In Discovering Black Existentialism, E. Anthony Muhammad powerfully theorizes from a place of facticity, a place of sociality, and a place of possibility. In doing so, he importantly understands the existential phenomenological vibrancy and import of being-in-the-world. As such, the reader encounters the author in medias res, amid the comings and goings of our shared lifeworld. He doesnât begin with the Cartesian âI thinkâ (where âI amâ feels more like an abstract deduction), but with the world as lived, as a complex network of shared experiences that always already constitute a space of shared intelligibility. In short, Muhammadâs engaging text plunges us within the middle of a lived narrative plot, a philosophically weighty story, that captures what it means to exist between facticity and possibility, that is, what it means to âencounterâ the world in terms of a complex set of meanings that precede who we are, and what it means to create a sense of our own meaning and to fashion who we are within such a world.
A central motif of existentialist philosophy is that we are not fixed, that we are not essences. And even as we inherit sedimented histories and find ourselves within the social matrix of various social discursive and nondiscursive forces, we are not determined by such forces. Rather, we can negotiate such forces, reconfigure them, resignify them, and remake ourselves according to new assumptions, new visions, new meanings, and new profiles within the context of new horizons. This existentialist insight is precisely what the history of Black agency powerfully exemplifies. Thrown within a context of anti-Blackness, Black people have continuously resisted and reimagined themselves outside of the White imaginary. Human freedom, in other words, is always situated, but not ontologically fixed. For example, Muhammad shares with us his own situated agency by describing a memory of a White female counselor (Mrs. Bunge) who questioned his cognitive abilities to succeed after he transitioned to a suburban (read: White) school. Like Frantz Fanon who underwent an anti-Black racist interpellation (âLook, a Negro!â) by a White child on a train, Muhammadâs sense of himself as possibility was challenged, leaving him in a state of self-doubt and, as he says, âcompletely deflated.â Like Fanon,
What is also fascinating within this text is that Muhammad locates his agency within the larger context of rap and hip-hop culture. These cultural phenomena functioned as sites of meaning that helped to shape his dynamic identity, not one reduced to an object through the White gaze. Historically, Black musical expressive modalities (spirituals, jazz, blues, rap) tell stories of triumph, of taking a stand against the hegemonic systems of anti-Blackness. For example, the blues embodies an ontology that speaks to the not-yet. While it speaks to the (nitty-gritty) facticity of lived pain, suffering, and lamentation, it also speaks to and about that place yet to come; it embodies movement and transcendence, where one is not a prisoner of pain, but where one finds a way to resist, to take a stand against the pain. On this score, singing the blues is an instantiation of freedom. Like blues performers, rap artists speak back (âtalking backâ or âback talk,â as bell hooks would say) to systems of oppression. And even when there are no lyrics used in jazz, the improvised sonic dimensions of the music speak to the capacity for freedom, instrumentally soaring above taken-for-granted structures. In this way, jazz is an agential form of aesthetic expression that creates new meanings, new sonic explorations. Combine the impact of this sonic free space with his involvement in the Nation of Islam (NOI), and it is clear that Muhammad was exposed to deep and meaningful Black semiotic spaces that prepared him with the insight to understand and critically deploy what he terms âYancyâs decoding/recoding dynamic.â
The Nation of Islam, for example, provided Muhammad with a counter-religious semiotics that spoke of Blackness in positive terms and critically
Given the rich details of this text and given the limited space within the context of this foreword, I will focus on Muhammadâs engaging conceptualization of Black existentialism, and his understanding of the concept of alterity. Consistent with the conceptual framework of existentialism vis-Ã -vis the structure of human reality, the embodied self that Muhammad narrates is a continuous openness. In fact, I would argue that the concept of the embodied self as protean, as transphenomenal, pervades this text. The very title of the text, Discovering Black Existentialism, speaks to a dynamic process, a continuous deepening of Muhammadâs understanding of the meaning of Black existentialism itself. Indeed, we have not heard the last from Muhammad on the deep layers of the meaning of Black existentialism that are yet to be examined. Like phenomenological profiles, Muhammad provides insights and disclosures that reveal various aspects of his identity and his growth, leaving us with so much more to discover, so many other profiles to explore. Moreover, the book that you have before you critically embodies Muhammadâs insightful qualitative research framework. As we learn from the text, Muhammad is expertly trained in qualitative research that emphasizes a multimodal approach. This expertise is revealed not only in the critically engaging scholarly work that he has published and continues to publish, but also in how he uses a qualitative lens to inform the writing, insights, and conceptual moves within this text, especially given the importance placed upon lived context and the emphasis placed upon meaning-making within qualitative research.
The narrative that he provides contains within it various significant places and junctions (whether as a child, in high school, at various universities, taking various classes and seminars, or working with different professors, and being exposed to different research orientations) where the self-in-context is taken seriously and theorized with deep insight. Muhammadâs narrative style reflects my own efforts to discern and write about important braided relationships between our lived experiences and how we come to think about and do philosophy. Meta-philosophically, we are kindred spirits. Moreover, his work
Like Muhammad, I argue that anti-Black racist violence is sui generis and that the deep mourning experienced by Black bodies is not the result of an intrinsic feature of our collective epidermis; rather, it is because of the world-making binary structure of Whiteness. It is because Black bodies have been physically and semiotically confiscated through the horizon of White violence that Black bodies appear as âproblem bodies,â as âdisposableâ and âabject.â It is through the White gaze, within the context of the White natural attitude, that Black bodies appear as âessences,â as things to be controlled, lynched, policed, imprisoned, and gratuitously murdered. And while Black people have suffered, and continue to suffer, from anti-Black racism, it is through the embodiment of Black Erlebnis (lived experience), as Muhammad argues, that Black people articulate their suffering, make meaning within and through their suffering, and yet resist and continue to exist beyond their suffering. The point here is that, for Muhammad, Blackness is relationally defined vis-Ã -vis the âhumanâ (Whiteness) and its junior partners (other non-Black people). Whether or not Afropessimism is informed by any degree of concrete optimistic futurity in the form of Black solidarity, as Muhammad maintains, I would argue that Muhammadâs work, like my own work, does point to something beyond the present, where the present is not ontologically totalizing. I would argue that Black liberation is tied to efforts of radical deracination vis-Ã -vis structures of anti-Blackness. And to the extent that Black existentialist sensibilities inform both of our views, I would argue that there is the hope that Black affirmative freedom and dignity is on the other side of the terrifying Leviathan of Whiteness, that there is an otherwise to the reality of anti-Blackness. Being-in-the-world is a process that is ontologically contingent. To exist as Black is to face the hardships of anti-Blackness. Yet, to be Black is always already precisely not to be a narrative fait accompli.
In his deep and insightful characterization of Black existentialism, Muhammad points out that it was the concept of alterity that brought him to Black existentialism. He shares a fascinating story. This is my take on it. Alterity isnât simply difference; rather, it is âdifferenceâ as a problem, âdifferenceâ as located within the framework of a normative framework of intelligibility that
Muhammad underwrites this paradigmatic understanding through tracing some of the crucial themes and figures within European thought that are responsible for Whiteness masquerading as âthe metanarrativeâ reality. It is this White hegemonic narrative that produced the âNigger.â It is the âNigger,â as James Baldwin might say, that âhas functioned in the White manâs world as a fixed starâ (Baldwin, 1995, p. 8). The navigational trope here is not lost on Baldwin. The point here is that Whiteness understands itself and can navigate through the social world precisely through the creation of the âNigger,â where the âNiggerâ is to be kept in its ânatural place.â Muhammad states this perfectly where he argues, âThe need to subjugate and control the Black Other produced the enslavement of Blacks, the Black Codes, Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, the War on Drugs, stop and frisk statutes, the prison industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline and other persistent societal manifestations of racialized alterity.â It is against such White racist dehumanizing machinations that Black bodies have resisted and continued to resist. It is within the context of this crucible that Muhammad situates Black existential thought. Muhammad rethinks Black alterity outside of the racial Manichaean binary. Black alterity as
There are deep epistemic implications in Black existentialism. For example, Black embodiment is positionally able to see beyond the willful ignorance of Whiteness, beyond, as Charles Mills would say, a world that Whites have created that they themselves donât understand. I would argue that Muhammadâs text, at its very core, propounds a profound understanding of alterity that is inextricably linked to a form of ethics, a form of address that is terribly needed in our contemporary moment of White populism, nativism, and xenophobia. It is a mode of address that recognizes the nonfungibility of the addressee, a space where Black bodies are not haunted by anti-Blackness, where Black bodies can breathe. Yet, for this to happen, Whiteness would need to undergo a process of kenosis (or emptying). In a Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutic discourse that Muhammad might deploy, Whiteness would surrender its racist fore-judgments of the Black body and become sensitive to Black embodied alterity. In this way, there isnât absolute epistemic closure, but the generative power of tarrying with alterity, of having oneâs own identity undone. The process of being undone has deep political and pedagogical implications. As an activist researcher, as one committed to imagining the world otherwise, of fighting on behalf of the least of these, Muhammad is a committed scholar motivated by a deep Socratic form of praxis. His is a radical ethical vision. E. Anthony Muhammadâs text asks nothing less than that we embody that vision.
References
Baldwin, J. (1995). The fire next time. Modern Library.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, White masks (Markmann C. L., Trans.). Grove Press.
Feagin, J. R., & Vera, H. (1995). White racism. Routledge.