Some other questions to be considered by black ontology include: In what ways is black being defined by its possibilities for being or non-being? What distinguishes a first-person understanding of black being (by black beings themselves) from second- or third-person understandings? Is the peoplehood of black people erased by referring to them as "black beings" rather than "black people"? To the extent that black people can determine for themselves what it means to be defined by categories of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., from where does this freedom for self-definition come and on what does it depend?
What are the basic constituents (if any) of black being? Does black being have any ontological building blocks or foundational elements? To what extent is it a dependent kind of being (dependent on racial categories, and dependent on the black-white binary)? How is it manifested socially and culturally? To what extent is it characterized by collective agency and collective intentionality?
Do such questions arise from an essentialist notion of the being of black people?
The meaning of being black may be determined by the given historical, social, and cultural situation. Being black in America today means something different from being black in China today. Being black in America in 1863 meant something different from what it meant to be black in America in 1963. Being black in black social spaces means something different from being black in white social spaces.
Black ontology is a racial, social, and cultural ontology. David Miguel Gray (2017) explains that races are social kinds, rather than natural kinds, and that they are in part or in whole products of human actions or human decision-making processes. Investigations of racial categories are therefore social and historical investigations, quite unlike the investigations of the natural sciences.1
Black ontology recognizes that black people have often been objectified by white people, who have seen them as objects to be used, exploited, eradicated, or manipulated. Black ontology may therefore examine the meaning of the "black body" as transmogrified into a subhuman object by white consciousness.
But isn't the personhood of black people erased when they are referred to as "black bodies"? Isn't it dehumanizing to refer to black people as "black bodies," as if they were things or objects (even if that's how they're seen by white supremacists)?
Black ontologies may develop new concepts of black identity. They may form a chorus of voices against injustice and oppression, and they may express, articulate, or proclaim resistant subjectivities.
Black ontology may also investigate the role of black social and cultural signifying practices, such as art, music, dance, fashion, religion, and language, in constituting black being.
Perhaps what is needed at the present moment is neither an evasion (or rejection) of ontology nor an ontology of flight or escape, but rather an ontology of struggle and resistance.
Ontology may involve not only a study of what is (or what there is) or what it is to be (the meaning of being), but also a study of the categorical structure of reality (the fundamental categories of being). Metaontology may involve a study of the methods of ontology, and of what we are doing when we ask such ontological questions as "What are we asking when we ask "What is or is not?"").
Just as there may be logics as well as logic, epistemologies as well as epistemology, knowledges as well as knowledge, so there may be ontologies as well as ontology.
Aren't we all ontologists insofar as we're concerned with defining who we are, and with defining our own being?
Instead of affirming that philosophy (or even our own way of doing philosophy) has some privileged position over us and can subject us to ontological investigation (or that philosophy itself supposes that it can subject us to ontological investigation), why don't we engage in a philosophy that arises from our own being and that is radically constructed or deconstructed by our own being?
Black feminist or afro-feminist ontology is an ontology centered on the experiences of black women or women of color. It may examine such questions as "What is the impact of repressive and hierarchical social structures on black women? What is the impact of gendered power relations? What is the impact of social conceptions of the female body, regarding such issues as reproduction, maternity, body image, and sexuality?
Ismália De Sousa (2021) explains that while black feminist thought centers on the lived experiences of black women, it can be deployed to better understand the experiences of people and groups at the intersection of multiple axes of connection. The ontology of black feminist thought centers on the lived experiences of black women in order to better understand unbalanced social structures of power. It also examines lived experiences as sources of knowledge development, and it creates the space for subaltern voices to be heard in dialogical daily practices.2
Emilie M. Townes (1993) describes womanist ontology as "a radical concern for is-ness in the context of African American life."3 She explains that "its primary concern is concrete existence (lived life) and the impetus for a coherent and unified relationship between body, soul, and creation. In this sense, it is consonant with African cosmology that understands all of life as sacred."4 Womanist ontology is also an ontology of wholeness that rejects dualisms such as self-other, mind-body, theory-practice, and individual-community. It's a relational ontology that calls us to moral responsibility and accountability.5
Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (2008) explain that feminist ontology "rejects binary and oppositional notions of 'the self' and its relationships to 'the body' and 'mind' and 'emotions'; it also rejects a notion of 'self and Other' that the self supposedly defines itself against and in opposition to."6 They say that
"The feminist approach to the construction of self, in contrast, sees 'self' as relationally and interactionally composed, its construction being historically, culturally, and contextually specific and also subtly changing in different interactional circumstances. Thus, an alternative feminist way of understanding the dualisms of masculinist ontology--of self and other, individual and collectivity--is to treat these not as oppositions but cooperative endeavors for constructing selves--both selves--through collective relational systems of action and interaction."7
Moreover,
"The ontologies of the oppressed rest on forbidden emotions and thoughts--such as loves which are supposed not to dare to speak their name but do, and white masks of apparent acquiescence on actually rebellious black faces. That is, fundamental here are actual or suspected subversions, as subversion is named and categorized within dominant ideological practices. But the ontologies of the oppressed are not merely negatively inscribed as Other, a counterpoint to dominant group ontologies and experiences. Central to the political projects of oppressed groups is the construction of an everyday life, a mundane reality often hidden from oppressors, and with it an ontological system for explaining and thus also defining and constructing the very being of members of such groups."8
Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou, and Rebecca Parker (2018) also argue that gender ontologies are relational and intersectional. They explain that one of the challenges for such ontologies is to find ways to leave gender variance and nonconformity dynamic but still findable.9
Calvin Warren (2018) says that the question of black being is a proper metaphysical question, because "metaphysics can never provide freedom or humanity for blacks, since it is the objectification, domination, and extermination of blacks that keep the metaphysical world intact."10 Being is therefore written under erasure, since black being exists in concealment and blacks are treated as objects. "Black thinking," says Warren, "must then return to the question of Being and the relation between this question and the antiblack violence sustaining the world."11
Warren (2022) also says that the "Karen call" (a call typically made by a white middle-aged woman who weaponizes her white privilege by calling for police to come and engage in surveillance of black people who are going about their normal daily activities, thus subjecting them to possible harassment and unlawful arrest) is a persistent social phenomenon that "performs ontological labor--a guarding and surveillance of Being--requiring a vigilant policing of ontological boundaries and a marshaling of violence (state sanctioned) to prevent black encroachment."12 The Karen call is a response to a supposed ontological emergency (actually a fraudulent, pseudo-, or non-emergency), in which black people are seen as not having the right to be in a certain place. Warren says that rather than dismissing the Karen call as an abuse of modern technology in which a cell phone is used to activate a system of surveillance, we should see it as the unfolding and appropriation of Being as a racial privilege. The preservation of such privilege, and the maintenance of its racial exclusivity, requires vigilance and surveillance.13
Ron Scapp (2013), in an essay describing how the killing of Trayvon Martin might be considered an ontological problem, says that at the core of this tragic event is the fundamental issue of what it actually means for an African American male "to be" in the United States, and that "there is, in fact, no proper or legitimate place for a person of color to be."14
George Yancy (2022) calls attention to the tragic deaths of George Floyd (2020), Ahmaud Arbery (2020), Philando Castile (2016), Eric Garner (2014) Tamir Rice (2014), Trayvon Martin (2012), Amadou Diallo (1999), Emmett Till (1955), and others who were deemed "ontologically criminal, subhuman, and ungrievable" by those who murdered them. They were perceived as "threats"and "criminals" within a distorted white imaginary and pervasive anti-black-male social ontology.15
Fred Moten (2008) explains that one way of investigating the lived experience of African Americans is to consider what it means to be seen as dangerous, and what it means to be regarded as an inevitably disordering or deformational force, while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order and form.16 He says that
"the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general...blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential...What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experience of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology...That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation."17
Marquis Bey (2022) also rejects ontological blackness and ontological gender as inconsistent with the abolitionist gender radicality that underlies black trans feminism. Bey says these ontological categories tend toward a reification by which race and gender are treated as if they were fixed and existed objectively, independent of historical contingency and subjective intentions.18
Victor Anderson (1995) also regards ontological blackness as a tendency toward racial reification. He uses the term "ontological blackness" to connote categorical and essentialist languages depicting black life and experience. He prefers to use bell hooks's term "postmodern blackness," which he says recognizes the importance of race as an effective category in identity formation, but also recognizes that black identities are continually being reconstituted, as African Americans inhabit diverse social spaces and communities of moral discourse.19
Charles W. Mills (1998) explains that some characteristics of race as a politically constructed categorization are that (1) it's essentially relational rather than monadic, (2) it's dynamic rather than static, (3) it's only contingently tied to a person's physical appearance, (4) it's usually vertically defined, in terms of hierarchy and subordination, (5) it may vary both temporally in a given system and geographically through entry into a different system, (6) it's unreal in a biological sense, (7) it's real in a sociohistorical or political sense, (8) it has to be maintained through constant boundary policing, and (9) historically the most important global racial system has been that of white domination over nonwhite people.20
Mills therefore says that in response to the "dark ontologies" of white supremacy (and of slavery, colonialism, and racial segregation), which have reinforced white domination over nonwhite people, revisionist ontologies can be undertaken in one or both of two ways: (1) by recognizing the metaphysical infrastructure of dark ontologies, and (2) by eradicating the substantive conditions of black subordination.
Axelle Karera (2022) explores the use in contemporary black studies of the concept of "paraontology," which was originated by the philosopher Nahum Chandler. She describes paraontology as "a radical disruption in the hegemonic and purist logic of ontology," saying that it's a method of reading that conceals, retreats, or shelters itself from classical ontology, and that therefore offers us "the possibility of considering blackness beyond (though always with and against) the violence of its constitution."21
Farai Chipato and David Chandler (2022) describe the "Black Horizon" of social and political thought as a perspective that, rather than leading toward a plurality of ontologies, deconstructs or destabilizes the very notion of ontology. They say that "the fugitive inclinations of the Black Horizon suggest lines of flight away from concrete ontological positions towards being as a poetics...It is an aesthetic method rather than an ontologizing practice, a creative becoming that cannot provide a new foundation for thought, but remains suspended in a creative, opaque uncertainty."22
FOOTNOTES
1David Miguel Gray, "Racial Ontology: A Guide for the Perplexed. Part IIIB: Sociohistorical Theories of Race," video for WiPhi Open Access Philosophy, 2017, online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcuabrV0Cok
2Ismalia De Sousa, "Centering Black feminist thought in nursing praxis," in Nursing Inquiry, Volume 29, Issue 1, Nov. 24, 2021, online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nin.12473
3Emilie M. Townes, "To Be Called Beloved: Womanist Ontology in PostModern Refraction," in The Annual Society of Christian Ethics, Vol. 13 (1993), p. 94.
4Ibid., p. 94.
5Ibid., p. 114.
6Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, "Feminist Epistemology and Ontology: Recent Debates in Feminist Social Theory," 2008, p. 348 online at https://ijsw.tiss.edu/collect/ijsw/index/assoc/HASH67b2/08dbd2b6.dir/doc.pdf
7Ibid., p. 348.
8Ibid., p. 355.
9Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou, and Rebecca Parker, "Storm Clouds on the Horizon: Feminist Ontologies and the Problem of Gender, in Feminist Modernist Studies (1,3: 230-242), 2018.
10Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 6.
11Ibid., p. 7.
12Calvin Warren, "The Karen Call: Emergency, Destiny, and Surveillance," in Critical Philosophy of Race, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2022, p. 141.
13Ibid., p. 148.
14Ron Scapp, "Postscript: Being in One's Place: Race, Ontology and the Killing of Trayvon Martin," in NAES (National Association for Ethic Studies) FORum Pamphlet Series, Volume 1, Article 1, 2013, p. 5.
15George Yancy, "Introduction: Speaking Behind and To the Veil," in Black Men from behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations, edited by George Yancy (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2022), p. 2.
16Fred Moten, "The Case of Blackness," in Criticism, Spring 2008, Vol. 50, No. 2, p. 180.
17Ibid., p. 187.
18Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), p. 13.
19Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 11.
20Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 76-77.
21Axelle Karera, "Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets," in Critical Philosophy of Race, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2022, pp. 159-161.
22Farai Chipato and David Chandler, "The Black Horizon: Alterity and Ontology in the Anthropocene," in Global Society (Routledge, August 10, 2022), p. 13, online at https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/0d3820337d2853d67931f13d88da3f5d71525602c55afa774c98cb40e9b3f81d/1997762/The%20Black%20Horizon%20Alterity%20and%20Ontology%20in%20the%20Anthropocene.pdf
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