The introduction sets the spatial coordinates and theoretical analytic for Geologic Life and introduces some of the book’s key terminology. Geologic Life argues for the geophysical underpinnings of Life and race as mutually constituted through a historical geography of colonial geology. As an empirical method of understanding the geophysical dimensions of colonialism and its afterlives, how the surfaces of the white supremacy of matter are maintained, practiced, and imagined is exposed, mapping sites for its dismantling. This lays the groundwork for an understanding of geology as racializing material praxis that shapes human subjectivity and planetary states. It is argued that colonial earth can be understood as a historical regime of material power—white geology—that used geologic minerals, metals, and fuels, combined with the epistemic violence of the category of the inhuman, to shape regimes of value and forms of subjective life.