On the Nonsensical Label of 'Black'

I am currently writing a book that critically investigates the continued use of the racial label 'Black' for people of African descent - a term I find to be fundamentally nonsensical. This work is the culmination of a lifelong inquiry that began in my teenage years. Inspired by the socially conscious, African centric perspective of 90s hip-hop artists like X-Clan. This is when I first began to seriously question the use of the colour 'black' as an identifier. Their focus on our African heritage sparked a more profound personal revelation: a quest to uncover my own African heritage - a legacy that had been obscured and was, until that point, largely unknown to me. This dual journey of personal and historical reclamation was later formalized and refined through the academic rigor of my First-Class Bachelor of Arts (BA) dissertation in Psycho-Social studies and my Master of Research (MRes) in Social Anthropology for which I was awarded a Merit.

A System of Deliberate Destruction: The Necropolitics of Cultural Genocide

I must reject the passive language of 'cultural loss,' a term which maligns my ancestors by suggesting they simply forgot or misplaced their culture and heritage. What occurred was an active, calculated project of cultural genocide. To understand its logic, I employ philosopher Achille Mbembe's (2003) concept of necropolitics - the power to dictate who may live and who must die. While Mbembe's analysis focuses on contexts like the Nazi death camps and contemporary conflicts, his framework finds its most profound and foundational historical example in the transatlantic chattel slavery system inflicted upon Africans. This regime was the ultimate necropolitical project, enacting the "social death" described by sociologist Orlando Patterson (1982) to systematically dismantle the African person and fabricate the enslaved 'black' subject. It is vital to distinguish this process from the broader, albeit harsh, realities of colonization faced elsewhere. The chattel slavery system was a unique and extreme necropolitical project. It enacted a total dismantling of identity enforced by a regime of relentless and pervasive levels of violence - a level of brutality whose psychological impact is recognized in modern diagnostic frameworks like the ICD-11 and DSM-5 as inducing the complex, intergenerational trauma characteristic of C-PTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

This systematic terror was the essential mechanism. It sought to annihilate the African 'person' to create the enslaved 'black' subject—a fabricated identity designed to sustain a system where human beings were legally designated as property.

The legacy of this necropolitical project is a persistent, intergenerational stigma within African-Caribbean populations against Africa, African people, and their cultures, particularly the various systems of African spitituality. This is not a spontaneous prejudice; it is the direct result of colonial laws and religious indoctrination designed to systematically vilify and erase African identity. The most potent evidence of this is a specific British law, imposed during enslavement to criminalize African spirituality as "obeah," which remains on the legal books in countries that have been independent for decades. a specific British colonial law, The Obeah Act (1854 and subsequent amendments), which was imposed because African spirituality was viewed by the British government as an immediate and potent threat to their control of African people—and, by extension, their entire system of wealth creation. The law was a direct response to the effectiveness of these spiritual practices in fostering resistance, solidarity, and an independent cultural identity among the enslaved. It is critical to recognize that these spiritual systems were highly advanced frameworks for understanding the universe, governing society, and nurturing well-being; their caricature as malevolent was a necessary tactic to justify cultural genocide. This history explains why some within the African-Caribbean popualation, particularly those strongly identified with this religious framework, remain highly susceptible to this stigma and its underlying Afriphobia, perpetuating a deep-seated shame that actively disrupts any thought of reclaiming their own cultural heritage.

The Central Argument

This project confronts what I term as a mass cognitive dissonance across the global African diaspora, a shared psychological conflict born from a specific historical trauma. It is the profound tension, and deeply held sadness, that some of us can experience as descendants of those subjected to the horrors of chattel slavery, and then being identified by an archaic label ('Black') that is semantically, historically, and physically inaccurate to our reality. The book will interrogate why this specific term, deliberately applied during enslavement and colonisation to enforce a doctrine of inferiority, remains in active use today, and consequently, by global societies around the world.

An Interdisciplinary Approach

The book employs an interdisciplinary lens to unpack this complex history and its modern-day inertia, drawing from:

• History & Sociology to trace the institutional weaponization of the term.

• Linguistics to analyze the fundamental semantic disconnect.

• Anthropology & Psychology to understand the lived experience and internalization of the label.

My Goal as an Independent Scholar

My mission is to move this conversation beyond just the realms of academia. Through this book, and the forthcoming social media campaign, I aim to make this critical research accessible to everyone, promoting a vital public dialogue about identity, language, and the legacy of coloniality.