<aside> 📕 Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues”

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Context: Wynter is a Jamaican novelist, philosopher...

WHERE DID THIS CLASSIFICATION COME FROM? THE POINT OF MY LETTER TO YOU

• Jews and Turks considered to be outside the sanctioned social order which led them to be labeled as aliens
• N.H.I: No humans involved
• antipathy: a deep-seated feeling of dislike; aversion.
• Affirmative action programs incorporated a new Black middle class into the "American Dream"
• Jobless Black Americans could now enter inside the sanctioned category of Americans (the not other), but there were consequences
• "Black men constitute 6% of the U.S population... they make up 47% of the prison population" - 1992 NYT editorial
• "Costs $25,000 a year to keep a kid in prison... more than college"
• Those in academia hold the key to race
• Race cannot be reduced as an issue
• Race and its classificatory logic relates to its premise

TAKING THE MAP FOR THE TERRITORY: THE FALLACY OF SUPRACULTURALISM

• Michel Foucault: Died 1984, French historian and philosopher involved in the structuralist and post-structuralist movements
• Shift from "human" being considered a divinely selected being to an evolutionary selected being
• atavistic: relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral.
• Black people make up the lowest version of the NHI
• Supraculturalism mistakes the representation of the human as the reality
• Humans are humans when they regulate their behaviors