Grand Rising Family!
As a research scientist working within the framework of Africana phenomenology, I’ve spent years examining the intersection of consciousness, culture, and structural power. What I’ve discovered—and what many scholars before me have documented—is that anti-blackness isn’t merely a social attitude or political stance. It’s a deeply embedded neurobiological condition that has shaped American institutions, psychology, and law for centuries.
My latest conversation with anti-blackness scholar, Dante King, on the Diagnosing Whiteness Podcast, discussed the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, bringing this conversation back to the forefront. However, many of us in the Black intellectual tradition have been sounding these alarms for generations. Kirk, a white nationalist figure who built his platform on racial grievance, became wealthy peddling hatred through his organization Turning Point USA. His words weren’t just inflammatory—they were symptomatic of something far more insidious operating within the American psyche.
The Psychogenetic Framework of Anti-Blackness
Dr. Frances Cress Welsing introduced us to the concept of psychogenetics, which examines how racist ideologies become neurologically wired into subsequent generations. When we talk about anti-blackness from this scientific lens, we’re not discussing abstract prejudice floating in the ether. We’re identifying a form of neurobiological programming where repeated exposure to racist narratives, stereotypes, and legal practices literally ingrains neural circuits that automatically associate Blackness with danger, inferiority, and unworthiness.
Think about that for a moment. This isn’t hyperbole—it’s neuroscience meeting critical race analysis. The concept of “white people” was invented as a matter of U.S. law in 1681, created in response to Bacon’s Rebellion. What many folks don’t realize is that it only takes three generations of repeated behavioral patterns for something to become genetically embedded. We’re looking at the epigenetics of whiteness, where trauma and ideology literally store themselves in the nervous system.
Consider this: we’re talking about an ideology that predates the Constitution by a hundred years, one that preceded the first meeting of Congress. The so-called Founding Fathers—Jefferson, Lincoln, Johnson—were birthed directly into this framework of whiteness and anti-blackness. They didn’t create it from scratch; they inherited a fully formed system of thought that had already calcified into law, custom, and consciousness.
Historical Evidence From Presidential Voices
Let me share something that might shock some readers, though it shouldn’t surprise those of us who study these patterns. Thomas Jefferson, in his own words, stated: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only that the blacks were originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances are inferior to the whites in the endowments, both of body and mind.”
This wasn’t just personal opinion—this was official political positioning. Jefferson also claimed that Black people secreted less through their kidneys and more through skin glands, suggesting we sweat more but somehow urinate less. The absurdity would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic and consequential. Here you have enslaved people denied basic hygiene and humanity, and their captors using their enforced condition as evidence of biological difference.
Abraham Lincoln, often mythologized as the Great Emancipator, declared: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” He explicitly stated his belief in white superiority and his opposition to Black people serving as voters, jurors, or holding office. The Emancipation Proclamation was political strategy, not moral awakening.
President Andrew Johnson put it even more bluntly: “As long as I’m president, this will be a country for white men and a government for white men.”
These aren’t outliers or anomalies. This is pattern, practice, and policy stretching across centuries.
The Charlie Kirk Phenomenon: Old Wine, New Bottles
Now fast forward to Charlie Kirk, who built his entire platform around statements like:
- “If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified”
- “The war on white people continues”
- “Blacks in America did not have the same rights they have today. Data shows they were actually better in the 1940s”
- “George Floyd was a scumbag”
What strikes me as a phenomenologist is the obsessive fixation—the psychological preoccupation with Blackness as threat, as inferior, as problem. Kirk wasn’t college-educated, yet he became massively wealthy through this particular form of racial grievance performance. Why? Because anti-blackness isn’t about education or facts. It’s about maintaining a psychological structure that centers whiteness as valuable and Blackness as its negative counterpart.
If you close your eyes and listen to Kirk’s statements alongside those presidential quotes, you literally cannot distinguish between them. They’re operating from the same psychosocial dysfunction, the same hateful ideology transmitted across centuries. This isn’t coincidence—it’s psychogenetic inheritance.
The Architecture of Anti-Blackness
Anti-blackness, as I define it through my research, functions as:
- A legal system embedded in American jurisprudence
- A social system organizing relationships and hierarchies
- A cultural-psychological framework living within the collective psyche
- An economic system driving global capital through labor exploitation
- A belief system justifying dehumanization
The 1790 Naturalization Act codified that only “free white persons” could become citizens. This wasn’t just policy—this was the psycho-political foundation of American identity. Whiteness became a political stance, a group identity with presumed superior value. Everything that followed built upon this architecture.
Dr. Cress Welsing demonstrated that white American universities—Harvard (founded 1636), Yale, Columbia, Rutgers, University of Pennsylvania—all taught disciplines centered on Black inferiority. They offered entire courses of study in what they called “physiognomy,” the supposed science of determining character and intelligence through physical features. The sheer arrogance and narcissism required to believe oneself the ultimate authority on human value is staggering, yet this was considered legitimate scholarship.
This legacy continues today. These same institutions now celebrate diversity while their foundational curricula was built on our debasement.
Neurobiological Racism: How the Brain Gets Wired for Hate
Here’s where the science gets particularly interesting. Racism operates like neurobiological programming. Schools, media, laws, and institutions create repeated exposures that ingrain specific neural pathways. The brain, seeking efficiency, creates automatic associations—shortcuts that bypass conscious reasoning.
This explains why facts often fail to change racist minds. You’re not arguing against opinions; you’re confronting hardwired neural architecture built over generations. The stress responses, the fear reactions, the disgust associations—these aren’t chosen consciously. They’re trained into the nervous system through cultural immersion from birth.
Dr. Bobby Wright and others in the Black Psychology Movement understood this decades ago. They recognized that we were dealing with something beyond mere bias—we were confronting a form of mass psychological conditioning that affected cognition, emotion, and behavior at fundamental neurological levels.
The False Consensus Effect and White Cognitive Dissonance
There’s a concept in decision theory called the false consensus effect bias—the assumption that everyone perceives reality the way you do. This explains the genuine confusion many white people express when confronted with structural racism. From their neurologically conditioned perspective, the world really does look neutral, fair, meritocratic. Their brains have been trained to see their advantages as earned and our disadvantages as deserved.
This cognitive dissonance isn’t accidental. It’s protective. Facing the truth—that their wealth, status, and safety rest on centuries of organized violence and theft—would require psychological restructuring too painful for most to undertake.
Where We Go From Here: Reclaiming Our Phenomenological Existence
As Black people, we must recognize that we’ve been forced to know ourselves only through white institutions, white language, white logic, and white cultural frameworks. We’ve had to assimilate for survival, but that assimilation has costs. We’ve internalized aspects of our own debasement, adopted value systems that weren’t designed with our liberation in mind.
The work ahead requires several commitments:
First, we must study our own intellectual traditions rigorously. Africana phenomenology offers frameworks for understanding consciousness, existence, and meaning-making outside Eurocentric paradigms. Thinkers like Fanon, Du Bois, Wynter, and Moten have charted paths forward.
Second, we need to build institutions that reflect our values rather than constantly reforming theirs. Economic independence, educational autonomy, cultural production—these aren’t separatism, they’re survival.
Third, we must protect our psychological and spiritual health. Understanding anti-blackness as psychogenetic helps us externalize what’s been done to us rather than internalizing it as something wrong with us. Nothing was wrong with us before contact. Much is wrong with us now precisely because of what contact required for survival.
Your Next Steps Matter
I encourage you to explore these frameworks further. Read the primary sources—not just summaries, but the actual texts where these ideas were developed. Study the laws, the court cases, the presidential statements. See the patterns for yourself.
More importantly, begin the internal work of decolonizing your own consciousness. Notice when you’re using white supremacist frameworks to judge yourself or other Black people. Notice when you’re seeking validation from institutions built on our subjugation. This isn’t about blame—it’s about liberation.
Share these insights with your community. Have difficult conversations. Build study groups. Create spaces where Black psychological freedom becomes possible, where we can imagine and practice ways of being that don’t center whiteness as the reference point.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk removed one voice, but the system that created and rewarded him remains intact. Our work isn’t to mourn his passing or celebrate it—our work is to dismantle the psychogenetic architecture that made his platform profitable and his ideology acceptable to millions.
Visit my research portal to access full studies, reading lists, and community resources for understanding Africana phenomenology and its applications to contemporary struggles. Join our monthly webinars where we break down these concepts and build collective analysis. Your consciousness is the battleground. Arm yourself with knowledge, with community, with truth.
The question James Baldwin posed still echoes: Why do they need a n***** in the first place? The answer reveals everything about the psychological infrastructure of whiteness—a construction built on our debasement because without us as the bottom, their entire house of cards collapses.
Family, the work continues. Our ancestors survived worse. We will too. But survival isn’t enough—we’re aiming for liberation, for thriving, for the fullness of our phenomenological existence finally, blessedly, free.
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