Inaugurating European Modernity and Its Cosmological Genealogy

An enduring cosmological grammar builds and sustains the American nation-state. That is, there lies a religious—namely, Christian—telos that gives justification and substance to the United States’ white supremacist rule: it is an ethnonational devotion to whiteness. The United States, according to W.E.B. Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1999, 65), traces its genealogy to a racial religion that embodies its godhead in whiteness and servitude in blackness: “‘Cursed be Canaan!’ cried the Hebrew priests. ‘A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’… Slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their ‘brethren’ white…. Upon such spiritual myths was the anachronism of American slavery built.” Slavery, along with its post-emancipation state, constitutes the framework on which the nation built its social, political, and juridical institutions. The continuity of these “spiritual myths” executed ethno-racial terror against Blacks, from lynching to mass incarceration. Blackness, consistent with this cosmological grammar, embodied a racial enemy understood through cosmic registers of good versus evil. It is because of this seminal condition that the American democratic project failed, as Du Bois states: “Black folk[s] in this land are but a tenth. Yet to tyrannize over such minorities, to browbeat and insult them, to call that government a democracy…is manifestly a peculiarly dangerous perversion of the real democratic ideal. It is right here, in its method and not in its object, that democracy in America and elsewhere has so often failed. We have attempted to enthrone any chance majority and make it rule by divine right” (88).

America’s white majoritarianism is intelligible alongside and coheres around a religious justificatory practice. White-majoritarian tyranny rationalizes as “divine right” or, in its Greco-Roman tradition, as jure divino, understood plainly as God made us to rule. Cosmology is indispensable for Du Bois because it is a critical axis on which the American nation-state revolves.

Against this backdrop, I define cosmology as a governing belief system anchored in a transcendental notion of being-creation, inside and outside the world of human beings, on which rests the justification and the later organization of social existence for the practice of politics. Whereas ontology is a metaphysics of being (subjectivity), cosmology is a metaphysics of genesis (creation). Cosmology refers to systems of beliefs that explain existence and how it is to be lived. It is not reducible to theology, which is only a specific form of a cosmological relation to being–creation (the creation of being). This means that some cosmological relations are secular, such as biocentric narratives of being (evolutionism), whereas others are religious, such as theocentric narratives of being (creationism). Regardless of a particular cosmological orientation to being–creation, both remain political relations because cosmologies are foundational to human existence, attempting to “answer the question of who-we-are” (Wynter Reference Wynter, Ambroise and Broeck2015, 191).

Ultimately, cosmologies give ontological content to the question of the human being. At the level of the sociogenic code, it becomes an autogenesis—that is, self-making—or, alternatively, what Sylvia Wynter calls human “autopoiesis” (self-creation): “the autopoietic institution and reproduction of a new kind of planetarily extended cum ‘intercommunal’ community…by that of the We-the-ecumenically-Human” (Wynter and McKittrick Reference Wynter, McKittrick and McKittrick2015, 28). Borrowed from the Greek, “auto” refers to “self,” whereas “poiesis” denotes “creation.” Taken together, a particular “cosmogony,” or what Wynter calls “origin stories,” has the power to inscribe an “autopoietic” shift toward a new genre of human redefinition that becomes adaptively self-instituting (Wynter Reference Wynter, Ambroise and Broeck2015, 199). Therefore, the cosmological foundations of the Euromodern world offer critical insights into the contemporary constitution of race-making in America. In extending Wynter’s analysis, I argue the United States is an ethnonational regime or a white ethnostate. American ethnic democracy enroots itself in both biocentric and theocentric cosmologies of the human being, on which white supremacy is built and sustained and through which anti-Black racism is executed for the elimination of the Black subject to enable the continuation of modern civilization.

European modernity, or Euromodernity, began in the New World in 1492 (Dussel Reference Dussel and Barber1995; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2011). During the voyage for the Indies, Christopher Columbus foraged into the West Indies where he located Indigenous cultures and peoples and, with them, new lands and precious metals. This formative contact with non-European peoples periodizes a pivotal historical juncture and the inauguration of Euromodernity, by which I mean a constellation of rational systems, cosmological beliefs, and political relations that universalize or center civilizational development on the basis of Eurocentric modes of governance. Euromodernity functions as an axis of hegemonic power that organizes and governs the known political world. Within this Euromodern imaginary, the relation between political systems and the philosophical anthropology of the human being meant that “race made European Christians white and modernity European. The result was Euromodernity” (Gordon Reference Gordon2022, 83). Under this view, Euromodernity, as a political consequence, penalizes and pathologizes human difference. Yet, the first and perhaps most fundamental marker of difference was cosmological from which sprang other markers, including the racialization of non-European subjects. The ontological, epistemological, and political limits of these raced nonbeings—Indigenous, Blacks, and so on—would be subsumed under a governing cosmic civilizational code: Christendom.

Christendom, denoting the state of being Christian, mapped an ontological, political, and hemispheric geography. The 1493 papal bull decreed by Spain—Inter caetera—stipulated the capture of non-Christian lands in the New World for “property rights: what was known in the language of neo-Thomism as dominum rerum”—meaning dominion over things (Pagden Reference Pagden1995, 50–51). These decrees would later be known as the “Doctrine of Discovery” that facilitated a religio-political justification for Euromodern domination, executed through papal supremacy for purposes of New World civilization. Such a cosmology of domination would be reinscribed within the nation-state through Christian ethnonationalism as white supremacy in the United States.

Christendom became the anthropological metric against which the non-European would be adjudicated and on which the Euromodern world would be made intelligible as civilizational. This explains the so-called civilizing mission of early European colonial settlers. Consider Christopher Columbus mandating that Indigenous peoples “be made Christian” (Gunn Reference Gunn1994, 28). Inside this cosmic constellational orbit, Indigenous cultural practices became naturalized as social depravity: “It was Christian theology that located the distinctions between Christians, Moors, and Jews in the ‘blood’” (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2011, 8). European contact with Indigenous people inaugurated a cosmological grammar—understood in its specific form as Christ-centric epistemologies—which found its genesis in its Greco-Roman lineage. Amerindian subjugation emerged from cosmic condemnation: because “the Spanish considered indigenous religion demonic and theirs divine, they pursued a policy of tabula rasa, the complete elimination of indigenous beliefs, as a first step in replacing those beliefs with their own” (Dussel Reference Dussel and Barber1995, 51). This theological and later sociopolitical demonization concretized the ground on which the primitivizing of Amerindian indigeneity would form and inform the tectonics of Euromodernity, along with its praxis of violence initiated against what would come to be a lengthy, (d)evolving chain of non-European “uncivilized” Others.

The continuity of this cosmological, notably Christian, praxis manifested in the physical and political purging of non-whites to erect a white nation. Ethnic democracy executes a program of death against those who do not belong to a Euro-American nation: “It follows that a territorial political unit can only become ethnically homogeneous, in such cases, if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals” (Gellner Reference Gellner1983, 2). By institutionalizing white rule, the American nation-state enacts civilization expulsion and death on its Black Other. Christendom’s impact on US slavery is the primordial basis on which the racialization of the Black would institute systems of subjugation during the pre- and post-emancipation periods.

Wynter (Reference Wynter2003, 265–66) describes this movement between theologism and racialism—the merging of the “religio-secular”—as a natural evolution of Euromodern discursive practices: “The physical referents of the conception of the Untrue Other to the True Christian Self had been the categories of peoples defined in religious terminology as heretics, or as Enemies-of-Christ infidels and pagan idolaters.” Using “Enemies-of-Christ” as a symbolic marker justifying European conquest and later colonization not only illuminates its religious dimensions but also occasions the emergence of modernity as being expressly political and, later, seemingly secular. Mignolo (Reference Mignolo2011, 155) catalogs the ascribed enmity of the non-European Other as raising the specter of racialized monsters: “Up to 1500, Christian cartography left the unknown and the monsters inhabiting the margins…monsters were translated into barbarians.” In this matrix of Otherness in which from Aristotle (1995), on the “barbarian” was an apolitical category for those subsisting outside civilization and expelled from the arc of universal history, race and ethnicity conjoin as a new and perhaps more fatal threshold for demonization. Wynter (Reference Wynter2003, 295) describes these new, decisively Euromodern epistemic practices as orbiting “systems of ethno-knowledge.”

Importantly, the inauguration of race ethnicized the process of state formation in the Euromodern world. Modern states developed from colonial nation-states, around which the new, secular, and specifically ethnic terms of reference—white and Black—were but reabsorptions of the old, binary Christian order of civilized and barbaric. As Aimé Césaire (Reference Césaire2000, 33) notes, the political calculus of Euromodern rationality was based on “dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes.” These formulaic systems of domination were primarily cosmological, with subsequent ontological, economic, and political co-productions. Mapping the European order of knowledge illuminates a seminal truth: “Epistemologies are always derived from cosmologies” (Mignolo and Walsh Reference Mignolo and Walsh2018, 135). In what I posit to be an expanded paradigm, ontologies are always derived from cosmologies. For this reason, a new cosmological schema, in its expressly Christian order, emerged to constitute and valorize the human being as exclusively European Man, from which bore ontological fatalities of those non-European Others.

The movement from Christian to white became what both Mignolo (Reference Mignolo and Walsh2018) and Wynter (Reference Wynter2003) dub the “de-Godding” of rationality, leaving behind its ethnically secular remainder. In his “ethnohistorical reading” of Western modernity, Paul Gilroy (Reference Gilroy1993, 8-9) mapped the evolution from civilized to white: “Notions of the primitive and the civilized which had been integral to pre-modern understanding of ‘ethnic’ differences became fundamental cognitive and aesthetic markers in the process which… Christianity, and other ethnic and racialised attributes would finally give way to the dislocating dazzle of ‘whiteness.’” Whiteness as a condition for civilizational development led to the formation of a colonial regime in which ethnicization preceded democratization and ethnic democracy thus emerged.

Race Rituals and the American Racial State

In classical theology, especially in eschatological thought, theodicy—from theo, Greek translating as “god,” and dike, denoting “justice”—refers to the vindication of God in the presence of evil. Within Euromodernity, this theological justification naturalizes divine legitimacy as transcending the cosmological domain and extending to mapping physical bodies as raced specimens. Gordon (Reference Gordon2021; Reference Gordon2022) contends that a secularized theodicy is the problem of the Euromodern world; that is, Euromodernity’s theodicean grammar naturalizes the Black as being outside God’s divine order. “In Euromodernity, there was the natural and the unnatural. The latter simply meant that which deviated from the former. In Medieval Christian theology, the unnatural was that which deviated from Christ, which made it also evil or demonic” (Gordon Reference Gordon2021, 85). Under this theodicean view, blackness, separated from God, becomes ungodly and therefore demonic. Gordon continues, “Blackness is fundamental to the formation of European modernity as one that imagines itself legitimate and pure through the expurgation of blackness. It is, in other words, a function of the theodicy of European modernity” (87). The just warfare arguments of the sixteenth-century Spanish priest and philosopher Ginés de Sepúlveda weaponize theodicy as the basis for ensuing political practice, legitimating the genocidal wars against Amerindians. Euromodern theodicean grammar found its continuation and completion in Black oppression. To be sure, Black elimination registers as a foregone conclusion, vanquishing the evil, dark civilization. Thus, Euromodern humanism, as the negation of the Black Other, is not merely a matter of epistemic or ontological superiority but is also naturalized as a cosmological necessity, through which an ethnostate conception of the human being would give rise to white supremacy.

For instance, the “curse of Ham” became the primordial theological justification for Black chattel slavery by creating, separating, and naturalizing not only good from evil but also white from Black: “Since the early days of slavery and colonization the ‘curse of Ham’ had been invoked to connect the phenotype of dark skin with God’s displeasure, especially with black people” (Omi and Winant Reference Omi and Winant2015, 23). In biblical terms, the curse of Ham was understood to be a cosmological construction of blackness as slaveness, marked by its somatic linkage to Black skin. The impact of these theocentric scripts/scriptures lies in their evolution or the secularization of a Euromodern cosmology of the human being. The white became embodied as divine right and, later, as natural right—for example, the “Rights of Man” (Thomas Paine Reference Paine2015). And the Black was embodied as a nonhuman human, what Frederick Douglass (Reference Douglass, McKivigan, Husband and Kaufman2018, 119, 123) termed “an ethnological science” that sought to prove “manhood in a monkey,” which was translated, ultimately, into “arguments directed against the humanity of the negro.”

The movement from Hamitic blackness (religious curse) to Simian blackness (evolutionary collapse) coheres around a single justificatory practice: cosmology. Wynter and McKittrick (Reference Wynter, McKittrick and McKittrick2015, 31) bring both logics to bear, describing Africa as a “continent that…within the terms of the West’s religious and secular chartering cosmologies—has been seen as either the site of the biblical Ham’s cursed descendants or the site of the missing link between apes and fully evolved Western European humans.” The negation of Black humanity settled as a theodicean constitutional grammar of the American polity; it was rearticulated as an ethnostate with its enduring formulaic construction of blackness as a three-fifths compromise. These Euromodern logics would concretize ethno-racial relations between whites and their Black Other, whereby theodicy collapses into ethnic justice; that is, the justification of whiteness as God or, alternatively, a vindication of a white God. This, in turn, produces an ethnicized theodicean grammar, wherein the ethno-racial as a proxy for God deifies itself as the new natural order. The ethno becomes indistinguishable from the theo through a process of political reabsorption and religious substitution. Thus forms an ethnicized theodicean cosmology or a race origin story; that is, there is a biocentric mapping of the human being to reproduce raced specimens through divine election (salvation), which is later secularized as natural selection (evolution) in which whites sit atop an ethno-racial hierarchy of beings.

As such, an ethnicized theodicean grammar becomes a form of race reasoning predicated on a cosmological belief structure that renders politics intelligible and enforceable. It births a new cosmogony, a cosmologically construed human being—what Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1999, 25) observed as “the devil is ‘black,’” which is thematized “in picture and story, in newspaper heading and moving-picture, in sermon and school book.” The cosmology of the West thematizes a theodicean grammar at the site of everyday social life. Consider Frederick Douglass’s (Reference Douglass2003, 47) searing critique of the prevailing logic of theodicy: “If the lineal descendants of Ham are only to be enslaved, according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who—like myself—owe their existence to white fathers.” What Douglass uncovers is the internal contradictions of theodicy, wherein Hamitic people (Blacks) are reproduced not through divine punishment but via miscegenation and interracial rape. Douglass’s characterization of slavery as being an “unscriptural institution” denaturalizes it as political conscription, and not divine ordination.

When this ethnicized theodicy is enacted as political practice, it forms and sustains normative life and thus sediments as race rituals: repetitive discursive and material practices that shape daily political life, born from race reasonings. Race rituals religiously enact ethno-racial rites or practices that establish a political norm. Alexis de Tocqueville (Reference Tocqueville, Kramnick and Bevan2003, 349) thematized religious and civil life as constitutive of American democracy, engendering what may be construed as a civil religion: “In America, religion is possibly less powerful than it has been at certain times and among certain nations, but its influence is more lasting.” It is this durability that gives rise to civil religion, to faith in political ideals. George Shulman (Reference Shulman2008, 711) refers to the impact of civil religion as a founding facet of the American polity: “Freedom depends on a constitutional framework and on a horizon of belief or ‘civil religion.’ Tocqueville thus insists: ‘to be free, people must have faith.’” Yet, when political faith in the polity deforms as racial doctrine, ethnic democracy supplants democracy, constituting whiteness as civil religion: A “nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1999, 21). America’s “white religion” becomes both a cosmic and civic commitment (21). The cumulative effect translates as white rule: “White supremacy names not only a mistake about identity but a regime whose racialized claim to authority denies human finitude and the domination on which it rests” (Shulman Reference Shulman2008, 713). The regime of white supremacy is an expression of American ethnic democracy. Consistent with its theodicean grammar, race rituals read as liturgical acts—public ceremonies—of white rule, re-Godded to become “the new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time,” which is politically reinscribed as ethno-racial condemnation enforceable as Black criminalization (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1999, 18).

For example, the practice of lynching cannot be disassociated from theodicy. Collectively, the symbology of the burning cross and the lynching tree reaffirms an enduring theodicean grammar: “The Klan was as active as ever, striking fear with their hooded night marches and burning crosses….White ministers sometimes served as mob leaders, blessing lynchings, or citing the stories of Ham and Cain to justify white supremacy as divine right” (Cone Reference Cone2011, 76). The doctrine of jure divino (rule by divine right), secularized as political creed and enacted as racial dogma, becomes ethnic democracy’s founding principle. This is what Wynter (Reference Wynter, Ambroise and Broeck2015, 215) labels a “bio-cosmogonic story of origin,” later secularized as “human evolution,” which embodied the human being through a theodicean grammar. This gave birth to the “doctrine of a white man’s Government,” which is, in a word, a white ethnostate (cited in Du Bois Reference Du Bois1998, 266).

The religious iconography of the burning cross functions as a race ritual to mobilize and execute racial terror, in its Enemies-of-Christ warfare against the Black. George Mosse (Reference Mosse2022, 5) argued that nationalism “based itself upon the Volk [ethnic people-group] as an entity held together by its historical myths and symbols,” with its accompanying “cult and liturgy… . The rise of nationalism and of mass democracy … stimulated the worship of the people as a secular religion.” In the United States, ethnonationalism generates white supremacy as civil religion. As Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1999, 18) writes, “Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time.” The ethnonational worship of America’s white “True Christian Self” and its corollary demonization of its black “Untrue Christian Other” create a psychological pathology: a white god complex (Wynter Reference Wynter2003, 265). This cosmological complex diagnoses an irrational condition wherein the white misapprehends selfhood as godhood. Ultimately, the turn to theodicy explains America’s political worship of its white citizenry.

Furthermore, the cosmic justification of law, codified as “lynch law,” configures racial terror as absolute, incontestable, and eternal. This explains James Baldwin’s (Reference Baldwin and Morrison1998, 127, 14–15) cataloging of racial warfare as terroristic: “The terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures” springs partly from a “theological terror, the terror of damnation” that “is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.” Civil rights activists were terrorized by iconographic markers of cross burnings affixed to their lawns, signaling a public threat of an impending lynching on or off the tree. This “theological terror”—a confluence of pious panic and anti-Black violence—viscerally animates, activates, and agitates the white so that the mere presence of the Black induces a civilizational threat such that “the interracial handshake or the interracial marriage can be crucifying as the public hanging or the secret rape” (15). Racial terror’s reinscription as Black crucifixion is not incidental to American ethnic democracy but is a natural expression of its theodicean grammar, around which race rituals such as lynchings, rape, cross burnings, and even police brutality all cohere.

For instance, Ida B. Wells (Reference Wells and Royster2016, 56) argued that the genesis of lynch law cannot be separated from an ethnonational seizure of modernity, undergirded by an inalterable racial contract that sought Black civilizational exile: “The race issue in lynch law, the whole matter is explained by the well-known opposition growing out of slavery to the progress of the race. This is crystalized in the oft-repeated slogan: ‘This is a white man’s country and the white man must rule.’” This ethno-democratic claim discloses the embedded discursive formation of the Black-as-Enemy who must be eliminated from modernity (149). Taken to its logical conclusion, white supremacy, in its American ethno-racial formula, can only be supreme if there are “Enemies-of-Christ” to crucify. Lynching was the emergent cosmogonic remedy against the Black, which “beat, spat upon and slashed the wretch-like demon” (108).

These race rituals stabilized Euromodern Christendom on which American ethnic democracy rests. Inside this colonial Christian cosmology, the enmity leitmotif transmutes the Black into a monster for the purposes of physical and political elimination: with “the Negro actually eliminated from all participation in the state and national elections, there could be no longer an excuse for killing the Negroes to prevent ‘Negro Domination.’ Brutality still continued; Negroes were whipped, scourged, exiled, shot and hung whenever and wherever it pleased the white man” (Wells Reference Wells and Royster2016, 73). Ethnic democracy’s racial terror only partially resolves its civilizational fear of “Negro Domination,” because this existential terror is indivisibly cleaved to its own sense of national identity. Therefore, the continuity of brutality expresses a modern crusade against forces of “darkness.” This civilizational fear of the black, Negrophobia, diagnoses a pathological terror of “assailants who are Black,” seeing them as a threat to quotidian life; this fear therefore acts as its own form of rational, white justification (Armour Reference Armour1997, 4).

The early twenty-first-century empirical studies of whiteness in social psychology verify the Black-as-Enemy thesis as animating contemporary anti-Black racism: “Data indicate that White American’s initial (i.e., early or automatic) evaluation of Black men is that they pose a survival threat” (March, Gaertner, and Olson Reference March, Gaertner and Olson2021, 1002). The trigger-happy shooting of stereotypic Black targets, via law enforcement or white vigilantism (citizen arrest), is self-justified as a reasonable and rational act of white survival. Negrophobia is constituted by the ethnicization of both affect and reason, where fear and enmity express an unquestionable natural and rational reaction to Black monsters—Euromodernity’s racial outlaws. Put another way, the criminal is sketched in blackface within the forensic imagination of America’s racial artistry: “There is an old proverb, ‘The devil is always painted black—by white painters’” (Cooper Reference Cooper1998, 159). This is to say that an ethnicized rationality makes lynching incontestably reasonable as an act of civilizational and existential survival against ethno-racial enemies. Colonial Christendom apprehends lynching as criminal, but its theodicean grammar supersedes, if not regenerates, its own ethical system to defeat a greater evil: the monstrous Black assailant or what is otherwise reformulated as the “devil race” (Brendese Reference Brendese2022, 102). If, as Jürgen Habermas (Reference Habermas1998, 5) posits, “the secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: It is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future,” then European modernity singularizes that claim to only white futures while fatally foreclosing Black ones.

Euromodern race-making is intelligible only within the limits of an ethnicized rationality that shapes state-making at the base of a secular, political domain. American ethnic democracy orbits these constellations of cosmological justifications in its war against Black heretics. This war is sublimated into ethnic enmity: race war as holy war. Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, was often framed as the coming of the “Anti-Christ” who embodied an existential threat to American nationhood (see Harris Reference Harris2013). Conversely, white rule sacralizes Donald Trump as jure divino—God’s elect, America’s white savior (see The Economist 2023). Christopher Parker (Reference Parker2021, 58) dissects the rise and resurrection of Trumpian politics through what he names “status threat,” which defines “change that challenges the foundations of American identity: White patriarchal dominance.” This threat to ordinary American life, fueled by ethnocentrism among other forces, grounds itself in anti-Black racism. Taken together, this dispositive end reproduces what Fred Moten (Reference Moten2008, 187) terms “criminality of/as blackness.” This criminalization is not only political or ontological but is foremost cosmological. The Black Anti-Christ is a replication of Wynter’s “Enemies-of-Christ” and a political-cum-ontological restatement of what I term “Black-as-Enemy,” which, at its core, is an expression of American ethnic democracy and its governing cosmological code.

Yet, these contemporary citations link other historical antecedents. Consider the tragic 1930 lynching of Oliver Moore in North Carolina, which, nearly a century later remains unsolved. Moore, a 29-year-old Black man, was accused of raping two white girls. Early accounts of the lynching chronicled that Moore was “playing a game” with the girls, when “the mother observed on the girl’s dress a paste-like substance which suggested to her the nature of the Negro’s game” (Raper Reference Raper1933, 107). Moore was later imprisoned. However, before he could be tried, a lynch mob stormed the jailhouse, shot Moore, and hung him on a tree for the alleged crime of defiling white womanhood. This act was not done in secret but was rather a public ceremony with a full congregation of practitioners and spectators. The lynching functioned as a race ritual with accompanying liturgical acts: its carnival of terror, the white gaze, and its sermonizing of race justice. A newspaper published a photograph of Moore lynched to a tree with this caption: “Whole families came together, mothers and fathers, bringing even their youngest children. Men joked loudly at the sight of the bleeding body…girls giggled as the flies fed on the blood that dripped from the Negro’s nose” (115). The physician assigned to the case of Moore’s lynching determined that “‘the only regrettable thing about lynching a Negro is that we sometimes get the wrong man” (118–19). The local newspaper, Rocky Mount Telegram, even rationalized Moore’s lynching as a Back, not a white, problem. Its account, under the headline, “A Problem for the Negro to Solve,” reasoned that “as long as Negro men attack white women, it will be exceedingly difficult to persuade white men that lynching does not have its virtues” (111, 113). In the grammar of the American ethnostate, the blood of Black innocence atones the blood of Black guilt. In this fatal paradox, Black death is the reason for Black life.

The ethnicization of rationality treats a system of thought as absolute or unquestionable; consequently, this rationality is manifested as though it were the reification of divine reason. Race rituals—lynchings—are political performances of such rationality. Although the Rocky Mount Telegram’s ethical system ostensibly disavows lynch law, it upholds the Black-as-Enemy when Blacks violate the natural order. Paradoxically, white primitivism remains necessary to “solve” Black primitivism: the former eliminates the threat of a “bestial race” (Wells Reference Wells and Royster2016, 47). Lynching, as an act “defending the ‘honor’ of all white women,” symbolizes a sacred chastity interwoven into a larger colonial Christian fabric, in which “the ‘false chivalry’ of lynching cast [white] women as Christ-like symbols of racial purity” (52; Royster Reference Royster2016, 28). At the base of this ethno-racial warfare lies the cosmic divide between good and evil: the Enemies-of-Christ against the Christ-like, now secularized in its civic divide as guilty Black men against innocent white women. Ethnic democracy’s reliance on cosmology for birthing epistemology and ontology is indispensable to its governing creed. Lawrie Balfour (Reference Balfour2015, 685) argues that Wells’s decarceral advocacy for Black men results in de-Godding a “rape mythology” that “terrorizes African American citizens” and frames them, in every sense, as criminals. This rape mythology exposes a cosmological belief informed by white lies, falsehoods, and untruths that harden as the basis of Euromodern political practice. The rape mythology is race mythology, in which Euromodern political practice structures colonial relations among the ethno-class, giving expression to a religio-racial belief in ethnic democracy. Race mythology becomes colonial mysticism: an expression of the ethnostate’s political faith in enmity and elimination.

Angela Davis (Reference Davis2005, 42) contends that nationalism engenders ethno-racial antagonism reinscribed as political enmity: “Nationalism always requires an enemy—whether inside or outside the nation.” American ethnic democracy, understood plainly as white Christian nationalism, practices lynching as a race ritual for the purposes of conjuring Black enmity: “The Black targets of lynching—construed as representatives of a racialized population—can be seen as individual victims in the construction of a collective racial enemy” (50). The Black-as-Enemy is a cosmological remedy for the expurgation of blackness—it is thought to be civilizational restoration. This ethnicized theodicean grammar functions as an overarching justificatory practice for the performance of race rituals—lynchings and rape as racial-sexual terror—that come to sustain the ethnostate as the only imprimatur of modernity. The totalizing logic of race rituals (e.g., criminalization) charts the genesis of US statecraft, which is not only confined within conservative ideological precincts but also expresses “liberal law-and-order” carceral schemas (Murakawa Reference Murakawa2014, 155).

Indeed, James Cone (Reference Cone2011, 166) declared, “The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people.” Yet, inside the arc of Euromodernity, race rituals, much like the ethno-democratic practice of white supremacy, evolved. For example, mass incarceration and its racialized death penalty were reformulated as legal lynching: “The death penalty is primarily reserved, though not exclusively, for people of color, and white supremacy shows no signs of changing it” (163). Others charge that police brutality, in the longitudinal, systematized use of lethal force against Blacks, as modern lynching (Alexander Reference Alexander2012; Gorup Reference Gorup2020). The transition from and later transmutation of the lynching tree of the old order to the carceral regime of the new order nevertheless retain and sustain the criminalization of blackness, enacted through a recursive theodicean grammar (Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Bhandar2022; Muhammad Reference Muhammad2010). The modernization of lynch law through the carceral state and its law enforcement agents generates police brutality. It is the ongoing reanimation of Black elimination, from Oliver Moore to George Floyd and countless unnamed Others.

Oliver Moore’s tragic lynching offers new, informed ways to analyze and contest lynching, old and new. Our understanding of what the Telegram describes as the raced criminality of “Negro men” and the presumed raced innocence of “white women” exposes that anti-blackness does not merely reflect the failures of democratic governance and its racially vexed traditions of political formations (institutional or otherwise). Rather, anti-blackness evidences the emergence of a new symbolic cosmic order, which becomes the derivative basis for the sense-making of a political or secular sphere devoted to racialized mythologies. For example, Gorup (Reference Gorup2020, 821–22) understands “public spectacle lynching” as a “political ritual” employed for the constitution of the people or for “re-founding the demos as an exclusivist—and, more specifically, a racialized—political body.” Framing ritualized lynching squarely through the lens of popular sovereignty and its political traditions risks reducing it to a civic phenomenon, thereby obscuring its deeper function as a theo-political sacred ritual that consecrates racial hierarchies. This sacralization pursues the deification of whiteness, in which racial terror is not merely “political ritual” as a metaphor for state formation but also, quite literally, a religio-racial rite/right consecrating white sovereignty as divine authority.

Lynching is not an autonomous political phenomenon but an epiphenomenon revealing deeper cosmological roots. Rituals, by their very nature, unveil logics of public worship that elevate the cosmic as the only intelligible basis for the civic. Lynching, seen as a political ritual for people-making, elides its overarching cosmic imperatives, where popular sovereignty owes its imagination and manifestation to cosmological narratives of order. In reaction to Moore’s lynching, a white court official in North Carolina noted, “From the standpoint of state and legality it’s regrettable…but, personally I think it was a good thing” (Raper Reference Raper1933, 117–18). A police officer confessed, “The black son of a b— got what he deserved…Legally awful; personally admirable” (118). This rigid separation between the political-as-secular and the personal-as-sacred demonstrates how the cosmic renders the civic inadequate in fully constituting “white society” (114). Therefore, foregrounding cosmology reframes lynching as a performative act of religio-racial sanctification in service to an ethnicized cosmic order—a white god. Cosmic sovereignty (divine rule) enacts, legitimizes, and sustains civic sovereignty (white rule).

Cosmology and Carcerality: Modernized Race Rituals

The Black-as-Enemy embodies the quintessential evil as the racialized criminal subject: “The problem was racial criminalization: the stigmatization of crime as ‘black’ and the masking of crime among whites as individual failure” (Muhammad Reference Muhammad2010, 3). Further still, the linking of “crime and immorality as race traits” confers a religio-political justification for the pathology of Black existence in America’s ethno-democratic order (68). Under this penal logic, Black criminality can only be intelligible as moral failing. For example, following the bloody and ritualistic killing of Travyon Martin in 2012, George Zimmerman, who slew him, blamed Martin’s death on the moral decay of Black parentage: “They didn’t raise their son right… . It’s their duty to have an internal dialogue to see what they should have done better… . Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin did everything they could to capitalize on her son’s death… . It [the gun] is what was used to save my life from a near-death brutal attack by Trayvon Martin” (Greene 2018; emphasis mine). Black death is justifiable through the projection of animalistic “brutality,” even on a 14-year-old boy. Patterson (Reference Patterson1998, 243) observes that the “symbol of crime was not that it called attention to the disproportionate rate of crime among Afro-Americans but that it was simply a modern version of an age-old cultural practice of projecting Euro-American evil onto the demonic Afro-American male.” Indeed, moralistic registers only masquerade their true cosmological code: Black-as-Enemy or, contemporarily, Black criminality.

To exorcise this social evil, the American nation-state instituted criminalization as a remedy to Black pathology. Ultimately, ethno-democratic discursive constructions of blackness as demonic find application beyond the demonization of Black males. Recall the 2024 deadly shooting of Sonya Massey, a Black woman killed by a white police officer, Sean Grayson. Before Massey was murdered, she cried, “I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” to which the officer responded, “You better fucking not; I swear to God I’ll fucking shoot you right in your fucking face” (Glawe Reference Glawe2024). The police officer then shot Massey in the face, killing her. This lethal, discursive exchange unmasks theo-political scripts on race embedded in everyday American life, revealing the performativity of race rituals in the citadel of white supremacy, where Black dying becomes a sacrificial rite of passage for white living.

Although they are primordially social practices, race rituals often thread themselves into the politico-juridical fabric of the polity, where law-and-order regimes convert ethnic rites (religio-racial practice) into ethno-democratic rights (politico-juridical practice). The latter are an ethnostate disfiguration of genuine civil rights. This is to say, Officer Grayson, as George Zimmerman did before him, pleaded the right to self-defense against the demonical Black—symbolically and literally: “As is well known, Satan, like sin, is always portrayed as black. Satan destroys from within in much the same way that ‘domestic enemy’ was consuming and threatening the body politic from within the community” (Patterson Reference Patterson1998, 215). Carceral capture or death is the American ethno-democratic practice for the Black-as-Enemy.

Richard Nixon, in his infamous 1971 War on Drugs speech, declared, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive” (Nixon Reference Nixon1971, para. 1). The “public enemy” would soon be marked as an ethno-racial enemy, so that the criminalization of blackness came to constitute the crisis of the modern era. As Michelle Alexander (Reference Alexander2012, 57) notes, it was “a drug war aimed at racial ethnic minorities.” War necessitates elimination or, at the very least, conquest or capture. Nixon’s political campaign revealed political logics that undergirded racialized criminalization under the theodicy of law and order, in which religious adherence to civilizational order rested on the exile and elimination of the “villainous” Black who threatens its political existence. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, disclosed the ongoing campaign to criminalize Blacks: “The Nixon campaign in 1968 … had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… . By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news” (Baum Reference Baum2016).

To “vilify” denotes “to slander, speak evil of”—in a word, demonization. Furthermore, vilification requires villains as enemies. Demonizing Blacks as an existential threat to society stood as the basis for carceral systems of control and capture, a “plantation gospel” that transfigured into a prison gospel: lock them up. Ethnonationalism gives full political expression to ethnic democracy’s governing cosmological code. In the United States, white rule is Christian nationalism whereby race rituals effectuate anti-Black racism, instantiated through state-led institutional violence from plantation to penitentiary: “Nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. Niggers are, thanks to the invisible tar-brushes, forever niggers” (Anderson Reference Anderson2006, 149). The universalizing of Blacks as eternal “niggers” is the teleological imperative of American ethno-democratic practice: “The logical extension of the plantation and acts of racial violence….is the prison industrial complex” (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2011, 955).Footnote ² The plantation-to-prison pipeline exemplifies America’s devotion to Black demonization to safeguard against social evils, such as civil disorder.

Billy Graham, known evangelical leader and political adviser to Nixon, sermonized against the 1967 summer Detroit race riot. Black rioters protested police raids of Black-owned businesses and chronic incidents of police brutality. Yet, Graham (Reference Graham1967) understood the problem as Black lawlessness, depravity, and its “moral and social disease,” sermonizing, “The rioting, looting, and crime in America this summer has reached the point of anarchy… . The failure of our society today is its inability to maintain law and order… . We need new tough laws against the subversive elements that are openly seeking the overthrow of the American government … the sensitivity to sin is almost deaden.” Racial jeremiads were seminal to the founding architecture of modern mass incarceration in America (Dubler and Lloyd Reference Dubler and Lloyd2019). Black existence is sin, for which the penitentiary serves as a form of penitence (Foucault Reference Foucault1995). Therefore, Black criminality becomes a self-negation, for blackness already violates humanness just as criminality violates citizenship, where both become the enemy of the body politic: “The criminal … is therefore the enemy of society,” in which “the right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society” (90). Inside America’s ethnic democracy, the criminal and the Black collapse into the other to become the Black-as-Enemy. The penitentiary as a site of so-called penitence operates “at the juncture between the judgment of men and the judgment of God” (45). The carceral landscape becomes a battlefield of cosmic-cum-civic judgements and vindications. “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The Afro-American is not a bestial race” (Wells Reference Wells and Royster2016, 50). Black being, then, is racial penitence—a Black apologia for human existence. The political consequence produces a savior-complex in whites that is also tied to a corollary god complex: the white as divine.

Within this cosmic universe, the criminalization of race impugns blackness with social evil qua civil disorder, whose end is eschatological judgment. Historically, Blacks bore the burden of defiling the body politic with “riots,” in the same way modern Black Lives Matter movements are condemned. This ascription of blame was necessary for the intelligibility and continuity of mass incarceration: “The expansion of criminalization is always explained away by reference to a secular rise in violent activity—rape, murder, child molestation are the unholy trinity” (Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Bhandar2022, 186). From enslavement to imprisonment, the “unholy trinity” of sexual-racial desecrations became secularized as a civic function via law-and-order regimes. Thus, its governing cosmological code remained intact.

Michael Dawson and Megan Ming Francis (Reference Dawson and Ming2015) offer a materialist study of Black carcerality. They contend that neoliberalism, through a racial capitalist framework, best explains the American racial order and its intrinsic features of mass incarceration: “Analyses of the contemporary racial order are often predicated on an examination of political and legal institutions; we want to remediate an understanding of the racial order away from this type of institutional framing to a political economy framing that focuses on the interconnectedness of race and capitalist policies” (32). Although racial capitalism structures the criminalization of blackness, this framing remains incomplete because it treats Black carcerality as a primary effect of economic arrangements, rather than a principal function of an overarching cosmological grammar. Dawson and Francis rightly posit, “As with the Jim Crow criminal justice system, the state and private corporations have profited from incarceration” (37).

Yet, profitability is not an autonomous mechanism separate from a cosmic justification: instead, making profits is a derivative of it. This is what Wynter (Reference Wynter, Ambroise and Broeck2015, 190–91) describes as the secularization of reason: “a new secular (i.e., degodded, desupernaturalized) cosmogonically ratio-centric rather than theocentric answer to the question of who-we-are,” in order to describe the evolution of rationality away from the pre-modern theocentric narratives of the Church, toward the Euromodern political justification of the state, while nevertheless retaining its theocentric devotion to reason-cum-labor as a new godhead. Max Weber (Reference Weber2005, 38) terms this “economic rationalism,” by which he means “the idea of a calling and the devotion to labour in the calling has grown … which has been and still is one of the most characteristic elements of our capitalistic culture.” Economic rationalism structures Euromodern political life, which is predicated on a devotion to labor as the highest calling for rational existence. Thus, neoliberal rationalism is only a racialized intensification of liberal democracy’s foundational rationalism. Cosmologically reframed, the ongoing mass incarceration of Blacks is an evolving slavocratic devotion to capitalistic labor undergirded by what Weber notes as “the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism,” where exploitative labor is a “absolute end in itself, a calling” (25). The carceral state’s economic consumption of human labor becomes reframed as a sacrificial site for the ritualistic extraction of Black labor. Ultimately, an exclusively materialist understanding of Black carcerality obscures its metanarratives of cosmic justification as fully explaining anti-Black racism and white supremacy in America’s ethnic democracy, institutionalized through the prison industrial complex.

Counter-Cosmologies: Black Rebellion and Afromodern Counterpublics

If American ethnic democracy is an effect of Euromodern theocentric statecraft, then merely an ontological analysis of race will not fully explain anti-blackness in America. Calvin Warren (Reference Warren2018, 58) posits that ontological, not cosmological, terror anchors the problem of Black being: “Sylvia Wynter remarks that the Negro must stand in for ‘all that is evil’ to provide the axiological and theological grounding for the human, along skin difference… . What the author describes as an evil is the ontological function of black being.” Yet, the question of evil represents a cosmological grammar of the human being, in which whiteness is “good” and blackness is “evil,” now secularized as law-abiding “Johns” and law-breaking “Jamals.” This, no doubt, enacts devastating ontological casualties. Nevertheless, ontology is but an effect of the governing cosmological code, not its cause. Thus, Wynter (Reference Wynter, Ambroise and Broeck2015, 35) argues, “Our human orders of consciousness/modes of mind cannot exist outside the terms of a specific cosmogony.” I contend that Black rebels offer a counter-cosmology of the human being to contest American ethno-democratic violence as white supremacy. For Wynter, it is a “counter-cosmogony whose narrative structures served to utterly de-legitimate the then…politico-religious, cosmogonic and mythical-complex chartering of…empire and its predatory imperial conquests” (207). This counter-cosmology initiates world-making anew. It creates new origin stories removed from both the biopolitics of Simian blackness (evolutionary collapse) and the theopolitics of Hamitic blackness (religious curse). The revolutionary power of this counter-cosmology reinvents blackness by proffering new political futures. It is self-making as a radical democratic project: “Wynter’s conceptualization of autopoiesis offers a way for us to distend the dialectic … to recognize that our storytelling capacities are our most important reservoir for breaking, heretically, from our epistemological assumptions” (Alagraa Reference Alagraa2023, 283). It degenerates democracy’s ethnicization to regenerate democracy’s humanization through heretical praxis. Concretizing what Wynter (Reference Wynter, Ambroise and Broeck2015, 241) dubs an “Autopoietic Turn/Overturn,” means creating a new genre of human being, such that the Black becomes a human agent capable of reconstituting the political world for the project of American democratization and crucially, beyond it. The effect of this “turn/overturn” functions as a Black insurgency toward Afromodern futures.Footnote ³

Therefore, a counter-cosmological enactment serves as Afromodern agonism against Euromodern antagonism. This Afromodern agonistic turn, as the actualization of an autopoietic overturn, is what Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1998, 325) names “abolition-democracy,” which is defined by its contestatory commitment to absolute equality/freedom: “Abolition-democracy demands for Negroes physical freedom, civil rights, economic opportunity and education and the right to vote, as a matter of sheer human justice and right.” Angela Davis (Reference Davis2005, 91) deploys Du Boisian abolition-democracy as a decarceral schema for prison abolition to remedy contemporary Black criminalization: “The prison-industrial-complex is a result of the failure to enact abolition- democracy.” Yet, abolition-democracy also offers a counter-cosmological schema for Black life because it places political faith in the possibility of democratic transformation. Put succinctly, abolition-democracy is “the belief in the self-resurrection of democracy” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1998, 186). This self-resurrection is a political re-creation—retelling the origin stories of Black life for democratic living. Thus, Black self-creation functions as a counter-cosmology of the human being outside the parameters of America’s ethnic democracy.

Robin D. G. Kelley (Reference Kelley1996, 40) propounds a conception of “race rebels” as referring to ordinary but inventive agents who produce “strategies of resistance and survival, expressive cultures, and their involvement in radical political movements.” My interest lies with forms of irreverential resistance that generate Euromodernity’s racial heretics: “Christian Others—pagan-idolators, infidels, and Enemies-of-Christ as Human Others (i.e., Indians, Negroes)” (Wynter Reference Wynter2003, 332). Herein lies the heretical movements that fashion a unique form of modernist resistance, within which Black rebels forge counter-cosmologies for the formation of new being. For instance, Harriet Tubman, famed abolitionist known for her antislavery Underground Railroad, became transfixed by cosmological “visions and dreams” of emancipation: “Long ago when the Lord told me to go free my people, I said, ‘No, Lord! I can’t go’… But he came back the third time.…‘Harriet, I want you.’ I knew then I must do what he bid me” (cited in Humez Reference Humez2003, 260). Tubman disavows colonial cosmologies through divine summons made heretical in a world it seeks to undo, thereby inaugurating a counter-cosmogony of blackness that is anchored in radical discursive and material possibilities for being both Black and free. It is a commitment to freedom by way of the cosmic in order to generate the civic. The forceful contestation against colonial cosmologies embedded in the Euromodern world requires building a new political world, what I term Afromodern counterpublics. Nancy Frazer argues that “subaltern counterpublics” generate a public sphere for marginalized groups, whom society have historically and materially denied publicity. Using Habermas’s (Reference Habermas, Burger and Lawrence1991) conception of the public as a sphere for political participation through communicative practices, Fraser (Reference Fraser1990, 67) espouses “alternative publics” as subaltern counterpublics in which

What makes counterpublics Afromodern is that Black publicity has been the sine qua non of American politics rooted fundamentally in institution building. For example, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1998, 638) argues that Blacks inaugurated public education in the American South: “In the slave states, there were 3,651 colored children attending schools supported by the free Negroes… . The first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes… . Public education for all at the public expense, was in the South, a Negro idea.” Afromodern counterpublics mapped not only discursive corridors but also materialized institution building to advance abolition-democracy.

Afromodern counterpublicity is one among many instantiations of subaltern counterpublics, yet it is distinct in its seizure of places, spaces, and territories for Black freedom and the corresponding institution-building that would emanate from them. Afromodern counterpublics explicitly challenge the deification of whiteness and render possible other normative ways of human living by struggling for democratic life as counter-cosmology. They also territorialize space, transcending discursive corridors, where there is a claiming of material property; they bring about the decolonial seizure of colonial property (Vimalassery Reference Vimalassery2016). In this view, a counter-cosmology makes possible the making of Afromodern counterpublics by displacing and decentering old cosmologies of domination that once legitimized and eternalized slave law and lynch law. Afromodern counterpublics explode the prevailing Euromodern conception of Man by delegitimizing its storytelling narratives, its race rituals of white deification, and ultimately, its governing cosmological code of Black-as-Enemy, thereby self-instituting new horizons for Black political living.

In substantive terms, between 1850 and 1860 Tubman’s Underground Railroad fugitivity, along with her Civil War insurgencies, liberated hundreds of enslaved people. This meant the creation of new Black settlements, the generation of Black commerce, and the many other freedom movements that resulted from it. These Afromodern counterpublics offer a liberatory schema for intergenerational freedom movements. Such a world-making schema—distinctly Afromodern—was otherwise unthinkable had a counter-cosmology not supplanted America’s anti-Black religio-racial scripts that refused Black human existence by universalizing the deification of whiteness. This new counter-cosmology ushered in possibilities of a genuine Black political world, whether in Canada or the US North, one self-instituted by Blacks for all human beings. It invariably built Afromodern counterpublics toward Black and, ultimately, human political futures.

For Tubman the value in constituting Afromodern counterpublics, as spaces of refuge and freedom, lay in cementing ground for intergenerational continuity for Blacks within continental North America: “‘I did not take up this work for my own benefit…but for those of my race who need help. The work is now well started, and I know God will raise up others to take care of the future” (Humez Reference Humez2003, 106). This counter-cosmology rendered possible substantive political transformation through the seizure of discursive and territorial spaces for thriving Black habitation—it represented the possibility and lived materiality of creating and sustaining Black home life and, with it, the political futures for posterity.

These Afromodern counterpublics yielded tangible results: the construction of educational and infirmary zones for those liberated and those still in the liberatory struggle. The Richmond Palladium newspaper (1869, 1) reported, “She [Harriet] was indeed a ‘Moses,’ chosen for a specific work… . Her services as nurse and scout were exceedingly valuable during the rebellion… . In addition to this, she supports by her own labors two schools for freedmen at the South, supplying them with books and clothing.” Afromodern counterpublics as discursive corridors of freedom enacted a politics that was lived in material dimensions, all the while being grounded in a counter-cosmology that made institution-building intelligible and concrete. Heretical praxis, such as Tubman’s serial acts of fugitivity, concretized what she named “the land of freedom” as constituting Afromodern counterpublics and their social and political institutions (cited in Humez Reference Humez2003, 183). Afromodern rebels commit to a new cosmic universe, where political possibility becomes the sacred duty of human politics and, specifically, Black liberation.

Furthermore, Black rebels continued to invent a counter-cosmology that not only opposed extant Euromodern cosmologies of being but also led to their deracination—uprooting religio-racial scripts to establish a new political order. The Haitian Revolution illustrated how a counter-cosmology catalyzed a slave rebellion and, ultimately, the creation of the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. Dutty Boukman, an enslaved revolutionary leader in Saint Domingue, imbibed Haitian cosmological rituals—syncretic forms of voodoo—to precipitate the 1791 rebellion at the Bois Caïman ceremony, where the enslaved assembled to wage a Black rebellion against colonial slavocracy. Boukman’s invocations and incantations created a cosmic insurgency, transforming theocentric narratives into civic rebellion: “The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge! He will direct our hands; he will aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears” (cited in Fick Reference Fick1990, 93).

The Bois Caïman ceremony, a convening in the “alligator woods,” became a fugitive domain of tactical warfare and revolutionary upheaval. It precipitated the progressive decimation of French plantocracy through Black insurgent praxis. This geo-political site of resistance materialized Afromodern counterpublics, so that revolutionary discourses and cultural practices led to a political reinvention: from Black selfhood to Black statehood. The Bois Caïman ceremony of 1791 culminated in the Haitian Revolution of 1804. This revolutionary event had global implications across the Afro-Americas, including the United States, producing subversive hemispheric currents for the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831: “For Southern [American] whites, Santo Domingo [Haiti]…left a searing legacy—a fear of slave uprisings that would haunt them for decades to come…their once submissive ‘darkies’ satanically transformed into powerful…Haitian rebels” (Oates Reference Oates2007, 18).

Bois Caïman, an Afromodern counterpublic, gave form to a counter-cosmology from below that anticipated and precipitated radically diverse modes of Black contestation against systemic anti-blackness in the United States and beyond. Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon and leader of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, joined a long lineage of Black rebels within the Black Atlantic who forged Afromodern counterpublics through a creolized cosmogonic grammar. In this post-emancipation uprising against colonial plantocracy, insurgents were thought to have “Africanized Christianity,” setting into motion fears within the colonial regime that “Jamaica might well go the way of Haiti, which they all regarded as a failed state characterized by Black anarchy” (Moore and Johnson Reference Moore and Johnson2011, 3–4). Black rebels inhabited churchyards to urban yards to ground Afromodern counterpublics (Heuman Reference Heuman1994). “Cleave from the white and cleave to the black” was an oathing ritual among formerly enslaved rebels as a precondition to revolutionary struggle. Oathing rituals had a distinct counter-cosmological grammar: they “could be regarded as the military win of the Native Baptist Church” (cited in Hutton Reference Hutton1995, 198, 200). Ritualized oathing as a theo-political covenant through creolized Afro-Christian cosmological practices formed the revolutionary foundation for “Black anarchy,” situating Black self-rule as the universal struggle for decolonial state-making.

Within the US context, the Nat Turner rebellion exemplified how Afromodern counterpublics mobilized a counter-cosmology from below as a mode of antislavery resistance for democratic transformation. Turner’s confessions, following his capture and imprisonment, interpreted divine signs and symbols as Black crucifixion for human liberation: “And on the 12^th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened…. Was not Christ crucified… and that I should take it on and fight the Serpent…. I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons” (Gray Reference Gray1832, 11). Turner’s subversive schema—a site of sedition—forged Afromodern counterpublics as emancipatory corridors for enacting political and territorial reclamations. His rebellion not only sought to reclaim enslaved bodies as embodied sites of Black agency but also reconstituted and remapped land as grounded territory for Black self-rule. His reliance on canonical exegesis pursued a heretical hermeneutics; that is, a radical reinterpretation of religious scripts to inverse and subvert the political scripts embedded in the narratives of social life. Turner’s commitment to “slay [his] enemies with their own weapons” as a call to arms, much like the Bois Caïman ceremony that preceded it, revealed not only the forging of discursive strategies but also demonstrated an insurgent praxis born from a counter-cosmology from below. This critical linkage materialized counterpublics as insurgent formations, rooted in anticolonial seizure, revolutionary struggle, and the territorial disruption of US slavocracy. The outcome was not merely a new origin stories of blackness but also the enactment of rupture—an open rebellion against an already established sacred racial order. Turner’s insurgent enactment of a new geography of freedom became informed by a genealogy of Black rebellion, from Bois Caïman to maroon communities in the Americas; it established the foundation for those to come, including Tubman’s Underground Railroad, the civil rights movement, and even contemporary struggles for Black freedom: the decarceration of the Black subject through the Black Lives Matter movement (Taylor Reference Taylor2016; Woodly Reference Woodly2021).

Understood as historical complements, these events Du Bois names abolition-democracy, with its ongoing contestations and transformations of political life—from the abolition of Jim Crow (King Reference King2010) to the movement for prison abolition (Davis Reference Davis and Lubiano1997; Gilmore Reference Gilmore and Bhandar2022), as well as others to come. This counter-cosmology echoes what Vicent Lloyd (Reference Lloyd2016, x) terms “Black natural law,” which “calls us to recognize what is self-evident: that the labels of slave, or Negro, or prisoner do not capture the humanity of those so labeled.” If Black natural law undoes the a priori claim of Black-as-Enemy across its many epochal iterations (from slave to felon), then the value of a counter-cosmology generates new modes of Black storytelling about what it means to be a human being. Where ethnic democracy congeals Man as a Euromodern principle, abolition-democracy reopens the category of the human. A counter-cosmology enacts a revolutionary democratic politics: “In the canon of black critics of white supremacy…they see that overcoming white supremacy remains the condition of democratic possibility, period” (Shulman Reference Shulman, Kahn and Lloyd2016, 31). The outcome, is to “reconstitute a regime” (30). This reconstitution is world-making in scope and self-making in application. It is self-making that generates a new social order and, with it, new political subjects. Counter-cosmology, reinscribed as heretical epistemology, self-institutes democratic transformation by concretizing Afromodern counterpublics.

Given the colonial totality of America’s “white democracy” and its “white Christ” that forms the political basis of its ethnic regime, rebellious Black apostates offer the possibility of cosmic insurgencies as strategies for democratic renewal (Coates Reference Coates2017, 10; Cooper Reference Cooper1998, 142). In other words, the struggle against ethnic democracy toward a Du Boisian “democracy with Blacks,” as opposed to a Black democracy, reveals itself as a dialectical struggle. This dialectic generates rebels as heretical agents whose praxis replicates the unorthodox, breaking with normative social customs. The problem of coloniality is a problem of orthodoxy. Black rebels engage in heretical praxis by reproducing thought and action outside Euromodern belief systems, birthing a counter-cosmogony of the human.

Malcolm X’s (Reference Malcolm and Karim1971, 84) mobilization of Black Islamic thought, which was central to the Black Power movement, would later inform the Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States, as both offered a radical critique of America’s ethnic democracy: “The hour of judgment and doom is upon White America for the evil seeds of slavery and hypocrisy she has sown; and God himself has declared that no one shall escape the doom of this Western world, except those who accept Allah as God.” Black heretical rationality functions as desecrations against a sacred white normativity, born from a counter-cosmology that provides conceptual coherence and substantive materiality to insurgent praxis. Black mosques were symbolic and concrete sites of Afromodern counterpublic formation—spaces forged in the crucible of a new, revolutionary counter-cosmogonic code: Black-as-Human. The historical significance of Black Islamic thought, occasioning a cataclysmic counter-cosmological event, reverberated through the 1835 Ramadan Revolt in Brazil. There, Malês (from the Yoruba Ìmàlé, meaning Muslim) waged an armed insurrection against white colonials to bring about a transformed free society conceived in theocentric beliefs. “Victory comes from Allah,” as enslaved revolutionaries chanted, “Death to whites!’ (cited in Reis Reference Reis1993, 120, 147). Islam curated both discursive and concrete sites of resistance through ceremonial convenings—namely, Ramadan—as constituting Afromodern counterpublics. To be a Black Malê within the dominant Euro-Christian colonial order manifested not only heretical ideological disruption but also embodied heresy itself: it was heresy enfleshed.

Anthony Bogues (Reference Bogues2003, 13) posits, “When we use the word ‘heresy’ to describe the actors of the Black radical intellectual tradition, in what sense do we mean it? First, there is the sense of challenging orthodoxy…. For the black radical intellectual, ‘heresy’ means becoming human, not white nor imitative of the colonial, but overturning white/European normativity.” Heresy destabilizes, subverts, and displaces the governing cosmogonic code of Black-as-Enemy not merely by proposing an alternative political imaginary but also by enacting a rebellious, contestatory reality. Through dialectical transformation, Black heretical reason inverses the sacred and the secular. In abolition-democracy, blackness heretically retains sanctity because it is irreducibly human. Abolition-democracy animates an emancipatory politics, where freedom is not merely a cosmic event meant for the afterlife but a civic event where statecraft and institution-making become necessary for human political futures.

Black rebels do not only attempt democratic transformation but also contest Euromodernity as a precondition for democratic self-resurrection, “Black radical intellectual production is…a critique of, and oftentimes a counterdiscourse about, the nature of Western modernity” (Bogues Reference Bogues2003, 9). Black rebellion pursues both the deconstruction of US ethnic democracy and the reconstruction of an abolition-democracy through a counter-cosmogony of the human being: the Black-as-Human, sustained through Afromodern counterpublics to secure democratic egalitarianism. Within ethnic democracy, whiteness naturalizes as deification. Heresy becomes an ironic, if not paradoxical, subversion of Euromodern cosmological rationality. The Black American abolitionist David Walker (Reference Walker2015, 56) invokes Haiti as revolutionary recourse against American slavocracy: “Go to our brethren, the Haytians, who, according to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.” Walker (16) anchors heretical practice by interrogating American ethnic democracy and by making manifest a counter-cosmogonic interpretation: “Are we Men!!—I ask you, O my brethren! Are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves?… Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone?…What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself?” Reconfiguring the “God of the blacks,” Walker (18) uses heretical reason to construct a counter-cosmogony of being, wherein blackness constitutes humanness. His heretical grammar inscribes “colored citizens of the world” to conceptualize enslaved Blacks, even though the civic category of “citizenship” was the exclusive marker of white political subjectivity. The cosmic becomes a necessary condition for the civic, making theocentric rupture essential for Black self-sovereignty. Walker’s heretical rationality—an unyielding counter-cosmogonic grammar of Black citizenship—functions as a radical discursive and political reconstruction of blackness itself. This desecration of Man’s deification dismantles the political divination of whiteness as God or, its corollary, a white God. Such radical transvaluation from below materializes Afromodern counterpublics in which the Black political imaginary enacts everyday life beyond the domain and dominion of white rule.