Whence Disinheritance Holds: On Ida B. Wells and America’s "Unwritten Law"

In January 1900, Ida B. Wells-Barnett published “Lynch Law in American” in the liberal magazine, Arena. Wells-Barnett, who by the turn of the century was already well-established for her anti-lynching activism, brought into sharp attention American’s “unwritten law” which sanctioned beyond the crime of lynching and the thousands of anti-black murders across the country. If lynch law authorized the mob to take the law into “the hands of the people” through the means of abduction, captivity, and murder under the ruses of “the orderly processes of law, Wells-Barnett explained that the “work of the ‘unwritten law’” is to condone “the behest butchery … made a pastime. Administering (white) justice at “the hands of the people” as a right was also to instantiate and to reinforce the perversions of lynch law as a white sovereign truth. Thus, American’s “unwritten law” not only safeguarded the gratuitous ways in which lynching unfolded; it also authorized practices of white lawlessness over the legal statutes that would ostensibly offer citizenship and protection to free blacks and the formerly enslaved. By which America’s “unwritten law” barred any possibility of black freedom through the justified and violent means of justice and truth. As a specific point in case, Wells-Barnett notes the “short-lived and illusionary” promise in providing every citizen the right to vote and to exercise their suffrage. She writes, “Hardly had the sentences dried upon the statute-books before one Southern State after another raised the cry against ‘negro domination’ and proclaimed there was ‘unwritten law’ that justified any means to resist it. The profundity of Wells-Barnett’s deceptively simple statement is that America’s “unwritten law” remains unwritten yet functions as the rule of law even before the ink settles on its letters.

Lynch law was therefore not a call to simply suppress black equality, but a more insidious and nefarious avowal of anti-blackness—unwritten yet naturalized. This is not all. Wells-Barnett points out that there also need not be an emergency in order for there to be an application of this “unwritten law.” As long as “the negro problem” is bound to the entwined complex of desire and anti-blackness, the volition for black death will exceed and justify its extrajudicial character in the name of white power. What is “unwritten,” as law or otherwise, paradoxically determines the re-inscription of anti-blackness without having the possibility of the formal rules of law to stop it. Even in all of its familiarity and in all of its indeterminable phases, “the world looks on and says it is well.

The gratuitous scale and centrality of anti-blackness which Wells-Barnett outlined in her writing and anti-lynching activism unequivocally still stands in the present day. This being the case, Wells-Barnett’s struggles and claims for a radical anti-lynching movement—one that would abolish the gratuity of anti-blackness, a mark that was indelible yet unwritten in America’s psyche—remain as urgent political and philosophical reflections that continue to be raised by the question of blackness. If the horizon of Black Studies is, as this special issue attests, a continuous and self-reflexive looking back at its inheritances to imagine its futurity, either as a possibility or an impossibility for study, Wells-Barnett’s meditations on the disquiet of America’s “unwritten law” also speak to this double-bind of retrieval that labors incertitude. As Wells-Barnett asserted in struggle, the fight against white supremacy was also to confront the illogic of black disinheritance without reproducing nor reforming the ubiquitous language of white truth that rendered black existence as neither life nor human. Indeed, from what position can and does an anti-lynching activism be heard, when “as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water—a menial—the Afro-American is welcome everywhere. As a man— nowhere. And what is inheritance, or disinheritance for that matter, of struggle, a Black Studies, from this nowhere?

Even if this nowhere makes possible black freedom impossible, Wells-Barnett nonetheless committed to struggle against America’s “unwritten law”—a struggle which Black Studies also continues to take up against the hold of knowledge and questions of unfreedom today. Needless to say, lynching in its many iterations, be it the indictment of an accused young black perpetrator for an imagined crime that they did not commit or the unconscious wish to remove blackness from civic life, still takes place in the present. “Hold” here also clearly takes on several valences, but more specifically follows what Christina Sharpe has explicated as “the belly of the [slave] ship that births blackness (as no/relation). This imprisoning rift of the hold—the violent reproduction of anti-blackness, “birthing in the belly of the state: birth in and as the body of the state”—at once brings to mind Wells-Barnett’s conceptualization of an “unwritten law” while also amplifying what Jared Sexton has described in another register as “the banal, official state of disinheritance authorized by white supremacist law and custom to an overtly sexualized, criminal scene of abduction. Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching activist writings concern the limits of knowledge, political praxis, and recognition in encountering the hold of truth at the heart of disinheritance. In this further sense, Wells-Barnett interrogated the construction of the citizen and citizenship based on the ideologies of the state, but also the contradictory viability of black citizenship within the state’s grammar of freedom and rights that position blackness as nonhuman And yet, Wells-Barnett’s inquiries on black citizenship are more extensive than the viability of black citizenship; her concerns also magnify the double-bound aporia between blackness’ uncertainty and America’s “unwritten law.” Sharpe and Sexton are correct to remind us of “the official state of disinheritance … to an overtly sexualized, criminal scene of abduction” and the violent repetition of logics borne from the conception of slavery’s regimes of routinized terror. Likewise, Wells-Barnett insisted very early on how the official state of disinheritance and the truth of America’s “unwritten law” under the assertions of (white) popular sovereignty were tied to anti-blackness and racialized sexual identities. While Black Feminist theory and Black Studies scholarship have productively taken up the role of race, gender ideology, the mythologizing and policing of black sexuality, and lynching violence in Wells-Barnett’s oeuvre, her conception of America’s “unwritten law” in its specific relation to difference, myth, and representation have yet to be fully explored. This essay attempts to offer a few implications of that here with the provocation for it to be furthered in the study of blackness, sexuality, anti-black violence, and the philosophy of law.

For Wells-Barnett, the guarantee of a white sovereign truth was made possible by the ubiquity of black death through the perverse justifications of lynching. She explains, “Men who … start the ball of lynch law rolling for a certain crime, are powerless to stop it when drunken or criminal white toughs feel like hanging an Afro-American on any pretext. Lynching, in its precedence during the nineteenth century onward to the turn of the century, was not only the refashioning of white sovereign truths by the lynch mob, but also ritualized as a public affair in civic life by indexing its constitution through the exclusion of blackness. Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching writings pointed to anti-blackness as the fundamental absence in which the (re)production of whiteness takes hold of knowledge and truth and in turn could be apprehended as such. Even still, the national wide debate on the “issue” of lynching and efforts for an anti-lynching legislation, both among various states and federally, strove to uplift the project of humanism with “the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law … spreading its wings over the whole country. “Issue” is clearly marked here as dubious since lynching gained significant value and traction as a national moral and humanist concern rather than the explicit and ceaseless targeting of black Americans. In other words, as a moral dilemma threatening the status of white citizenship, state, and nation, opposition against lynching was often taken up as the humanist’s responsibility rather than as the struggle against the rampant pathology and structural condition of anti-black violence. If the operation of black disinheritance gave value and rise to not only lynching’s juridico-political stature and its legitimated violence but also the State’s enforcement for extrajudicial policing and violence more broadly, the most radical anti-lynching activism, which did not follow the reformist template of morality and humanism, brought attention to the ways in which black disinheritance was the essential condition to lynching, white sovereignty, and the State—all of which enabled the foreclosure of any possible legal protection, or otherwise, for lynching victims, their families, and their communities.

Central to Well-Barnett’s interrogation of the spectacle of lynching was her unflinching analysis of gender ideology and the moral panic which sutured antilynching reform. Her work illuminated the veil of the Victorian ideal of true white womanhood which also stabilized the pervasive myth of the black male rapist and the lascivious and available black woman. Wells-Barnett’s understanding and critique of moral panic and the ways in which it policed and gendered blackness signaled the anti-black sexual politics both internal and external to lynch law and lynching practices. As one example, her rhetorical analysis deconstructed the precarity to which consensus of inter-racial sexual intimacy stood by the false promise and protection of law for black people. Wells-Barnett pointed to the nature of anti-blackness as a pathological mechanism that in turn intensified the sanctions of whiteness as instantiated through notions of true white womanhood. She makes lucid the relation between sexual myth and lynch law in Southern Horrors. There, she locates the nexus of anti-blackness between the rule of law and desire as law in her critique of a white person’s breach of anti-miscegenation laws entwined with the mythology of black sexuality. She explains:

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the forces and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

… there are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-Americans who consort with their women

The virtues of humanism veil the ways in which whiteness polices desire and blackness while confirming law’s structural anti-black interdiction Moreover, the inapplicability of law’s promise of protection suggests that the specificity of the absence of law’s intervention conforms to the policing of white sexual heteronormativity and purity. In this sense, the consolidation of law’s anti-blackness from within obeys the pretenses of humanistic virtues thus displacing the ways in which anti-blackness underwrites white sexual heteronormativity including the formal institution of anti-miscegenation laws and law enforcement. The result is an inheritance of white virtue constituted by the disinheritance of blackness, namely the barring of black desire that is otherwise always already policed from within and without. If then anti-blackness underwrites the enforcement and policing of white sexual heteronormativity (meaning more bluntly that antiblackness is not separate from the discursive formations of sexuality), the anti-miscegenation laws as Wells-Barnett is apt to point out are regulated not only by the ways in which sexuality is mythologized, but that America’s “unwritten law”— which stages on one hand the occlusion of its anti-black interdiction and attempts to regulate sexuality on the other— is mythic in itself. And the separation of the two is necessary in order for what is understood as “unwritten” to thereby require its positive representation, or constitutionality, in law. Thus, law must not only forbid the co-habitation of inter-racial intimacy; it must also deny the intermingling of anti-blackness and sexuality as part of its own mythos. The separation of the two, however and in spite of their entwinement with one another, must be naturalized to “[become] a different object. As Barthes explains more clearly, “Not that this distinction is false or ineffectual, but it has become mythic itself. Therefore, even though America’s “unwritten law” is irreducible neither to anti-blackness nor to the ways in which sexuality was mythologized (whether indexed as white purity, the black male predator, or black female availability), it is still driven largely in part by its staged separation. However, Wells-Barnett’s point is not simply about the failure of law’s political representation, nor the failure of a politics of representation in general. Her anti-lynching work also concerned itself with how the differences of race and sexuality were nevertheless articulated insofar as America’s “unwritten law” continued to assert itself as written More plainly, how could the difference of race and sexuality be enunciated through and from a relation which has yet to be written and no less governs itself as law? This was in no doubt deeply troubling for Wells-Barnett. For even “without intervention of law upon Afro-Americans” who faced an encounter with lynching, before and of its event, the role of race and sexuality would be critical to the nature of the “unwritten law” as law. In the face of this evident contradiction and the ways in which its anti-blackness produces a complex of social and political relations, Wells-Barnett continued to contest lynching systematically against its many explicit and less obvious fronts.

Wells-Barnett was instrumental in galvanizing anti-lynching organizing by and for black women. Previous Black feminist scholarship has incisively explained the rhetorical device of lynching that underscored Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching activism as it simultaneously located the ideology of gender and sexuality in lynch law and the rituals of lynching As Patricia Hill Collins has explained:

Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s antilynching work clearly rejected both the myth of the Black male rapists as well as the thesis of Black women’s inherent immorality and advanced her own highly controversial interpretation. Not only did WellsBarnett spark a huge controversy when she dared to claim that many of the sexual liaisons between White women and Black men were in fact consensual, she indicted White men as the actual perpetrators of crimes of sexual violence both against African American men (lynching) and against African American women (rape)

The staging of guilt and proof occupies two sides of the same coin wherein blackness is unconsciously imagined as criminal and whiteness as the beholder of truth. Wells-Barnett illustrates the transcription of the unconscious desire that predisposes to police blackness as sexual deviance in the writing of not just law, but also in the writing of culture. White desire in policing blackness not only becomes a political and legal force. It also operates as a necessary conflict structured by and structuring within culture by a collective unconscious wish to adjudicate blackness. At the same time, Wells-Barnett shows us that which is unwritten and written of law is never just a rhetorical opposition, but America’s “unwritten law” and its laws of desire are both mythic in nature themselves even before law emerges within the signs of culture. In this further sense, Wells-Barnett’s work as a political philosopher—not just as a sociologist, journalist, and anti-lynching activist—have yet to be fully understood. Her interrogations on the legal sanctions and everyday cultural practices that police black life in collusion with lynch law urge philosophical problems regarding the conditions of the human, sovereignty, truth, and the ideologies of state apparati. Equally important, her questions on the psychic life of desire codified by America’s “unwritten law” pose an even more difficult challenge for radical anti-lynching activism. For, how does one disturb the signs of politics and culture when the enunciations within those relations of representation are irreversible as the state of desire itself?

If a white desire for freedom projected a mirage of law and culture which had yet to be written, Wells-Barnett nonetheless utilized the letter as a mirror to reflect the perversions of white desire in its manifestations through lynching, law, and culture. She did so even when the constitution of that very truth is marked by the absolute exclusion of blackness. Her anti-lynching writing and pedagogical orientation decisively reckoned against the official state of disinheritance that claimed her as necessarily excludable while also gesturing to the ways in which blackness is staged within the symbolic scripts of sexuality and the (il)logics of anti-blackness. Wells-Barnett’s conceptualization of America’s “unwritten law” gestures to the ways in which the interiority of political and civic life under the guise of whiteness were not separate, and in fact directly correlative, to the traumatic realization of blackness in the United States. That is to be policed inside and outside of one’s psychic lifeworld as a constant effect of one’s black nonbeing in America. And yet Wells-Barnett pursued and called forth a movement of anti-lynching activism without any guarantee of reconciliation—or perhaps even more unsettling, in the face of a world ensuring one’s impossibility of being.

Wells-Barnett was quintessential to the anti-lynching movement at the turn of the century including the campaign for the Dyer Bill. Though the bill, one that was largely supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Black women’s club movement, and other women’s rights organizations, was set-back a number of times with a filibuster in the House, it would bring about other anti-lynching legislative efforts Wells-Barnett’s understanding on the needed interrogation of the rhetorical force of lynching as part of modernity’s logic linked how the language of the state, law, and lynching also fused into variants of anti-lynching activism and with its larger political movement But as with any political struggle that mobilizes in mass, facets of the larger collective anti-lynching movement would lose sight of Wells-Barnett’s piercing attention to the consolidation of anti-blackness as part of the socio-cultural formations of lynching and reformist anti-lynching efforts. For one, Wells-Barnett comprehended that desire and freedom were “two of the most radicalizing forces in American politics at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as the most intimate conduit of knowledge, desire was one of the most unregulated realms anyone could inhabit. The language deployed in Wells-Barnett anti-lynching activism, namely in the production of newspaper and print materials, did not uncover what was unknown to the general public about lynching violence. Rather, it illustrated that which was naturalized as already familiar, in front of everyone’s eyes, and understood as an everyday state of affairs. Wells-Barnett’s radical interventions would productively destabilize the possibilities of political strategy for the larger anti-lynching activism which hoped for reform by illuminating the limitations of an anti-lynching politics that strove for a moral humanism. Indeed, Wells-Barnett’s writings contend that white women, in spite of their larger participation in the equal rights, emancipation, and anti-lynching movement, found it difficult to confront the concerns and to question the role of race in lynching as lynching continued to be perceived as a sexually moralistic dilemma. More to the point, as Goldsby notes, “with their all-too-frequent participation in and defense of lynching’s violence, white women chose more often than not to buy into the riches of unfreedom Wells-Barnett’s agitation toward both lynching and reformist antilynching practices is critical because it gestures to the ways in which the hegemony of gender ideologies such as true white womanhood would interfere intramurally among black anti-lynching organizers and participants. With this, these dominant modes of thought on gender and morality would push anti-lynching legislative efforts toward a humanist rhetoric of colorblindness, a mask in itself that deflected and distorted the law of anti-blackness at the heart of American civil society and history. Wells-Barnett’s frustration is not unknown, and she, herself, reported on the dangers in which moral and gender ideologies would and did fracture antilynching efforts organized by the black community. It is worth noting Goldby’s description at length:

Wells’s frustration is explicable; beneath it lie chagrin and embarrassment too. Why would African Americans not contribute to a cause meant to protect and save their lives? However, Wells’s tally of the [Anti-Lynching] bureau’s ledgers underestimated the power of her critique’s scope. Because if she was right—if black life was so precariously dependent on the fears of white women as well as the anxiety-ridden animus of white men; if the common sense of white people could not conceive that the mob murders of black people were unjust and needed to be stopped— then black people were not (and, maybe worse, could not be) free, and their efforts to inform themselves about the nation’s news implicated them in the violence that threatened them on so many sides. Indeed, it must have been daunting for Wells’s African American readers to absorb her message. Perhaps the Anti-Lynching Bureau’s membership rolls and publication funds plummeted so low by 1902 because the truth about lynching as Wells knew it was more than sobering. It was traumatizing

As Goldsby notes, Wells-Barnett’s writings on the psycho-social positioning of blacks did not distance the reality of the violent double-bind that situated African Americans and their participation and cognizance of anti-lynching resistance. Wells-Barnett’s work was incisive to the nature of anti-black violence in lynching and troubled the ways in which morality and humanity circumscribed both lynching and reformist anti-lynchings’s myopic narratives. Her writing could not be avoided because she reminded her readers point blank of the difficulty in registering the immense scale of lynching’s violence, but also because she spoke of the familiar(ized) trauma of being folded into the violence of lynching and language— while simultaneously realizing that the axioms of language cannot protect oneself, it would only secure a violation, if one was black. To speak and read of lynching was indeed (re-)traumatizing. That is, and to reiterate Goldsby’s point, “if the common sense of white people could not conceive that the mob murders of black people were unjust and needed to be stopped—then black people were not (and, maybe worse, could not be) free.” To actively be involved in radical anti-lynching resistance was a decision to sit directly in the belly of the beast that consumes you. At stake is a basic question of resistance and movement but one seemingly bound to impossibility: what is a real anti-lynching resistance when one’s (black) being was completely illegible in the eyes of law—if not an absence already in its imaginary?

In spite these well-understood uncertainties, anti-lynching activism, particularly in their legislative efforts, took on varying fronts and tactics. The concern here is, again, not so much what the differences were nor how they were pursued and taken on by various anti-lynching struggles Instead, it is to suggest that in Wells-Barnett’s continuous struggle and her anti-lynching activism, she also pursued a type of immanent critique while knowing the aporetic ways in which blackness’ non-presence becomes an instrument to labor as “unwritten law” in the political imaginary of the nation and state. On one hand, Wells-Barnett demonstrates how raising the “Negro problem,” or the question of blackness, would delegitimize the political significance and weaken legal claims in the struggle of anti-lynching activism. On the other hand, her inimitable writing and commitment to the struggle of black freedom also reveal taking a leap into the caverns of a national consciousness that refused one’s being when black. This in itself is also a paradox: to take a step when and where it cannot be made simultaneously against the machinations that strips one of their agency. I do not believe this leap of Wells-Barnett is a process of re-signification nor even re-tooling of the master’s discourse. However, it does appear to be less about the common activist proclivity to be heard and seen within the rubrics of the state and the concern of strategy and tactic than it is a question of (im)possible expression and the irrepresentability of blackness in the collective political imagination. In other words, Wells-Barnett in her own leap in the fight against white sovereign truth also seems to concern the (im)possibility of black expression especially in regards to one’s own defense against anti-black lynching and in the face of America’s “unwritten law” of antiblackness as a structural condition that positions blackness “as no/relation. It is also in this regard that Wells-Barnett’s work poses a philosophical problem for political thought. For anti-blackness is not merely an outcome from a decisive procedure of racist laws and practices, but that anti-blackness is the very structure that links one’s (non-)being inextricably to power, language, and the very motor of the imagination animating both to work together in the power of language and the language of power. The arbitrary articulation of race, as it precedes yet fortifies the “unwritten law” as positive law, makes this point clear. That is, even in spite of blackness’ desirable absence, anti-blackness appears to fuel the mythification of America’s “unwritten law” in a real way through law’s symbolic practices that actively and persistently commit to the repudiation, lynching, policing, and murder of black people.

Wells-Barnett stood and wrote nonetheless with the danger of her own thought against all that stratifies her and black people as an impossible self, as a point of negation. If Wells-Barnett’s political and pedagogical work interrogated the ways in which blackness and sexuality were seized and made to labor for white sovereign truth and freedom, her work also engendered a reading of that hold and the radical lines of inquiry that emerge—a singular type of insight that could only unravel from the knot of a forged disinheritance and dispossession, an imagining of an all-together resistance that has yet to come. Wells-Barnett’s return to an intuitive reading, a reading as always a way of return, was powerful in its instruction in that it was irreducibly dialogic unfolding the dual relationship between racist myth and white sovereign truth to shed light on the caesura of blackness that constitute the meeting place of the two. Both her work in writing and reading as a way of study worked against the co-optation of hegemonic knowledge production all the while inaugurating a self-reflexivity of an apparent justice in civil society that could not imagine a justice beyond the duties of a racist state apparatus. In the process, there is an unprecedented flash of reflexivity in which justice reflects back a turn away from the racial state system, not through the incorporation and reflection of a self outside of the racist imagination of the state, but through the radical uncertainty of one’s racialize difference.

In this regard, we can consider Wells-Barnett’s pedagogy then giving glimpse to the ways in which Black Studies in the present within its longstanding tradition of critical thought often takes charge in crystallizing the moment of reflexivity through which difference is addressed. Doing so, it continues to confront and take the task of examining the infinite ways violence and desire profoundly shape structures of black unfreedom even, or especially, when political thought appears at a moment of crisis. Wells-Barnett offers countless examples of the conditions of black disinheritance regulated by (white) lynch law and through the ruses of America’s unwritten law (the unconscious justification of black death). At the same time, she extends her ongoing questioning of America’s “unwritten law” to move beyond the politics of representation—even at the horizons of justice. For if the very writing of law is always already racially discriminatory, what can the offerings of justice provide without the existing axioms of justice itself to be totally upended? This would require a radically different idea of freedom untenable within the political imagination of the state. If the language of reform and humanism fail to achieve such a reimagining, the total refusal of a dominant political imagination or capacity to imagine the unimaginable, the only alternative to take hold of America’s “unwritten law” would have to be a real revision of its unwritten grammar, an abolition of its mythic uncertainty, and not simply its reversal from positive law’s representation as constitutional.

In a paradoxical way, Wells-Barnett’s notions of justice and freedom are perhaps the most substantial and ongoing, yet incomplete, political and philosophical questions inherited in the study of blackness and anti-blackness and in the field of Black Studies more generally. If these questions remain incomplete, it is not because these questions have yet to be attended to. On the contrary, as Wells-Barnett herself suggests the political praxis of thought by those who are victim to the “unwritten laws” are, in particular, the most demystifying because they are the ones who grasp most intimately the un-answerability of a death trial that awaits at the hands of lynching and dream of a revolution that cannot be figured nor apprehended by the existing grammar of American unfreedom and its mirage. For even if one were to follow the promise of a fair trial, the existing structures of law would have to undergo a radical and real revision, an abolition of that unwritten law that is nonetheless fundamentally threaded through and through within the fabric of American life. Black Studies continues to contend with this indeterminable struggle which is one without sense of beginning nor end while knowing the arrival of uncertainty that will arise in its ever waking constellation. That said, the task of activism nor study is never simply easy. As a journalist asked Wells-Barnett, “what, then, can we do?” She responds:

Give us a hearing, and your sympathy, and say so. It will be for the fact cannot be denied, and such facts cannot stand the light of day. Or am I go to back and tell my poor people that the only way to get the ear of the civilized world is to learn chemistry enough to make bombs

And so, Wells-Barnett leaves us in Black Studies with the facts of facts “that cannot be denied” yet “cannot stand the light of day.” The stone cold problem is not one of choice nor agency when the civilized world preserves black suffering and the nature of black disinheritance is unthought. For, as David Marriott explains lucidly:

… inheritance (for the Black subject) answers not a simple claim, nor even to a straightforward acceptance, but to a kind of forced choice in which the ambiguity of any claim to one’s birthright must involve the acceptance of one’s specific, and exclusionary inheritance

He continues:

… all the while knowing that one is choosing one’s disinheritance. One is never in the position, as a Black subject, of being the one who freely chooses not to choose, for one’s political conscience and consciousness begins in the uneasy awareness that a racial inheritance is the price of one’s social being

In this final sense, the interrogation of America’s “unwritten law” of anti-blackness is never just a case nor call for better representation in law through which legal interpretation depends—but remains an ethical and politico-philosophical problem of how the dissimulation of disinheritance is inextricably linked to one’s black nonbeing in the world as a structural condition. Is there “chemistry enough” that would produce the explosions necessary to undo the psycho-social bond between the civilized world and black disinheritance? We have yet to see its abolition.