Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

“I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was,” says Paul D. So, what is the being of blackness? Ultimately, (anti)blackness appears to be a matrix: a mold, a womb, a binding substance, a network of intersections, functioning as an encoder or decoder. It is an essential enabling condition for something of, but distinguishable from, its source—and therefore, it performs a kind of natality, performing a generative function rather than serving as an identity. If (anti)blackness is a matrix, then the normative conception of “the human” and the entire set of arrangements Sweet Home allegorizes have their source in abject blackness. In the process of distinguishing itself from blackness, normative humanity nevertheless bears the shadowy traces of blackness’s abject generativity. As “the defined” rather than the “definers,” the enslaved’s abjection places blackness under the sign of the feminine, the object, matter, and the animal regardless of sex.”
― Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World