 Cornel West employs a Foucaultian methodology to produce a genealogy of modern racism (1982). West analyzes how the discourse of modernity came into being to show how central white supremacy is to its practices of knowledge and meaning making (47). By modern discourse he means, “The controlling metaphors, notions, categories, and norms that shape the predominant conception of truth and knowledge in the modern West,” which are driven by the scientific revolution, the Cartesian transformation of philosophy, and the classical revival (50). It is a discourse comprising certain forms of rationality, scientificity, objectivity, and aesthetic and cultural ideals, the parameters of which exclude Black equality from the outset, marking it as unintelligible and illegitimate within the prevailing norms of discourse and knowledge (47–48). Notions of truth and knowledge produced by these three forces are governed by a value-free subject that observes, compares, orders, and measures in order to obtain evidence and make inferences that verify the true representations of reality.