White futurism labels Blackness as “outcasts” reordering progression when tapes stop. Characterization of abandonment maintains a dislocation of white domination that furthers Blackness as the Other producing biocentric models of evolution. Only furthering Blackness to weaponize whiteness in academia destroys notions of existential insecurities.

Fleeing and escaping, second-class servitude in their own “home” countries, refuged white Europeans mimicked their intimate familial class violence to create the New World mercantilist-capitalist system by stratifying themselves into a higher class, enslaving African people and Indigenous people in the process. These white insecurities manifest in laws, literary genres, epistemological constructions, and every facet of American life. One of those is the American romance literary tradition that writer Toni Morrison explicitly names in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Morrison gives us the language to understand America as a white, nationalist, hegemonic world-building project that brands its aesthetic as generative and restorative through the shadow of slavery: “The black population was available for meditations on terror-the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed. In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man.” Ultimately capitalism derived from feudalism to free the peasants and serfs who were the least powerful in Western Europe and established a new white hierarchy that “freed” them from their poor, oppressive class conditions.

The white reordering of history acquaints us with a narrative of historical progression and controls when the tape stops, plays, and rewinds. I use Black feminist literary scholar Michelle M. Wright’s concept of “linear process narrative” to acknowledge how white linear historiographies play on a loop to place Blackness in constrictive, barricaded time-spaces in which whiteness uses Blackness as a historical causality to map out its regressions. As Black folks attempt to break 37 “free,” they must appeal to and reason with fallacies of white freedom and equality through the same forms of language, mediums, and textiles that are used to hold captive Black matter in its anti-Black world-building projects. Through the destabilization of historical time periods, the Black collective will be better equipped to destroy the machinery of white supremacy that naturalizes anti-Black normative assumptions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction.

As whiteness defines freedom in the form of white patriarchy (dependent on the suffering and oppression of stolen African people), Blackness runs the risk of inadvertently re-inscribing signifiers of white humanity in their new constructions of subjectivity and humanity. While the abandonment of freedom as a concept could seem degenerative and pessimistic to the survival of Black people, I beg the question of why Black existence is predicated on running and escaping the whip, ultimately an inescapable, slow necropolitical death? Perhaps, surrendering could possibly be more “freeing” than rendering Black matter legible to the category of the white Human. In our swapping of (white) Humanist conceptions of freedom for the non-Human, we are liberating ourselves from limiting, fixed categorization. In solidarity with Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music Of Other Worlds, I recognize “those of us who are dislocated on the planet are perfectly positioned to break open the stubborn epistemological logics of human domination. These (im)possibilities open up where the human has abandoned us and onto a much bigger universe, when we jump into the unknowable.” Brown’s 38 statement has facilitated my choice to abandon the white Human category. The intimate interiorities are expressed in the Black feminist quilting of both Afrosurrealism and Afropessimism as artistic traditions and philosophical meditations that highlight how Blackness exists beyond the limiting concepts of white gender and the illegibility of white assumptions surrounding Black family, sexuality, and gender.

The category “Human” rests in the condition of gender; gender enters on the stage of European colonialism and sexual conquest. I call upon Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s overrepresentation of the man to define Black freedom’s attempt to perform citizenship in the desire to be “Human,” in others words, a white Man:

Other, the abnormal Other, the timeless ethnographic Other, the most salient of all these was to be that of the mythology of the Black Other of sub- Saharan Africans (and their Diaspora descendants). It is this population group who would come to be made, several centuries on, into an indispensable function of the enacting of our present Darwinian “dysselected by Evolution until proven otherwise” descriptive statement of the human on the biocentric model of a natural organism. With this population group’s systemic stigmatization, social inferiorization, and dynamically produced material deprivation thereby serving both to “verify” the overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human, and to legitimate the subordination of the world and well-being of the latter to those of the former.

There is no “Human” and white regime without the control of Black reproduction and life. The American colonial law “Partus Sequitur Ventrem” was imagined as a curse that assigned subjects with a Black female genitalia to be slave-producing vessels: “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother—Partus Sequitur Ventrem. And that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.” On the basis of white reproductive logic, this law fertilized the 40 grounds on which the colonial mappings of the “New World” were reinforced in every Black striving towards freedom. However, it is important to note that Blackness does not emerge from whiteness, but it is rather whiteness that exists because of the coercion of Black matter. To be white is to be human as to be human is to oppress and dominate. In our captivity, Blackness is expected to show up in specific ways that stabilize the existential insecurities of whiteness.