This paper offers a reception history of the legacy of Arabic literature’s preeminent Black hero, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad. It compares the earliest known recensions of his diwan from the 9th century and near-contemporary biographical notes with the later anthologies and descriptions produced under the influence of the myriad pseudo-‘Antarah’s composing in his epic tradition, Sirat ‘Antar, the existence of which is first attested in the 12th century. While early versions of ‘Antarah’s diwan contain 40 or fewer poems, later ones grew to incorporate portions of ‘Antarah’s epic poetry, and especially poems that were thought to best typify his persona. I argue that this growth marks a shift in ‘Antarah’s legacy from being a self-identified hajin (mixed) figure to being a Black-Arab hero. This shift parallels the waning use of hajin as a classification due to the growing emphasis in Arab-Muslim societies through the ‘Abbasid period on patrilineal descent as the sole criterion for legal ethnicity, regardless of how an individual born to a foreign mother through marriage or concubinage may be raced in daily life. ‘Antarah’s status as a Black hero is a construction that gradually took hold. Using Fanon’s black phenomenology, in which the raced self exists carries responsibility simultaneously for “[one’s] body, [one’s] race, and [one’s] ancestors,” and Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s concept of the “racial imaginary” as the “the narrative opportunities, the kinds of feelings and attributes and situations and subjects and plots and forms ‘available’ both to characters of different races and their authors,” this paper assesses how ‘Antarah’s poetry and his epic tradition come to grapple with the complications of racial others moving through Arab-Muslim spaces. I conclude that what we might perceive as racial anachronism accruing to ‘Antarah’s legacy is in fact emblematic of the workings of siyar sha‘biyya more broadly, which were used not simply to salvage the stories of the past, but to set scripts for the future. ‘Antarah’s identity in his sira and later poetic discourse doesn’t line up with our earliest iterations of the historical ‘Antarah’s attitudes. It does, however, align with the concerns of an expanding Muslim polity with an Arabian center that was determining its definition of Arabness, and concomitantly, formulating new racialized practices of inclusion and exclusion.