Black Body Metaphysics: Excavating Black Embodied Truth

Abstract

This paper aims to explore and expose a new kind of metaphysics which I have entitled Black Body Metaphysics. Black Body Metaphysics refers to a metaphysics that arises directly out of lived realities of Black people trying to survive physically and existentially embodied in a white world. Grounded in my own personal questioning about the importance of my body in the field of academic philosophy, I argue through the lens of standpoint epistemology, that Black Body Metaphysics, which is uniquely produced by Black people, necessarily will prove insightful to the wider philosophical discipline. In the remainder of the paper, I explore one metaphysical question I find particularly striking, which goes as follows: How does one come to know and live out the truth of their subjectivity, humanity, and selfhood in a world that only permits them to be a Black body (read: object, subhuman, and faceless)? I attempt to answer this question in two parts. In the first part, I develop a stance of the Black body as itself an object of metaphysics and then argue that in the white world it displaces the subjectivities of individuals who have been raced, Black. I close the paper with a brief account of a woman who I believe actively lives out her subjectivity in her body although it proves extremely costly in a world that won’t permit its possibility.