Anti-blackness

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Anti-blackness is the mentality and enforced socialization that requires the inferiority and belittlement of Black people. Anti-blackness is typically seen in active circumstances that demonstrate one’s racial proximity to Blackness and thus their societal prevalence and importance is also created and reinforced. Anti-blackness is the origin of racism, and was born out of the Africanized slave trade and the maintenance of racialized power dynamics, ethos, and philosophy created to racially demonize Black people.

Historically, this racial demonization has created the precedent for white supremacy in European and white-dominated societies. This precedent of white supremacy crafted social and systemic tactics that reinforced the rationale that Black people, or people with African descent, are inferior and people of white skin are superior. The core of anti-blackness ethos solely focuses on the connection between both the devaluation of Black people and Black culture and the simultaneous uplifting and forced assimilation into whiteness.

Anti-blackness is different from racism in that it speaks to the specific targeting and othering of Blackness and the punitive measures suffered by Black people due to their racial makeup. The definition of Blackness itself has become much more fluid amongst Black Studies scholars to encompass the state of belonging to a racial community of Black people who engage in shared experiences that shape the individual’s understanding of the significance of their skin color and how that may affect how they are perceived and treated socially and within their institutions.

Racism stems from anti-blackness because the understanding of every other racialized group has been formed on the basis of Black people through the globalized imperialism and colonization of the 18 and 1900s. The United States offers an example in their movement to assimilate Native Americans into white society as a way to “Kill the Indian and save the Man,” as Native Americans were historically compared to people of Black descent and were pushed in white society to be seen as something worth saving. This also reinforced another tactic of white supremacy: white saviorism. This idea is fundamental to the understanding of anti-blackness, racism, and any other form of discrimination.

White saviorism employs white people as the sole narrative in a circumstance where they are framed as saving people or serving as a heroic figure to protect people from something. White saviorism euphemizes moralistically positive actions as altruistic and requires the action of saving, protecting, or advocating on behalf of people who are seen to have less power. This power dynamic of being able to save or protect someone within the context of white saviorism also implies the correctness of the rightness of the savior, which in this case is whiteness. Essentially, whiteness asserts itself as the ‘right way’ and is allowed to impose itself and its rhetoric on others who are seen as inferior, in order to leverage their perceived vulnerabilities.

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