The Globalization of Anti-Blackness: Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Colonial Roots of a Universal Prejudice
Authors
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La Shun L. Carroll
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Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1000, USA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55121/prr.v3i1.962Abstract
Anti-Black racism persists as a global social phenomenon despite its lack of empirical foundation and its incompatibility with rational moral theory. This paper investigates the paradox of racism's endurance by integrating evolutionary psychology, cognitive bias theory, colonial history, and analytic philosophy. It argues that anti-Blackness is not a natural or biologically grounded disposition but a historically constructed and cognitively reinforced system of false belief. Drawing on evolutionary accounts of in-group and out-group heuristics, the paper demonstrates how adaptive mechanisms designed for rapid threat assessment become maladaptively misapplied to morally irrelevant traits such as skin color. These cognitive tendencies are amplified through well-documented biases—including availability, confirmation, and affective salience—that sustain racialized misperceptions even in the presence of counterevidence. The analysis further situates these cognitive mechanisms within the historical consolidation of European colonial power, where phenotypical differences were deliberately transformed into moral and ontological hierarchies to legitimize exploitation, enslavement, and economic domination. Through philosophical and historical examination, the paper shows how theological interpretations, Enlightenment-era contradictions, classical philosophical appropriations, and pseudo-scientific racial taxonomies collectively produced a globalized ontology of Black inferiority. This ontology persists through cultural transmission, institutional reinforcement, and contemporary technological systems that reproduce historical bias under the guise of neutrality. The paper demonstrates that racist reasoning commits fundamental category errors and epistemic fallacies, conflating descriptive biological variation with normative moral value. The paper concludes that dismantling anti-Blackness requires epistemic reconstruction, cognitive retraining, and the systematic deconstruction of inherited metaphysical and institutional frameworks that continue to sustain irrational racial hierarchies.
Keywords:
Philosophy, Morality, Racism, Prejudice, Epistemology, Anti-Blackness, cognitive constructionReferences
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