“For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and then the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960’s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture’s purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” ) those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians, as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered. Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assembalges that establish “natural differences” between the selected and the dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapien species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, sever climate changed, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources…—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.””
— Habes Viscus (2014), Alexander Weheliye quoting Sylvia Winter on the project of black studies.  (via lordsofsoundandlesserthings)

(via lordsofsoundandlesserthings-dea)