ABSTRACT
A comparison of the work of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon shows that anti-Black racism structures Blacks outside of both the dialectics of recognition and the ethical struggle of self and other. The result is a struggle to enter ethico-political relations and to establish the self both as “self” and “other.” Biko demonstrates how this struggle occurs within the historical context of white supremacy, that is, within a domain that forbids the very possibility of the political. Biko’s Black Consciousness brings these realms of the inter-subjective and political together in demonstrating how colonialism has left us with a situation that requires political intervention before ethical life even becomes possible. Black Consciousness is, as such, identical with political life under such circumstances. Moreover, those willing to take in the risk of political action within such circumstances are, as their opposition mounts, blackened by such a process. Part of Biko’s genius thus was to render politics Black. This proves a crucial means of contesting liberal modes of cosmopolitanism which maintain unacknowledged endorsements of white normativity. The cosmopolitanist fails to see that politics is at work in the illusion of transcending particularity. To insist upon Black Consciousness constitutes an intrusion of the political in the dream world of ethical efficacy. It is to blacken the cosmopolitan world, and to begin its path into Black Consciousness.
