Toward a Twenty-First Century Black Liberation Ethic: A Marxist Reclamation of Ontological Blackness

Abstract

In Beyond Ontological Blackness, Victor Anderson critiques Black theology as a theo-intellectual project whose ontological claims of blackness requires white racism and black crisis. Anderson asserts:

In black theology, blackness has become a totality of meaning. It cannot point to any transcendent meaning beyond itself without also fragmenting. Because black life is fundamentally determined by black suffering and resistance to whiteness (the power of non-being), black existence is without the possibility of transcendence from the blackness that whiteness created. (1995, 91–92)