Afropessimism
Human life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its conceptual coherence. There is no world without Blacks, yet there are no Blacks who are in the world (228).
I'd heard the word "afropessimism" thrown around over the previous two years, but never gotten even a vague grasp of its meaning. In fact Mau's ex-partner, with whom I was also pretty well acquainted, was a big afropessimist, as was her entire friend group. They all studied with the afropessimist Calvin Warren at Emory. The group threw the term around casually as they talked, and I noticed it (whatever "it" was) seemed to give them a secret understanding of the world, it seemed to ground how they moved politically and socially.
Though Mau dated someone in this afropessimist circle, though he had been surrounded by her and her friends, he never participated in an explicit study himself. It was only this summer, far away (both geographically and temporally) from any afropessimists, that he ordered Wilderson's latest book on the topic. He read it in just a few days.
When the uprisings started two weeks later, Mau called me.
"Have you started it yet?" he asked.
"I have other things in line to read first," I told him.
I heard the edges of his mouth crinkle kindly. "Maybe let this one skip the line," he said, "given everything that's going on."
It was sound advice, for I clung to Wilderson like a life raft through the heart of the Atlanta uprisings. To be honest, I felt like a lucky white person reading him. While fellow crackers were reading White Fragility or White Rage, and generally working to "process their racism" or stare, perhaps for the first time, into their white guilt, I felt I was let in on darker secrets that rendered all that other stuff meaningless.
Afropessimism's central claim is that since the Middle Passage and through the current moment, society has treated Black people as non-Humans (as "slaves") and this holds the non-Black world together. Anti-Blackness and anti-Black violence are not unfortunate hold-overs from a bigoted past that can and will be overcome through the steady march of progress, but rather central necessities for society to function. Black folx, it argues, are society's punching bag, its malleable scapegoat, its plaything.
Of course the non-Human status and treatment of Black people work to hold society together in the material ways well documented by the social sciences: by facilitating the economic exploitation of Black people. Structural violence in the form of policing, the prison system, and inequitable access to nearly all opportunities literally and physically holds an entire population in the position where they must do society's undesirable work to survive. But for afropessimists, Blacks' non-humanness offer a psychological benefit to white society as well. Just as the slave master's very identity was informed by his power over his flesh-property, non-Black society would not know what to be without its domination of Black life. Indeed, violence against Black people provides catharsis—or even pleasure—to non-Black society at large. It is ever the reminder of, at least I am not Black. At least I am Human.
To put the material and psychic pieces together in one simple phrase, afropessimism argues that our system is not only structurally built to treat Black people as non-Human, but relies on treating them this way. Any Humanity in Black people provides the non-Black world with an existential threat, and thus must be blocked at all costs.
This logic flies in the face of much of the social science, the humanities, and especially the social-justice/movement spaces that view oppressions as essentially comparable units. The mainstream dialogue on the left posits Black folx, women, non-Black people of color, indigenous people, the working class, queer people, and trans people as experiencing similar processes of exclusion and exploitation. Wilderson and the afropessimists are clear, however: the oppression of Black people is categorically different. All other groups are Human; Black people are not. Humans have some stake in broader society. Perhaps they have had something taken from them that they are working to get back, perhaps they are striving for greater recognition for aspects of themselves, or perhaps they are the subject of exploitation in certain contexts. Black people, though, are unique in their universal timeless, and necessary mistreatment. Since the development of the Atlantic slave-trade, Whiteness has built a world that is fundamentally irreconcilable with Black Humanity, that views the Black person as object—a slave required for labor, pleasure, and, ultimately, the formation of an identity of superiority. Black people (though they may delude themselves otherwise) have no stake in society, they are not allowed to.
Afropessimism does not lead anywhere in particular. Indeed, it explicitly avoids prescribing a solution to its dark analysis. As I see it, it sets out mainly to be a foil against false-hope and self delusion, against the enticements of progress narratives and liberalism as a whole. It comes to remind the world that, for Black people, nothing has changed, and (in painfully candid terms) nothing can.
For Black people in particular, afropessimism calls out denial. It says: there are two ways to be Black in this world, to be afrompessimist or to lie to oneself. Black capitalists, politicians, and liberals—all those who allow themselves to believe they can become Human in the white world, that they can work at the bank during the day and not get gunned down by police on the way home—are the delusional. The honest group, the afropessimists, doesn't necessarily understand themselves as holding any particular position (in fact, hardly anyone outside of a small intellectual milieu would call themselves an afropessimist). But an afropessimist is simply any Black person who is frank about their role in society, the role society has made for them. The afropessimist does not condemn the riot, the looting, the rebellion, because they have no stake in what exists; they were born without stake, and they cannot see themselves gaining one in their lifetime. Revolution—by which they mean destruction of everything—is the closest thing to liberation available.
For the non-Black person, the implications of afropessimism are somewhat more complicated. The question for us (and by us, I mean literally everyone who is not Black) is not simply whether or not we will live in denial. The questions for us are many. First: will we face the fact that our very identities rely on violence against Black people? That we do not exist outside of this relationship? That we, at both the personal and structural levels, must treat Black people as object for the sustenance of the material and psychic status quo? For the sustenance of how we understand ourselves?
And then: can we accept that Black liberation will therefore require our own destruction? Not reform, or personal work, or coalition building, but destruction. Wilderson notes that once the non-Black person takes afrompessimism seriously, they realize that to end anti-Blackness they themselves will "have to be destroyed regardless of their performance, or of their morality, and that they occupy a place of power that is completely unethical, regardless of what they do (from radio interview on Ferguson)."
Unsurprisingly, afropessimist scholars have earned themselves controversy and criticism. On the one hand, they are attacked by scholars of other oppressed identity groups who scream, "How dare you argue your oppression is greater than mine! How dare you tear apart intersectional solidarity!" But the afropessmist doesn't really argue that anti-Blackness is necessarily "worse," in any quantifiable way, than patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. It acknowledges that all these reactionary positions result in dead bodies and structurally disadvantaged groups of people. However, it notes that all other groups suffer "contingent violence, violence that kicks in when [a person] resists (or is perceived to resist) the disciplinary discourse of civil society's rules and laws." For Black people, there does not have to be rhyme or reason to the violence, but it is in fact a "paradigmatic necessity (245)." Violence must happen to uphold the relationship of superiority, Human to non-human, subject to object. News agencies spend months investigating the minute details of police murders of Black men to try to uncover "if he had it coming." But this investigation obscures the reality that it doesn't matter what he did; his killing was socially necessary. No other group demands regular lynching for white society's identity to carry on intact. And for this reason, afropessimists draw a distinction. Also for this reason, they call all other oppressed groups the "junior partners" of white people. These groups may suffer at the hands of white people, but they also benefit from violence against Black folx.
The other main point of critique of the afropessimist is one of utility: what solution do you provide us? You say, "the end of [Black] suffering signals the end of the Human, the end of the world (331)." What are we to do with that? End the world? But in many ways the impossibility of solution is the afropessimist's point. The kind of revolutionary change necessary to restructure society into a place where Black people actually have stake is hardly fathomable. Thus a smiling nod to riots are the closest Wilderson comes to offering a way forward.
And this brings us to the current moment, to the riots across the world sparked by a particularly gratuitous murder of a Black man, caught on film. What does afropessimism tell us here? How is it instructive?
Firstly, it tells us not to be surprised at such violence, for it is—again—the glue that holds non-Black society together. There is nothing shocking about the murder of George Floyd, it says, because the murder of George Floyd is a daily occurrence. And even if a day passes without murder, that day contains a thousand less-visible acts of violence that permeate the lifeblood of society.
Secondly afropessimism tells us to temper our expectations for change from this upheaval. It is tempting to see millions of people in the streets from all backgrounds, to see "Black Lives Matter" signs hanging from the mansions of the white elite, to hear discussions of police abolition being thrown around in city councils, and think that all of this will be of some consequence in the quest to end anti-Blackness. But Wilderson reminds us that a society that is fundamentally a vampire to Blackness, that not only takes materially from Black people but uses them psychically to feel better about itself, will not allows its foundations to be crumbled. In fact, Wilderson points to how shows of solidarity from white and other non-Black people may actually work to fortify the existing relations:
online video posts of police murdering Black people contribute more to the psychic well-being of non-Black people—to their communal pleasures and sense of ontological presence—than they contribute to deterrence, arrests or even to a general sensitivity to Black pain and suffering. Afropessimism helps us understand why the violence that saturates Black life isn't threatened with elimination just because it is exposed. For this to be the case, the spectator, interlocutor, auditor would have to come to images such as these with an unconscious that can perceive injury in such images. In other words, the mind would have to see a person with a heritage of rights and claims, whose rights and claims are being violated. This is not the way Slaves, Blacks, function in the collective unconscious. Who ever heard of an injured plow? (225, emphasis original).
Wilderson goes on to say that moments such as the George Floyd protests can serve more to remind the non-Black world of their existing structural superiority—that whatever else may be going on, at least they are not Black—than to provide them the desire to upend this dynamic. They may go to protests in disgust at the violence, but at some level they are soothed and comforted by it. They are aware that the signs say "Black Lives Matter," because their lives are comparatively secure. They are, however quietly, aware that they have more in common (structurally speaking) with the police, than their Black comrade. In fact, the police are merely an extreme, external manifestation of their own relationship to Blackness.
Third, and lastly, afropessimism tells us that if we are to do anything of purpose during this moment—and moments like these, that has heighten the visibility of the ever-present anti-Black violence to some level of tangible power—it is to destroy. If afropessimism is to become our creed, then our feet must be on the ground, and our hands in the riot. "Afropessimism is a looter's creed, Wilderson says. It is "critique without redemption or a vision of redress except the end of the world.' (174)."
As I write, I'm in an apartment in Oakland. The apartment has a beautiful open room filled with natural light, with air mattresses strewn across the floor, and high-volume, impassioned conversations roaring through the air. At one point a few days ago, afropessimism came up. One of our group, a Black woman, offered it a critique, one I'd like to end on here.
Afropessimism, she argued, is fundamentally a masculinist position. It states the obvious (the world is fucked) and gives its devotees very little to do (brood or riot). How very manly and rationalist! To look at things how they "really are," to cross your arms in cynicism, to be moved to action only if it can involve an external explosion! It is not that any of its observations are incorrect, or its desire for destruction misplaced. Rather, afropessimism severely lacks imagination.
Black feminism, my friend argued, has been knowing afropessimism, and so much more. Black women have long known the material and psychological benefits that their suffering provides the white world. Perhaps they have less often been gunned down in the streets in grand public lynchings, but they have borne the brunt of a million less sensational violences. They have experienced these things on the most minute level, in their very bodies each day. And yet, through generations of unHumaness they have raised families, fed, cared for, loved, grown, planted, challenged. This is not to say that they have not been destructive and rebellious. In fact, they have often been on the cutting edge of revolution. "Enslaved women learned how to put crushed glass in their master's pies," someone said at an Atlanta protest, through a bullhorn. "They could kill their enslaver—and all too often their rapists—and not a soul would know." No, Black women have not been shy in the revolution, but they have also been unbelievably creative and imaginative in the living of every day life for the last 400 years, in the creation of ways to survive and thrive in spite of everything. In short, they have held and carried the flame of hope (and I mean not the self-deluded hope, not Black capitalist, progress-narrative type hope, but the real and tasteable hope of liberation) through a thousand rainy winds. This is what afropessimism, for all its spot-on-ness, completely neglects.
Today I was at a rally for QTPOC (queer, trans, people of color) Pride. Many people were wearing shirts that read, "God is a Black woman." Though I'm an atheist through and through, I think understood what they meant.
As this same above-mentioned critical friend has told me time and time again, if the source of the world's current woeful state can be largely attributed to the domination of the white man, then to get out of this miserable place, our task it obvious: we must, with immediacy and swiftness, begin to center his opposite. We must begin to center the Black woman.
