Antiblackness Quotes

“In Beloved, the weather comes, breaks, changes quickly; it “let[s] loss,” it is remarked upon and forgotten; it is. In my text, the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack. [...] In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.”
― Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“[...] I wonder here what would an ethics based on the radically non-relational look like? Insofar as the constant recognition of our existential interdependency cannot substantially challenge the many forms of segregations on the steady rise in our current times, it seems to me that assuming the inevitability of our ontological entanglement may need some re-thinking. In light of what I perceive to be relationality’s inability to maintain its ethical currency when faced with the extended rupture blackness sustains on ethics, Fred Moton’s understanding of relationality is pertinent here. In his famous essay “Blackness and Nothingness,” Moten understands relationality to be “an expression of power, structured by the giveness of a transcendental subjectivity that the black cannot have but by which the black can be had.” It is, indeed, “a structural position that he or she cannot take but by which he or she can be taken.” In other words, relationality is inherently not only a position that the black cannot afford or even claim. The structure of relationality is essentially the condition for the possibility of their enslavement. I wonder, therefore, whether our naïve reliance on a type of inherent co-dependence has recently done more harm than good—that is to say, has instead worked to obstruct the very possibility of a positive transformation of our ethical sensibilities.”
― Axelle Karera

“Those of us who study black radical traditions of experiment and refusal must grapple with the painful fact that every appearance within what David Lloyd calls “the racial regime of aesthetics” is invariably the reproduction of antiblack violence.”
― Rizvana Bradley