 To discuss studies of black life and social death in the context of this entry is to return to one of the recurring tensions in the field of Africana philosophy. It is a field not just born of struggle but also emerging from the crucible of racialization. Africana philosophy is importantly related but not reducible to a responsible philosophical race theory: it is a constellation of views, approaches, traditions, problems, debates, and figures that owes its existence as a somewhat unitary enterprise at least in part to the practices of race-making, but that reaches deeper into the lives of particular communities than race theory can, with results—like studies of the Yoruba conception of peace—that in no way depend on race-theoretic analysis for their import.