This paper shows how the vanguard moment of abolishing slavery in Tunisia (1846), albeit unprecedented in the African/Arab worlds, did not only fail to unravel the social stigma attached to it in the contemporary moment, but had also racialized the practice and its memory, thereby rendering it an adjunct to blackness. Despite the multiethnic slavery system in which some black Tunisians’ ancestors were incorporated in Ottoman Tunisia, the specters of slavery continue to shape contemporary black Tunisians’ identity formation, stigmatizing them as a primordially foreign group of “genealogical isolates” in a society that is not only vulnerable to the contemporary global racial imaginary but equally to local premodern antecedents of anti-blackness, most embodied in lineage and kinship-based discrimination. Looking at the semantics of blackness in correspondence letters, the abolition edict and reports on slave flights between the first (1846) and the second abolition (1890), I argue that the blackness-slavery assemblage gets inaugurated at a moment of supposed recovery and redemption, heralding an epoch of social death that the color blind policies of the nation state failed to rehabilitate.