ABSTRACT
Africana thought is an appeal to reality premised on taking seriously a point of departure often occluded in the reverie of Euromodern thought. Race and racism posed several difficulties for Africana thought. The first is the Euromodern tendency to conflate not only modernity with European but also thought, retroactively, with Europeans. Colonialism and enslavement consigned the status of property and subhumanity to the colonized and the enslaved, which left the logic of rationality and reason in the minds and souls of those who imposed such on them. Eurocentric history makes history European. Demonstrating that position as fallacious, as with the human question, particularizes European history and raises a meditation on history and historiography. The particularizing of European claims to universality is a form of argument recurring in Africana philosophy. It is in effect a critique of secularized theodicy as a form of idolatry.
