Much of contemporary race discourse is muddled, confusing, and premised on an ongoing project of evading the core issues of race and racism. Texts that racialize everyone with equal-opportunity racism tend to achieve some popularity because of the carrot they offer the contemporary sentiment on race matters. There is desire to speak about race, that is, but not about racism. Consequently, as race is spoken of in ways that offer multiple sites of oppression (consider the current vogue of the term racisms), we find persistent racializing of every site of oppression. Thus, even where race isn’t the proper marker nor concern, the terms race and racism are evoked as legitimating expressions for acts of condemnation. One reason for this tendency is the historic role race and racism have played in the construction of oppression in Anglo societies. For example, given the historical significance of slavery and the civil rights struggle in the United States, the operating metaphor for oppression has been and continues to be race and racism.
Thus, race discourse is projected onto any location of group oppression, the consequence of which is that race and racism are spoken of in contexts ranging from Irish-Anglo conflicts to black-Korean conflicts. Yet, if we were to deconstruct the order of racial signifiers in these contexts, we will notice the persistence of the metaphor “the blacks of... .” If one has to be “the black” in or of a particular context in order designate a racial and a racist formation, then the rug that slips away beneath one’s feet becomes apparent with the Fanonian historical “lived-experience” (l’expérience vécue) of the black: Although there are people who function as “the blacks” of particular contexts, there is a group of people who function as the blacks everywhere. They are called, in now-archaic language—Negroes. Negroes are the blacks of everywhere, the black blacks, the blackest blacks. Blackness functions as the prime racial signifier. It is, the element that enters a room and frightens Reason out.