Antiblackness.

• Author: Johnson, Kofi

Jung, Moon Kie, Vergas, Joao Costa H., eds. Antiblackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Ix + 382 pages. Paperback, $29.95.

The world in which we inhabit at this moment is beset by violence against black people. In recent years, violence on black people has triggered discourses whether Black lives matter. The killings reached its crescendo with the death of George Floyd in the hands of police brutality. To illustrate, they were colonized by Western powers, enslaved, and forced from their homelands, subjected to sale like a piece of furniture, and forced to relocate from their ancestral homes. In most cases it involved the breakup of families.

Although slavery ended more than 150 years ago, one can argue that White society has not come to recognize Blacks as humans. The downside is that the vestiges of colonization and enslavement are still felt in wherever they live. Black people are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. Anti-Blackness remains the extreme anti-social affliction in our modern world.

This book, Anti-Blackness, is a collection of essays that underscores the de-humanization of black people. The book draws its sources from Black Feminism, Afro-Pessimism, and Critical Race Theory. Anti-Blackness is written for understanding those people that are collectively racialized as Black. The concept, as used, is not a monolithic concept of Blackness. In fact, Anti-Blackness is an all-embracing concept that includes all non-black people of color such as African Americans, Afro-Latin-X, African-indigenous, Caribbean, and other marginalized ethnic groups. The term applies to all non-Black people of color.

The focus of this book is to respond to the prevailing current situation in which Black people are being killed. The book as a whole is a collection of essays assembled by Jung and his collaborators from a cross section of thinkers who write from a host of different disciplines. They critically analyze, reveal, and expose how slavery and Anti-Blackness is structured, thereby providing meaning to Anti-Blackness. The authors rationalized how Black people were enslaved and colonized and forced out of their...