Following Baldwin, Spillers, Hartman, and others, we call attention to the perpetual, if unnoticed and ignored, theoretical incoherence generated by the deep-seated antiblackness of modernity. Applied to the plight of Black people, concepts and theories meant to index social domination and human suffering invariably falter and fall short. Under racial slavery, for instance, "the captive female body... could be converted into cash, speculated and traded as commodity, worked to death, taken, tortured, seeded, and propagated like any other crop, or murdered," Hartman reminds us. "The work of sex and procreation was the chief motor for reproducing the material, social, and symbolic relations of slavery [that]... inaugurated a regime of racialized sexuality that continues to place black bodies at risk" (Hartman 2016, 168-69). In apperceiving such antisocial, antihuman conditions, even the most radical theories of the Social and the Human, much less their mainstream counterparts, cannot but misrepresent. What conceptual vocabulary is up to the task? Exploitation or primitive accumulation? Patriarchy or misogyny? Hegemony or subalternity? Relative to antiblackness, such categories "are all thrown in crisis" (Spillers 2003, 221). Misrecognition and euphemism are inevitable.

— Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas (Page 2)