 According to Gordon, what is sometimes referred to as the “race question” is really a question about the status of Blackness, for “race has emerged, throughout its history, as the question fundamentally of ‘the blacks’ as it has for no other group” (2000, 12). Rather than a denial that other groups have been racialized, the claim instead is that such other racializations have been conditioned on a scale of European personhood to Black subpersonhood (see also Mills 1998, 6–10). Blackness itself has been characterized as “the breakdown of reason” and “an existential enigma” in such a way that to ask after race and racialization is to ask after Blackness in the first instance.