Personal Yet Systemic: On Antiblackness as a Social, Historical and Cultural Phenomenon

1. that which engulfs Blackness with inescapable violence 2. a set of relations that mark and position Blackness as the nadir of sub-human or non-human qualities 3. Gratuitous “Slavery and colonialism ushered antiblackness into modernity by using violence as the means to (re)produce Black captivity as unremarkable.” 4. a complex interplay of social, political, institutional, and metaphysical forces 5. the quality of (in)distinguishing Blackness 6. global, not geographically specific 7. Pervasive. 8. constant yet shifting 9. particular and nonspecific 10.

As a concept it seeks to connect and valorize seemingly disparate events as the products of a larger singular structure. As an analytic it refuses the progress narratives of liberalism. Instead, antiblackness surveys the constancy of Blackness as a site of dereliction despite assumed social and political advancements.

As a term it refuses the jubilee of formal emancipation, various forms of decolonial revolutions, the acquisition of extended rights for Black people, and the neoliberal placement of Black bodies in positions of power. Furthermore, antiblackness clarifies how across subjective differences marked by age, class, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and so on Blackness is over-exposed to violation. Antiblackness expands beyond understandings of racism, which assume a misalignment between beliefs and/or actions and reality by antagonizing the insistence that there is a truth of Blackness that is uninhibited and defined without violent intrusion.

On June 2, 2020, I receive a text. The text is from a neighbor. During the weeks prior, she collected phone numbers from moms in our subdivision to arrange socially distanced outings to escape the madness of quarantining with children.

This is what she had my number for, but instead she has sent me a death omen about my son. Somehow saying my son will die an unremarkable death does not make the world flinch. Before I can respond there is a knock at my door.

I open the door and there stands another white woman neighbor. I’ve only seen her once in passing, where we exchanged very brief hellos. She is holding a card and some handpicked flowers she’s gathered from her garden on the way over.