Antiblackness as Modernity’s Historical a Priori: The Binary That Generates

Jae Kim, Russell Sage College

This paper takes up the challenge of sociologically making sense of antiblackness, arguing that modernity is not merely accompanied by antiblackness but fundamentally structured by it. Rather than treating antiblackness as one among many inequalities, this study theorizes it as an epistemic condition—an organizing logic that structures modern knowledge itself. Drawing from Black Studies, historical sociology, and critical theory, this paper argues that modernity requires the categorical negation of Blackness to sustain its coherence. To make this case, I bring together Foucault’s concept of the historical a priori and Durkheim’s theory of classification. While Durkheim shows that social order depends on categorical distinctions, this paper extends his insights to argue that modernity relies on an absolute human/Blackness binary. Foucault further reveals how knowledge is historically contingent, governed by rules that define what can be known and who can be a knowing subject. Through this framework, antiblackness is not just exclusionary but actively generative—structuring the very categories of modern thought. This study extends analyses of antiblackness beyond the transatlantic slave trade to examine its global epistemic adaptability. In East Asia, modern nationhood was secured through an epistemic commitment to non-Blackness, while in Iran, the erasure of slavery functioned as an epistemic reconfiguration that preserved Black exclusion. These cases show that modernity does not require direct participation in slavery to be structured through antiblackness; it requires a commitment to differentiation, erasure, or historical reconfiguration. Finally, this paper interrogates the limits of resistance. If modernity reproduces itself through antiblackness, can resistance escape the very epistemic structure that sustains it? While modernity must continuously adapt to sustain coherence, tracing these adaptations is a critical task of historical sociology, as within them lies the potential for rupture—not a total break, but a fissural rupture.

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 Presented in Session 121. Racial Echoes of Settler Colonialism