J. Sexton; footnote 15, “Ante-Anti-Blackness” (2012):
“Blackness does not come from Africa. Rather, Africa and its diaspora become black at a particular stage in their history. It sounds a little strange to put it this way, but the truth of this description is widely acknowledged

. Blackness is an adjunct to racial slavery. No doubt, we will continue to discuss and disagree about the factors that made blackness imaginable as well as the pacing of their influence. That process is quite complex, mixing legal doctrine from ancient slave systems with customs

from the history of enslavement between Christians and Muslims to produce a new amalgam that would become foundational to the modern world. Blackness is a modern condition that cannot be conceptualized apart from the epochal changes in travel, trade, communication, consumption,

industry, technology, taxation, labor, warfare, finance, insurance, government, bureaucracy, science, religion, and philosophy that were together made possible by the European systems of colonial slavery. Due to this complexity, we will likely never be able to say with certainty

whether blackness starts before or during the sugar revolution, or consequently whether slavery follows from racism or racism follows from slavery. We can say, however, what blackness indicates: existence without standing in the modern world system. To be black is to exist in

exchange without being a party to exchange. Being black means belonging to a state that is organized in part by its ignorance of your perspective—a state that does not, that cannot, know your mind. Adapting a formula from the eve of decolonization, we might say that blackness

indicates a situation where you are anonymous to yourself. Reduced to what would seem its essential trait, blackness is a kind of invisibility. Taken seriously, these facts about blackness are enough to make problems for anyone who wants to talk about blackness as founding a

tradition. Conceptualized not as a shared culture but as the condition of statelessness, blackness would seem to deny the perspective that is necessary to communicate a tradition. To speak as black, to assert blackness as a perspective in the world, or to argue the existence of

the black world is to deny the one feature by which blackness is known. Because blackness is supernumerary, it is impossible to speak as black without putting yourself into an unavoidable tension with the condition you would claim. Speaking as black can mitigate your condition,

or make you into an exception or credit to your condition, but it cannot allow you to represent your condition, as speaking is enough to make you unrepresentative. You can be clean, articulate, and also black, but to be all these things at once is to admit to a life scored

by its division (or its doubleness).”

*this is J. Sexton quoting Bryan Wagner.