I got the chance to read Jamaican feminist theorist, Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” again for a class, and it is always an education to read how she unpacks the invention of the schema “man”, and the rational, economic processes involved in the invention of race and racialization. Wynter investigates the epistemological erasures and disregards that emerged from the inventions of man and their overrepresentation. She explains the interconnectedness of coloniality/modernity as it explains how the idea of race became a powerful instrument of colonial domination over the last five hundred years.
In the first invention, Man1 emerged as a new representation of humanity during the Renaissance humanist period across Europe from the 14th to 16th centuries. This marked a significant shift from the medieval Christian worldview towards a more secular understanding of human nature and society. Man1 was a “degodding” invention that coincided with the gradual separation of church and state, though it still retained some religious undertones. While it was a step towards secularization, it still operated within a framework that saw European Christianity as the pinnacle of human development. It reframed humans as primarily political subjects of the state rather than spiritual subjects of the Church. However, it maintained a dichotomy between humans, categorized as rational versus irrational, replacing the earlier Christian/non-Christian divide.
This new conception established that rational man had a natural (God-given) right to rule over, occupy, and even punish irrational (godless) populations. This ideology became the intellectual foundation for European settler colonialism, that justified the violent erasure of indigenous lives and cultures as Europe expanded its reach through invasion, occupation, and pillage of non-European lands. Man1 was used to legitimize early forms of slavery and colonial exploitation. Wynter especially refers to the 16th-century debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in Spain as an example of how this concept was used to argue whether indigenous peoples were fully rational and thus fully human, a reasoning that was later extended to justify the enslavement of Africans. Man1 essentially allowed for the continued marginalization and dehumanization of non-European peoples, setting the stage for centuries of colonial oppression and racial hierarchy.
Man2 emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries as a response to the limitations of Man1, the changing socioeconomic landscape and evolution of Western thought. The foundation of Man1 began to falter partly due to the Christian conversion of colonized peoples, which complicated the rational/irrational divide. But, the primary driver for the shift to Man2 was the rise of biological sciences, particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution. Wynter describes the emergence of Man2 as a “colonial difference ‘big bang’ event” that reshaped global power structures. This new invention facilitated the rise of Europe and the construction of a global civilization based on racial hierarchies, enabling African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.
Man2 was fundamentally biocentric and economically oriented. It normalized a bio-centric “scientific” justification for slavery and racial hierarchy by employing Darwinian ideas of natural selection and evolution to argue that some races were less evolved and naturally inferior. It created hierarchies that positioned white Europeans at the apex of human development, with other races arranged below in a pseudo-scientific scale of evolutionary progress. Going beyond the simple human/subhuman categorization of Man1, Man2 created a racial taxonomy that positioned Black people at the bottom of this hierarchy, categorizing them as closest to animals in the evolutionary scale. This artificial category of race and race essentialism became a tool for erasing existing systems of what it means to be human in indigenous contexts, and replaced them with a secularizing, “scientific” framework. Colonial education, anthropology, ethnography and guns became tools to reinforce this logic in colonized contexts, writing societies out of their past ways of knowing.
Wynter argues that this new mode of being human became the primary response to the Heideggerian question of who/what we are. It led to an epistemic disregard of non-European ways of knowing, enabling the overrepresentation of the Western bourgeois conception of humanity as a universal that all people must adapt to. Man2 not only created racial hierarchies but also encoded them into social, economic, and political structures. It inherently denormalized blackness and implied that attaining “normal” human status involved distancing oneself from anything connected to Blackness. This biocentric, economic view of humanity provided pseudo-scientific justifications for ongoing colonial exploitation and racial oppression, even after the formal abolition of slavery, continuing to influence global power dynamics well into the 20th century and, as Wynter argues, shaping our understanding of humanity today.
This overrepresentation of Man2, which Wynter terms the central challenge of our modern time, has reinforced a master code that denies the existence of truths in other societies and overlooks the relativity of Western modes of being human (a product of time, space, and violent encounters). We continue to face this challenge in the positive markings of white knowledge vs. the negative marking of African thoughts. It continues to reinforce the epistemic erasure of African truths by contributing to the metaphysical dread of evil in blackness that today enables unfreedom and carceral imaginaries for Black and brown bodies in Euro-American societies. However, Wynter contends that these overrepresented Western truths, that are irrevocably fused with our knowledge through coloniality, are half-starved and are incapable of providing solutions to the dilemmas we now confront as humans.
While Wynter’s analysis unpacks Man1 and Man2, I believe the evolving nature of human categorization and technological advancement in our modern time prompts us to see a new kind of invention emerging—what might be termed ‘Man3’ – a conception shaped by our increasing entanglement and fetishization of technology. We see Big Tech elites create technologies, strip away the human foundations and prompts, and then present them as a better “us” that will replace human workers. Yet the labor of creating these technologies relies largely on the racialized bodies of “Man 2”, African and South Asian workers underpaid to do the arduous, emotionally taxing task of data labeling. As our everyday lives become territories of surveillance, controlled by various platforms from social media to worksheets, health records, grocery shopping, transportation, and more, we become increasingly separated into those who adapt to machines and techno-hegemony and those who control these technologies—the data elites/the data producers.
Although every invention of man was built on a colonizer, exploitative logic, the resistance to the imposed categories of ‘Man’ has been a constant throughout history. From enslaved women preserving their truths through oral traditions, to kings and queens fighting Christian colonization, to anti-colonial movements throughout history, to the Black nationalism internationalism movement for the liberation of all Black lives, oppressed colonized people have consistently challenged these narrow definitions of humanity shaping coloniality/modernity. From time immemorial to date, our people continue to push back against the normalization of the white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class man and its derivatives as the only recognized mode of being human. Just as there was resistance to the impositions of Man1 and Man2, we are witnessing in the moment the pushback against the techno-hegemony, techno-utopianism and digital colonialism of Man3, led brilliantly by women of Afro-descent. There are rising modern movements against the techno-civilizing mission of Big Tech, the inheritor of the genocidal missions of Big Science/Medicine, Big Commerce, Big Church, Big Weaponry, Big Education and so on. The lesson here, as we can infer from Wynter, is that we must push back against the rhetoric of technologies like AI that seek to take the human out of the equation, rather than bridging and repairing. As we resist this invention, we must continue to look for the non-European indigenous truths that have persisted due to unknowability and untranslatability and find in them lifelines that may save us from a starved misogynistic, climate-deficient, hyperindividualistic world with no soul.
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