My contemporary Black colleagues will put an accent on Long with their pointed observations that Black peoples have not shared in the formation of understandings of the human. Indeed, these cultures and communities have been the “savage,” “primitive,” or “nonhuman” opposite against which the Euro-American human has largely defined itself in endless social evolutionary scales. These colleagues will also reflect on how the “superhuman” is a more or less accurate descriptor of Black self-understandings, myth, ritual, dance, art, and extraordinary experience, from ancient Egypt to the contemporary
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