Jessica RuffinThis article considers anti-Blackness and implicit bias through the lens of aesthetics, tracing their manifestations from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy to contemporary news and avant-garde media. The article treats anti-Blackness as global and environmental, eschewing approaches that focus on individual spectacles of violence, racist representations, and systemic reform. The essay’s central thesis is that the racialized and white-supremacist content of the philosophical foundations of Euro-American aesthetics, particularly Kant’s “ideal of beauty,” introduced the racial as a transcendental aesthetic category. The underinterrogation of the racial in the history of aesthetics has contributed to a persistently colorblind optimism regarding the ethical promise of abstraction, particularly in cinema studies. This argument is developed through a close reading of specific sequences from Terence Nance’s experimental television series, Random Acts of Flyness (HBO, 2018–22). The analysis focuses on two key moments from the first episode—the “Black Face” montage and a segment on the “fluidity” of identity—which the article argues implicitly critique early twentieth-century abstract cinema. The article demonstrates how the ethical figuring of aesthetic abstraction—while hegemonically lauded as universal and objective—further marginalizes the material experiences of Black subjects, and other people of color, when the racial is not engaged as a transcendental aesthetic category.
“Fluid in All Aspects, Except for Race”: Black Faces and the Limits of Abstraction
