What is Ontological Subjugation?
Why Europeans Used Black African Slaves: Black Ontology and Ontological Materialism, & Capitalism as an Abstraction
"English has many doublets from Latin sources. Usually, the earlier word came from Norman French and the later one came from central French . . . or directly from Latin. Occasionally we have three words, or a triplet, from the same source, as in cattle (from Norman French), chattel (from central French), and capital, all derived from the Latin capitalis, meaning 'of the head.’” — Katherine Barber, Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do With Pigs*. 2007
HUMANISM
Ontology is the study of the nature of being, becoming, and existence:
How do you see in the mirror? What do you see? Who do you see? Why?
When you were born, you had no self-awareness. You had to experiment— feel, touch, smell, learn, and most importantly, live pain and pleasure.
Eventually you came to know the ecology of your senses your self; your fingers, your body odor, your face and its color… Your voice, or lack thereof.
Your identity is born.
And once you begin to utilize and recognize these tools of living, you recognize those same traits, or lack thereof, in others.
The contrast is made immediately; there was never an escape, and there was never a pretense. There was only You, and suddenly, there are Not-You’s. This contrast extrapolates into every situation you experience with the Others (and other Things) until your death, even with a weak sense of self.
Whether you exist or not was never a question, and may never become one for many, even through decades of experimentation.
Nevertheless, Others have often already decided for you:
“Are a boy, or a girl?”
“Are you profitable?”
“Are you savage?”*
“Are you human?”
And so the white race, the Human race, became itself.
Many individuals have decided that Others are less than human: from ancient Grecian speciations of Georgian peoples by Hippocrates, to Amerika’s withholding of humanist ethics from African peoples by founder Thomas Jefferson, to Nazi Germany’s mimicry of Amerikan pogroms (that time aimed at both Blacks, non-Black Jews, and Afrikan Jews).
Whenever this individual has enough social capital by ancient standards, those views were adopted and enforced by the populous. In effect, the public eventually embody a passive form of the pogrom, ready to marginalize, exile, and/or kill.
The recurring theme from an international perspective is a hierarchy created in which Europeans were viewed as most human — in other words, to be exempt from slavery upon some pseudoscientific natural right.
These Europeans, who would continue in tradition to develop these theories into the ideology of white supremacy, would eventually refer to themselves as collectively “white”. The self-actualization of a person calling themselves “white” was a process that entered the ontologies of individuals, and eventually became the self-actualization of entire populations of people who would eventually know themselves as “white”.
More comprehensively: those who were safe from social death, from being Black and thus being non-Black, were welcome.
This caste system, this hiearchy, is not [ontologically] materially different from its predecessor as much as it is rhetorical. It would eventually be found throughout the world, in self-reproducing fractals, as Europeans raced to colonize every non-European society they could: in colorism, in who is most often affected by xenophobia, in who is considered an Amerikan, and who is considered to be Truly Jewish. Different colonizing, imperialist, and otherwise thieving civilizations accelerated the development of a systemic network of whitenesses through incremental reforms in response to material conditions at hand . They employed strategies such as the barely-imposed one drop rule, to the more obscured Code Noir, to the widespread and thus more well-known (at least by population count) blanqueamiento and castas. Each of these were differing and, more often than not, symptomatically overlapping attempts at maintaining a permanent working/non-working chattel slave class (and thus implications otherwise). Some were the results of experimentation, others simply happy mistakes. Each was instrumental in engineering moats of death built to preserve the personalized and barely selective subjugator that is whiteness, and its primary antagonist (the Slave). Each purposeful mistake that landed at the feet of future generations to come could pick up the useful bits for repurposing and optimizing whiteness. Each will have its own “inefficiencies” that we ought to exploit, and fluidities stacked against the subjugated. Some are socio-economic relics of machines powerful enough to exist even until today. Some would become simply repurposed, and not-so-readily observable in what Saidiya Hartman has referred to as the afterlife of slavery but in this text are more like afterlives of slavery.
In time, colorism becomes a function of colonies as an ideological characteristic of European imperialism: another pogrom. Not so different from Confuscian ideological tenets being forcefully injected into Vietnam by the Han Dynasty. In turn, global anti-blackness becomes the impetus of all ontological hierarchy.
Just as those celebrity humanists of the past decided they were non-Black, and therefore human, so would their peers and kin, so would their progeny and all they deemed to be the fruit of “humanity”.
And who were Africans by the time Europeans had sunk their fingers into the World?
Chattel. Property. Colonized.
A history, controlled.
A future, denied.
More like apes than human. More like a fixed capital, than living. In summary, non-human, free for the taking, and ripe for killing.
Queue genocide by public pogrom: if you hate the Blacks, you are free to do so as long as they are your property or a runaway. Free, or enslaved. Their land is for the taking, too. No regrets! But the mixed ones are slightly worth more: more trustworthy, more attractive, more human than the darker ones. Feel free to consider that if you so choose. Just remember: The Blacker, the deader. The only deviation or obscuring possible in such a direct law can be what Black can be.
This is the aesthetic of social death that must always come before totalized brain death.
WHITE SUPREMACY
The effects of European ideology of “white supremacy” and its inherently invasive imperialism became apparent in all aspects of life, from sugar cane fields in Waitikubuli (Dominica) to Far-Eastern perspectives on “Africa”.
This was all enforced without consent of any of the mothers, fathers, agendered adults and children, grandparents, who would permanently lose their cultures and connections to home, their families, and in the future,
the idea of what home is.
If this pattern of “the darker, the deader” continued and all dark-skinned Black people were wiped off the face of Earth, eventually lighter-skinned Black people would be next, and perhaps their non-Black, colored peoples deaths would follow in suit.
The overarching theme (the superstructure) is white supremacy,
and the means of enforcing white supremacy is anti-Blackness.
Anti-Blackness makes Black labor (the cultural, material-ontological base) a primary tool in creating and sustaining civilization as we know it. Anti-Blackness takes the shape of assimilating non-Black peoples into whiteness, or an identity adjacent to whiteness (eg. Native Amerikans being able to own and trade slaves, whether they did or did not).
All in all, white supremacy is not a completely material hegemony, but also an ontological hegemony that weaponizes anti-blackness as an oppressive force.
It takes the shape of cultural theft, commodifies it, and makes it non-Black. It takes the shape of widespread poverty, societal and economic underdevelopment, genocide, the erasure of history, etcetera. Anti-Blackness does all of this, while denying even the most self-hating Blacks a chance to become anything more than what they are: Black, non-Human, and lesser-than-thou.
What those before us have witnessed is the creation of a caste system (or more accurately, a filter) that fractalizes and reproduces itself at every level of life in Amerika. What we are witnessing today is the application of such a caste system that has essentially defined Blacks, the less-Humans.
DEATH, AND DYING
The aforementioned process described above, of losing one’s humanity, is known as social death. It is a horrendous process that has permanently affected Black peoples more than any population of people on Earth; at the precise moment Africans began being dragged through the Middle Passage, or even earlier during the Arab slave trade (≈500 AD) as subhumans across continents, to India and to China, they were never allowed to return to their ethnicities, or to be Africans. They became Blacks. They became a subhuman Other, or subaltern. This is the unique case of Blackness, one that has never been addressed by any of the participants of chattel slavery— including the Church.
In the process, of becoming chattel and Blacks, Africans were stripped of their families, permanently separated from people who they could continue speaking to using their tribe’s language, or relate to spiritually. This continued on, and on, and on, millions forced to adapt to their new surroundings, new families, only to lose them again. This happened for centuries upon centuries, ten fold. Eventually, most had no choice but to be Black, to forget or abandon most if not all of their identities, and to adopt the identity imposed on them. No longer could they reject this identity, for there was no other to claim.
The pre-Columbian period, the late Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on the questions of what to do with the ontologocal effects of slavery, as they might be related to that massive group of black-skinned people south of the Sahara.
No one asked: Should they have social death forced on them, as opposed to physical death (i.e. executions)? Should this form of chattel slavery be imposed on the internal poor, en masse? Should the scale of White slavery become industrial? Should the children of the White slave be enslaved as well?
This chattel slavery became unique to Black people in that we were offered no conditionals whatsoever, and neither was any progeny of ours. Suddenly, children were born Black (as opposed to Afrikan), and had to be told they were slaves by any slave who had a modicum of dignity. Even with dignity, slaves existed without knowing what slavery meant. Black became synonynous with slavery and social death, an existence soon recognized and exploited by white Humans and non-Blacks with greater Human proximity (eg even Seminoles natives exclaimed they would not be made Black) .
(click here for more photos not from Uncle Tom’s Cabin: https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/slavery?mediatype=photography&phrase=slavery&sort=mostpopular)
It was a genetic and ontological remaking of an entire population of peoples resulting in conditions such as permanent placelessness and cultural appropriation — in which Afrikan indigenous cultures that are still maintained by the Afrikan diaspora can be accused of appropriation of non-Black culture by those who use ideas such as sovereignty to further Black ontological genocide. And of course, the effect these accusations have is always of greater, more “positive” response than any accusations of cultural appropriation by Black peoples, which is always questioned and critiqued and given a less authentic merit.
AFTERLIFE
Slavery didn’t only recreate the existence of Afrikans. It also developed a contrast to what it means to be Human.
At all walks life, working class or bourgeoisie, Black people continue to face this ontologocal erosion that allows them to be discriminated against regardless of how much money they claim, or land they “own”.
Author David Eltis asserts in his book (Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery) that European society’s decision to not capture slaves from Europe’s own territory was a “bad business idea.” Eltis writes:
“No Western European power after the Middle Ages crosses the basic divide separating European workers from chattel slavery. And while serfdom fell and rose in different parts of early modern Europe and shared characteristics with slavery, serfs were not outsiders either before or after enserfment. The phrase ‘long distance serf trade’ is an oxymoron.”
According to Eltis, population growth patterns in Europe during the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s heavily outpaced growth patterns on the continent of Africa, demonstrating chattel slavery’s devastating effects on Africa’s growth patterns. In fact, Europe was heavily populated enough to easily provide 50,000 White slaves a year to the “New World” without serious disruption of either international peace or existing social institutions that supervised potential European victims. Even class warfare could have been been unlikely due to lower labor costs, a faster development of the Americas, and higher exports and income levels on both sides of the Atlantic. He explains in great detail how the costs of enslavement would have been driven way down if Europeans had taken White slaves to America instead of Black slaves from Africa, noting
“shipping costs… comprised by far the greater part of the price of any form of imported bonded labor in the Americas. I we take into account the time spent collecting a slave cargo on the African coast as well, then the case for sailing directly from Europe with a cargo of [Whites] appears stronger again.”
To Eltis, the decision to capture slaves from Africa was nothing more than symbolic. White chattel slavery would have destroyed the value of consent and social contract amongst those of the “white race” that were strictly reserved for the convict, beggar, indentured servant, or child. Even under heavy coercion during the Middle Ages and late modern period, “the power of the state over [convicts in the Old World] and the power of the master over [convicts of the New World] was more [defined] than that of the slave owner over the slave.” (Eltis) Karl Marx also takes note of the unnecessary political costs to civil society, had Europeans been willing to enslave Whites (Capital, 895–896), implying there must have been more to the decision.
However, according to afro-pessimist theorist Frank B. Wilderson III (Red, White, and Black) claims slavery is symbolic by refuting two misunderstandings:
He states that work, or alienation and exploitation, is not a constituent element of slavery, and that profits are not the most important motivations in slavery .
If slavery is “the permanent, violent domination of… alienated and generally dishonored persons,” (Orlando Patterson), then the basic characteristics of slavery “are accumulation and fungibility.” (Wilderson)
This is a much more accurate definition, as it still describes all the elements necessary to create a slave, regardless of race or ethnicity. But it also implies that Black people, at least in Amerika, are still slaves.
“The ontology of slavery is the [extent] of the Black.” — Frank B. Wilderson III
MIRROR
Ontological oppression is sad, and it is also materially oppressive.
Even with the whips, the manual plantations, and Harriet Tubman out of the picture, there still exists a fungibility in Black existence that maintains an ontological hold over Blackness; Black people are still moved around and generally treated as fixed capital itself:
— through gentrification and natural disaster, not allowed to move back home until the individual or group of individuals has already forgotten that it is their home but lost.
— through constant cultural appropriating with little to no respect for Black consent, as if the culture is being produced for all to rape and distort until it is Black culture no more
— through mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex that capitalizes on low to no-wage labor of prisoners who, much of the time, are in jail for crimes that are no longer criminal (eg possession of marijuana)
—through underdevelopment which leads to widespread illness (mental and physical), famine, and the magnification of damage done by natural disasters that leas to further privatization of underdeveloped lands by its neocolonial predators
etcetera, because all these forms of exploitation are only possible in Amerika and Europe due to the chattel slavery of Afrikan Blacks. The same social death that inspired Amerika through all its stages of development and earlier would become the same to use against Jews in Nazi Germany, albeit without lasting ontological social death post World War II. We are left to our plantations and social death as a sort of anti-Human antimatter.
Even now, as “post-racial”, or “post-human”, views of political society take hold over the minds of so called “people of color”, anti-blackness reproduces itself why ignoring the critiques of Black society left without an ontology that can be their own.
No longer is it possible for us to go back to a Africa, for even there we are viewed as cultureless. It is humanly impossible to exist without such an identity. And while cultures we produce are raped and pillaged by non-Black people (in spite of our collective desire for that culture to not be warped into what is essentially a mess), we end up again as a chattel of culture .
We are constantly molded into caricatures for what is essentially Amerikan imperialism, where eventually rappers can exist everywhere and suddenly everyone can say “nigga” because Black people are no longer allowed to maintain their own culture. The word “nigga” becomes less and less coded, because our ontology isn’t allowed to exist — because our consent, as Blacks, never existed:
What are we other than Blacks?
What are Blacks, other than…
Blackness has become a bleak reality, even with the temporary joys of television and screen-time, because it is now our ontology — the Black state of being. Like the blues, it will always carry with it the weight of ancestral trauma growing heavy in time under capitalism and the ideology of white supremacy that made mules of Blackness for all, but Blacks, to benefit from in any way they see fit in the future.
What this means is that anti-Blackness can now flourish proper within any economic system: Left, Right, or Center. Ontological oppression, then, is a tool used to create a sort of platform that all societies, except the utopian, can thrive on — a widely untouched hegemony that preys upon Black communities.
“Without this gratuitous violence, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity— Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement— political discourses [relying on modes/grammars of suffering], and their [theories] of exploitation and alienation, might not have developed.” — Frank B. Wilderson III
The implications of this truth only mean that the complete destruction of what the European Human deems “civilization”, ideologically and materially, is the only way to end an anti-Blackness that even the dichotomous Left versus Right is built on (by white people who benefitted from white supremacy and continue to today).
Until this hegemony is rendered obsolete and replaced with a true New Humanism, or until Humanism is done away with completely, civilization itself will continue to be anti-Black — and not only anti-Black but also reproducing this same hegemony in various, unecological formulations of taxonomy*. This entails the abolition of the police, of capitalism, nations/states, and much more. It’s time to start imagining a New Ontology.
*a pun
“Everybody agrees that there is no people on earth in whom generosity is as universally well developed as the Zanj. These people have a natural talent for dancing to the rhythm of the tambourine, without needing to learn it. There are no better singers anywhere in the world, no people more polished and eloquent, and no people less given to insulting language. No other nation can surpass them in bodily strength and physical toughness. One of them will lift huge blocks and carry heavy loads that would be beyond the strength of most Bedouins or members of other races. They are courageous, energetic, and generous, which are the virtues of nobility, and also good-tempered and with little propensity to evil. They are always cheerful, smiling, and devoid of malice, which is a sign of noble character. The Zanj say that God did not make them black to disfigure them; rather it is their environment that made them so. The best evidence of this is that there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as the Banu Sulaim bin Mansur, and that all the peoples settled in the Harra, besides the Banu Sulaim are black. These tribes take slaves from among the Ashban to mind their flocks and for irrigation work, manual labor, and domestic service, and their wives from among the Byzantines; and yet it takes less than three generations for the Harra to give them all the complexion of the Banu Sulaim. This Harra is such that the gazelles, ostriches, insects, wolves, foxes, sheep, asses, horses and birds that live there are all black. White and black are the results of environment, the natural properties of water and soil, distance from the sun, and intensity of heat. There is no question of metamorphosis, or of punishment, disfigurement or favor meted out by Allah. Besides, the land of the Banu Sulaim has much in common with the land of the Turks, where the camels, beasts of burden, and everything belonging to these people is similar in appearance: everything of theirs has a Turkish look.” — Al Jahiz, zoologist (860 CE)
In the above mural in Dominica, notice that the Kalinago (Natives of Dominica) had A Better Living, which became A Worse Living. ‘The Blacks’ only have one life in this mural, one of suffering and torment. There was neither a Better, nor a Worse Life. This is an accurate depiction of Black people having no connection to the 3-part narrative of Had, Lost, and To Be Restored eg. Though we have stolen surplus labor time to be restored, and stolen land as a colonized peoples, sometimes performed by other colonized peoples sent by the colonizer (e.g. Liberia 🇱🇷) , these are neither intrinsic nor the hollow foundation to our international situation, and are often inaccessible histories, as most of us can not even accurately pinpoint where in Afrika we come from. And even if we could, there is no saying we would be welcome in any peoples’ societies, since there is much disdain for the diaspora in many areas of where we may guess we have come from also due to colonialism — with much disdain being held towards the areligious, those who do not uphold the ideals of the nuclear family (e.g. Non-straight, and trans people), and those who do not speak their language or have access to as much as they do — the ontolpgies of which are present in native communities in Afrika as well, and also regarded with the same xenophobic disdain as natives would reserve for foreigners like ourselves in The West. This renders Marxism an inadequate fraction of what full Black liberation ought to entail.
Theres nothing closer in existence to the existence of a permanent working class than Black people tofay, and what AI will some day be. This is why transhumanism and "fully automated luxury 'communism'" will also necessitate a *permanent* Black working class— that is, if history is a continuum contingent on the past.
If we are the soil foundation used to build this charnel house then AI is a foundation of steel. No matter how many times one has seen Terminator, no matter how many visions of autonomous machine-led massacres one has imagined, we need to remember that these images of machine were made by capitalists, most often white than not. The same goes for the material that has made the machines... It was not put here for us to use, pillage, collect, burn, melt etc...
There is no "God" that has determined that this Earth is our Eden and that we can do as we please, lest we seek to destroy it and all of its memory. We ought to live in conversation with it— in an ecological transparency with mutual respect and understanding. And if it can’t understand us, then give it the ability to do so.
In the Hyperion Cantos' Book 2 by Dan Simmons (a horror-sci fi loosely styled off Canterbury Tales), the first narrator tells the CEO of the intergalactic federation (who apparently everyone in the federation likens to our reality's white supremacist Abraham Lincoln) that the war she started is only supported by so many civilians, politicians, & investors due to a fear of anything that is human and also partly non-human— pointing to why androids are outlawed as an example.
This is a fictionalized allusion to Western, now-universalized 'Black' ontology through which chattel slavery (slavery with social death) and its echoes, the ideas of Humanism and the Enlightenment, colonialism, Christian human supremacy over "nature", and all other materially historical formulations of taxonomy in what is now Europe that lead to the aforementioned (eg barbarians vs civilized people [read History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter]), live on and have shaped today’s international systems of unecological hegemony.
In the anime Armitage III, seen below, Armitage herself asks the question “If humans don’t want me, then why did they make me? — ” Similiar to James Baldwin’s questioning of why it was necessary to have a n**ger in the first place, Armirage questions why it is humans created themselves , or rather: why did humans need a human/non-human dichotomy at all?**
Instead of killing the man who has been staging false flags and murdering innocent artificial intelligence through a campaign of propaganda of the deed, she succombs to her assimilationist-integrationist desires to be human (or at least, treated as such), as opposed to being, like a human while being allowed to not be human; she succombs to the pleas of her shocked but apparently empathetic partner, who is a policeman, asking her to embody to The State’s desires, and therefore, The State’s/The Ultimate Power’s perspective on “non-humans”, instead.
**See the past [essay] for an answer.
Suggested Reading:
History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter
The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter
Red, White, and Black, Frank B. Wilderson III
Some Villains Don't Deserve Sympathy
- The Taíno callied us (Kalinago) brave people — caniba. We were most likely refugees from the mainland (Venezuelan Kalina). Land was not to be shared between us for reasons I do not understand yet…. The Taíno told Christopher Columbus noble things about us and, verbal communication and/or performance to be translated be sacred, decided we were cannibals. It could have also been a simple lie — for he told the queen not only this, but also that we were easily convertable to the Christian faith to serve as subjects. And thus, it became a cassus belli that would bring endless destruction to the Kalinago. Christopher Columbus eventually would start labeling the Taino "Caribs", once they started fighting back. And so, in the eyes of the colonizer, thr colonized became "cannibals" too. Bravery became synonymous with a true resistance, became synonymous with savagery and cannibalism and terrorism. Soon we were all "Caribs"— first "savages" in the "New World". The Queen was told we killed his men for no reason, except for when it was found out how awfully Columbus treated us. And when she did, he was banished. Same with Governor Ainslie in Wai’tu kubuli in the near future. They filmed pirates of the caribbean 2 in dominica and it had cannibals in it. That tale has lasted that long…
