What is Black Event Theory (BET)? This opening lecture introduces BET from the ground up: its philosophical foundations, its departure from conventional ontology, and its insistence that Blackness is not a problem to be solved but a structure of being to be thought. Beginning with the temporal rupture at the heart of The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black, and an ambition to respond to the thinking of Toni Morrison, we establish the tripartite framework of Cognition, Consciousness, and Being that organizes the theory before asking what it means to originate a philosophical system from the site of the Middle Passage rather than from the traditions that sought to make the world before it unthinkable.