Miron Clay-Gilmore

Leonard Harris’s “racism as necro-being” thesis, its theoretical contours, and actuarial methodology is a brilliant philosophical account of racism which posits the phenomenon as a polymorphic agent of death that confers upon its victims the status of the living dead. Though Harris’s thesis relies on arguments against attempts to understand racism as a logos or logic, there exists an explanatory account of racism which is nevertheless complimentary with his actuarial approach: the racism-as-war thesis. Indeed, there is a deep conceptual harmony between the racism as necro-being and racism-as-war thesis (despite their structural asymmetry) regarding: (a) the plasticity of racism’s expression and (b) the centering of war, militarism, and death as its absolute indicators. Harris’s overall philosophical aim—to depict racism as a killing machine—is ultimately strengthened when yoked to an explanative account of the basic mechanisms that underly the pattern to be depicted, which the racism-as-war thesis can supply. On this basis, this essay will argue for a synthesis of these two theses.

This essay introduces the special issue Contemporary Issues in Black Philosophy: Pluralism in Methodological Approaches and advances a metaphilosophical argument about method in Black philosophy. We distinguish the question of what makes philosophy Black from the question of what counts as philosophy, and argue that conflating these questions produces a misleading methodological monism. Attention to the difference between substance and method shows that methodological choice must be guided by the problems under investigation. We defend a disciplined pluralism according to which methods are justified by problem-fit rather than by allegiance to a single tradition. The essays in this collection are a demonstration, not a discussion, of methodological pluralism and its benefits to philosophy.

The development of AI and the cyber-physical systems that typify it has yet to be theorized as a product of shifts in Western epistemology, or have its historical links to the American military-technological revolution of the mid-20th century explored in any rigorous manner. To fill this gap in knowledge, we argue that Sylvia Wynter's framework of MAN reveals the philosophical underpinnings of and links between Western liberal humanism, modern scientific inquiry, and racist philosophical anthropology that can explain the contemporary symbiosis between these and the application of new predictive, data, and AI technologies today by Western-Liberal security apparati.

This chapter argues that the strategic and cognitive foundations of the United States’ 21st-century Global War on Terror (GWOT) were not a novel departure but were developed domestically during the state’s internal counterinsurgency against Black liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It posits that the GWOT’s signature tactics—the preemptive targeting of “military-age males” and the use of computerized mass surveillance—represent the intense externalization of a long-standing American practice of racialized social control, rather than a foreign invention. The analysis begins by identifying the core characteristics of post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism: a deeply gendered ideology framing intervention as a civilizing mission to protect women, the concomitant categorization of the “military-age male” as a preemptive threat, and a massive investment in computational systems for mass surveillance and predictive modeling. It then traces the genealogy of these strategies back to the nation’s foundational structure as a counter-insurgent state, established through the extermination of Indigenous populations and the brutal governance of enslaved Africans. This internal war, characterized by gendercidal violence and social engineering, reached a climax during the Black Power era. The FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign against the Black Panther Party and allied groups served as the crucial laboratory for modern counterterrorism. Here, the state perfected a dual-track strategy of neutralizing prominent Black male leaders while subjecting the broader Black civilian population to pervasive community surveillance. Ultimately, the chapter aims to force a re-evaluation of the American state, contending that the distinction between foreign battlefield and domestic homeland is a legal fiction. The capabilities demonstrated in the GWOT are a historically embedded structural capacity, refined over centuries of managing Black populations and simply redirected to new theaters. The battlefields of the GWOT were, in essence, prefigured in the founding crucible of American slavery.

Scholars have observed that AI image generators often produce racist and sexist results. In fact, AI systems have been shown not only to reproduce common racial stereotypes but sometimes to amplify biases present in the real world. Overall, images created by AI often include biased and stereotypical traits related to gender, skin color, occupations, nationalities, and more. However, scholars have yet to examine how AI imaging technologies and the stereotypes they rely on connect to their militaristic roots. From their beginnings in the US Pentagon’s Cold War efforts against Communism, AI technologies have been consistently linked to America’s pursuit of mastering the dark military art of counter-insurgency. This article will explore the ongoing role of AI by demonstrating how AI image generation tools produce images that reinforce the principles of Western strategic thinking, especially the dominant doctrine of modern irregular warfare: counter-insurgency. Using a sample of 20 images, we will show that AI image generators enhance tropes related to targeting Black male militants in the US and depict sexual stereotypes that assume the benevolence and superiority of Western society—particularly the US—in promoting gender equality among non-Western and formerly colonized populations, while also portraying the protection or liberation of Black and Brown women from the threat of their ‘barbaric’ male counterparts.

This essay explores the long-range evolution of Robert Williams’s philosophy of self-defense and the relationship this had to the redefinition of self-defense by the best-known and most ambitious theorist-practitioner of the Black Power Movement: Huey P. Newton. Despite his prominence as an ideological rival of MLK Jr.’s program of nonviolence and a militant figure in the Civil Rights Movement, Robert F. Williams has been ignored as a subject of philosophical relevance. But Williams’s program of pre-emptive self-defense not only reformulated Black manhood but matured into a body of ideas grounded in the proposition that violence against whites –organized, armed resistance against a militarized police state— was the key to Black survival. Williams’s ideas were assimilated by the leading theoretician of the Black Panther Party—Huey P. Newton—who adapted it within a broader Black nationalist philosophical system (intercommunalism) which understood self-defense as necessitating the harnessing of violence for revolutionary ends. Rather than an aberration, I argue that Newton’s transformation of self-defense was a natural evolution of the offensive and militaristic essence in the thought and practice of Black nationalist tradition in the US.

The development of AI and the cyber-physical systems that typify it has yet to be theorized as a product of shifts in Western epistemology or had its historical links to the American military-technological revolution of the mid-20th century explored in any rigorous manner. To fill this gap in knowledge, we argue that Sylvia Wynter’s framework of MAN reveals the philosophical underpinnings of and links between Western liberal humanism, modern scientific inquiry, and racist philosophical anthropology that can explain the contemporary symbiosis between these and the application of new predictive, data and AI technologies today by Western-Liberal security apparati.

Leonard Harris’ ‘racism as necro-being’ thesis, its theoretical contours, and actuarial methodology is a brilliant philosophical account of racism which posits the phenomenon as a polymorphic agent of death that confers upon its victims the status of the living dead. Though Harris’ thesis relies on arguments against attempts to understand racism as a logos or logic, there exists an explanatory account of racism which is nevertheless complimentary with his actuarial approach: the racism as war thesis. Indeed, there is a deep conceptual harmony between the racism as necro-being and racism as war thesis (despite their structural asymmetry) regarding: (a) the plasticity of racism’s expression and (b) the centering of war, militarism, and death as its absolute indicators. Harris’ overall philosophical aim – to depict racism as a killing machine – is ultimately strengthened when yoked to an explanative account of the basic mechanisms that underly the pattern to be depicted, which the racism as war thesis can supply. On this basis, this essay will argue for a synthesis of these two theses.

In this essay, I fill this gap in knowledge by arguing that the central object of Fanonian dialectics is violence (anticolonial guerilla warfare), the achievement of the decolonized Black nation and the eventual creation of a new anti-colonial (Pan-African) world order over and against its dialectical negation: Neo-colonialism via colonial counterinsurgency. Furthermore, I argue that Fanon’s dialectical thought helped lay the basis for the emergence of a new theory of revolution against US empire coined by Huey P. Newton as intercommunalism. The complementarity and conceptual harmony between Fanon’s and Newton’s dialectical thinking about US/colonial empire, counterinsurgency, the imperative of creating new forms of humanism, and the lumpen masses as primary agents in the revolutionary transformation of society comprise what I call the ‘empire as pacification’ thesis.

This essay conducts a diachronic examination of the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, it reveals a corpus that is marked by a tradition of thinking rarely acknowledged by scholars today: Black nationalism. Du Bois’s early focus on the relationship between racism and imperialism and ideological conflicts with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey laid the basis for his intellectual maturation around the concept of self-determination. After synthesizing the insights of his former ideological rivals, this essay will show that Du Bois affected a revolution in Black nationalist (and human) thought by making the common humanity and autonomy of African/African-descended peoples (and all colonized people) thinkable through the ideology of Pan-Africanism: a truly universal idea of freedom which was antagonistic to Westernism (Liberal Capitalist and Marxist thought).

Contrary to the dominant arguments put forth by Black feminist scholars, this essay argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’ pioneering role in establishing the principles of Black sociology, ethnological arguments and long-range development of Pan-Africanism as an ideological rival to colonial imperialism/Westernism suggests that the masculine roots informing his approach to the Black intellectual endeavor is a positive and humanistic rather than a restrictive marker of his thought. If Du Bois’ masculinization of Black agency and intellectual endeavors were simply indicative of mimesis – his internalization of the very sexism against which he fought anchored to a view of freedom for Black people which materialized as a struggle among men over the control of the bodies of Black women – then there should be textual evidence demonstrating that he (like some of his Black female peers) supported the relegation of Black women to domesticity or was in favor of US imperialism against darker races abroad. But rather than an imitative aspiration towards Black nationalist patriarchy and the subordination of Black women to men’s will, the logical consequence of Du Bois’ masculinist (ethnological) thinking as it relates to the Black intellectual endeavor and the problem of race in America materialized as the formulation of Black sociology to study Black men and women as agents of history who were endowed with unique insights stemming from their experiences of marginalization, his articulation of an anti-colonial and egalitarian Black manhood, and his laying an intellectual basis for Pan-Africanism to emerge as an anti-colonial ideology.

Filling a gap in knowledge in gender theory, genocidal, and Holocaust studies, this paper operationalizes the concept of phallicism as an analytic explanation of the simultaneous killing and sexual victimization of racialized men in western, capitalist, patriarchal societies. The theory of phallicism posits that racialization lays the basis for a sexualization process wherein racialized males are caricaturized as both salacious savages (who can be raped by the men or women of the dominant racial group) and bestial/wanton creatures deserving of immediate death for the sake of liberal civility. Breaking with the dominant interpretive lenses in scholarly discourses around race and gender that understand racialized femininity as the basis of dehumanization, this paper will operationalize the notion of phallicism through historical and comparative analysis of the writings of political prisoner George Jackson and Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. With the theory of phallicism—the guiding theoretic of the paradigm of Black Male Studies—we can sharpen our conceptual acumen to account for the function of misandric patterns of intergroup violence and its role as the organizing principle of the negrophobia characteristic of Western, patriarchal, capitalist regimes.

This project is a blend of Africana intellectual history and philosophical anti-humanism. The opening chapter seeks to contextualize the thought of Huey P. Newton in the Black nationalist tradition outline his conceptualization of US empire – ‘Reactionary Intercommunalism’. I use the second chapter to explore counterinsurgency as a historical phenomenon that laid the basis for European colonization and the civilizing mission during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the modern phenomena understand as racial violence. The third chapter analyzes how gender ideological have been deployed toward this end historically and through contemporaneous Black scholarship before using the final chapter to introduce the theory of killology or MAN3. This theory advances the claim that counterinsurgency as a modality of warfare be understood as the contemporary fountainhead of western humanism and thus as the primary force of social regulation which proleptically organizes modern civilization on a spatially and temporally indeterminate basis to defeat/subvert insurgent populations before they are ever mobilized towards resistance through the application of technology, deadly force to those constructed as threats and control of the information environment towards this end.

This essay argues that Huey Newton’s philosophical explanation of US empire fills an epistemological gap in our thinking that provides us with a basis for understanding the emergence and operational application of predictive policing, Big Data, cutting-edge surveillance programs, and semi-autonomous weapons by US military and policing apparati to maintain control over racialized populations historically and in the (still ongoing) Global War on Terror today – a phenomenon that Black Studies scholars and Black philosophers alike have yet to demonstrate the conceptual acumen to explain. Newton’s ability to explain the conceptual foundation of US empire alongside his prediction of the emergence and application of AI and other Big Data technologies towards the repression of dissidents, criminals, terrorists, and other racialized groups abroad gives intercommunalism the explanatory power to lay the basis for a genealogical account of Black repression that also advances our understanding of how the US as a liberal democratic regime engages in enemy target acquisition (the construction of racialized groups as threats internally and externally) to rationalize the brutal repression of these populations by military-police agencies whose operational application of new AI and computing-surveillance technologies and semi-autonomous weapons are conditioned by the intensity of their racialized dehumanization of the enemy.