Western metaphysics defines human being against the racialized beastly as its negation.

Evidence

Central to the history of western metaphysics, as Eric Santner has commented, has been an engagement with the question of being, of substance. Substance, it has always turned out, has been unveiled in relation to changing conceptions of sub-stance or sub-standing, of sub-being or non-being. Being comes to know itself only through what it takes itself not to be, to non-being. And in euro-modern terms, this focus on subbeing or non-being, on creatureliness, has been necessarily elaborated in relation to the subor less-than-human, to the racially diminished, of the animal or animal-like. Human being is delineated in contrast to, in repulsion from, the creaturely or beastly that is taken always as the threat to “us,” to our wellbeing. The beastly is identified invariably to underscore the condition of human being, and by extension of being human. Being human, while deeply related, is more than simply human being. Where the latter represents an ontological condition, the baseline state of being or existence for the human as such, the former signals the range of practices and habits normatively characterizing what it means to be human. Being human signals the culture of the ethical, the content of character, the cultivation of the self not possible for the beast, or for the beastly in us. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 878

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes ‘human being’ (ontological baseline) from ‘being human’ (cultivated ethical selfhood).
• ADDENDUM: The animalization of racial others as ‘beasts’ connects to the sacrifice piece’s framing of how a society defines who is expendable by dehumanizing them.