'Blackness' and Its Ethical and Social Implications: Discursive Impositions, Colonial Entrapments, and the Attendant Phenomenological Questions

In this dissertation, I investigate the moral and social problems associated with ‘blackness’ in its historical and contemporary usage. Since ‘blackness’ now identifies continental and diaspora Africans (CADA) without major moral concerns, it seems ‘blackness’ has been normalized in society. From the 1960s, ‘blackness’ has become beautiful, socially uplifting and politically effective as a resistive socio-political and socio-economic device. This positive outlook apparently suggests that ‘blackness’ has been delinked from its historical problematics as the signifier of ugliness, evil, immorality, barbarism, etc. My findings suggest this is not necessarily the case. Even today, ‘blackness’ continues to play an exclusionary and denigrating function. More than half a century after the end of official imperial colonialism and formal racial segregation in the Americas, CADA have accepted skin colour as opposed to cultures and geographies to be a global, unifying identity.

Using archival sources and a multidisciplinary scholarly literature, from the classical antiquity (Ancient Rome and Greece) to the present, I interrogated how ‘blackness’, which was used by the slave and the colonial regimes to commodify, segregate, debase, and socially patronize CADA, finds positive, decolonial social currency in its contemporary normalization. Four theories have been helpful: Phenomenology, genealogy, postcolonial theory and Gramscian hegemony. Through phenomenology I interrogate what ‘blackness’ means. Through Foucault’s genealogy, I interrogate how ‘blackness’ changed overtime and how discourse was used to impose it. I use postcolonial theory to interrogate the colonial era under which ‘blackness’ was operationalized by the colonial and the slave regimes. Finally, Gramsci’s hegemony through consent helped me make sense of how ‘blackness’ is still relevant today.

I wondered if there is a significant difference between ‘blackness’ as used by the colonial and the slave regimes and ‘blackness’ as used today. My findings show that ‘blackness’ still pays unintentional homages to colonial epistemes and epistemologies. I have called these homages colonial traps and bad faith. Colonial traps are hegemonies through consent. Bad faith is a willing and knowing abdication of personal responsibility. That ‘blackness’ is necessary for solidarity and resistive purposes against colour-based prejudices has been put to the test within this colonial entrapment context. CADA, who have convincingly shown over the last hundred years that they are capable of successfully challenging Eurocentric hegemonies, seem unable to wiggle out of colonial appellations.