not attended to with objectivity, distance, abstraction, or even a passionate dedication to the given issue. Jared Sexton argues, for Black folk, having one or not can be a matter of health and psychopolitical necessity. Some of us need a stable conception of how the world works to cling to precisely because of its everyday incoherence and its tortured logic. Knowing the world is first an embodied thing (Diatta 45–46) that comes in the form of terror and illegibility—far before this knowledge is ever theorized on by scholars. Terror and incoherence can serve as “structures of feeling” in order to think critically (Sexton). Finding a worldview to stand on is important to this extent because we must also swiftly survive the structuring irrationality 1 that makes white life coherent (Wilderson). From my non-white, Black, Asian, Senegalese, Japanese, North American, Queer, immi- grant to the United States positionality, tugging at the threads of these kinds of “ontological” or “epistemological” frames matters at the level of existence; not only to the degree of asking or articulating. The process of naming worldviews in this essay is for survival, not primarily in terms of physical persistence, but at the level of consciousness. In this work, it is specifically through an understanding of white supremacist structures (i.e. Anti-Indi- geneity, Anti-Blackness, etc.) that some sense can be made of our complex positionalities.