The Insufferable Being of Blackness

Black Pessimism

Not too long ago, the view that every race could be identified by a color was almost common sense. There were the Blacks and Whites, of course, but also the Yellows, Reds, and Browns, each hailing from their own home continent. While the last hue in this array remains an occasional term of political convenience, Red and Yellow were long ago repudiated by the peoples to whom they once referred, while Black and White are still recognized as legitimate if, of course, ‘problematic’ designations. Unlike the other race-colors, both are still experienced and invoked as collective identities. For Americans at least, the distinctiveness of White and Black has its roots in slavery, but perhaps also, it might be thought, in the deeper recesses of color symbolism, for both seem to stand out as laden with aesthetic, moral, and even metaphysical connotations. 

This schema was always riddled with anomalies, and moreover, superimposed upon by terms based on other, non-color-coded systems of intra-European racial classification—opposites like ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘Germanic’ and ‘Slavic.’ Closer to home, there was the once official U.S. census category ‘Caucasian,’ encompassing Swedes and Bengalis, and ‘Latino’ still hangs on as a quasi-racial identity among numerous other deviations from the baseline color pattern. Regardless, more than elsewhere in the West, the race-color order of things had deep roots in America, where a self-consciously White republic expelled and destroyed the Reds and enslaved and then later disenfranchised its Blacks. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville drafted this triangle of White, Black, and Red, but the relegation of what little remained of the native population to reservations would ensure that the polar opposition of White and Black would constitute the central axis of American racial order and the discourse surrounding it, across ongoing controversies occasioned by European and Asian, the perilous Yellow immigration. 

Of the pair, White traditionally occupies the positive pole with Black as its opposite, though the more encompassing ‘non-White’ constitutes a term of its own, referring to what used to be called ‘colored peoples,’ and now to ‘people of color.’ Once a category under which all colonial era natives were subsumed, the non-White is now often used to signal anti-colonial or, to speak in a more up to date idiom, decolonial allegiance, overlapping with the political geography of a global South in opposition to a North that largely folds into the West. But the negative has another form. On the American Right, there has long been alarm about anti-White discourse and politics. Perhaps our racial terms form a structure made of binary oppositions, mediating an incongruous order of things. From anthropology we know that such unstable, contested schemes of social classification typically lack logical consistency, and this is evident when it comes to race: the non-Brown, the non-Yellow, and non-Red are nonsense terms and no one ever thought to propose a category of the anti-Brown, Yellow, or Red. But like with the negations of Whiteness, the non-Black and the anti-Black do make a certain sense, for Americans at least, and in recent years a new academic discourse has sought to flesh out these long unoccupied squares in this ideological grid.  

The emergence of the new discourse of Blackness and the black body points to a contemporary shift in American race talk. While Black was the old non-pejorative term for Americans descended from African slaves, from the late 19th century other names would come and go with new political-cultural movements and ensuing changes in the tenor of official ‘race relations.’ From Black to Colored to Negro, and then, in the new international context of the 60s, Black once again. During the heyday of multi-culturalism in the 90s, the specificity of blackness came to be effaced by the term ‘Afro-American’ expressing the aspiration to enter the country’s long tradition of hyphenated, ethnic identities, now embellished by a new language of diversity but also a claim to be at the center of the national story from its beginnings, in distinction from later comers. After a few decades of people getting the hang of it, Afro-American is now out and Black is back, but the current discourse that celebrates Blackness and the black body may have an even briefer career with the passing, in turn, of the political moment that gave rise to it.

What is blackness? Of course, there’s that cluster of supposedly recognizable physical traits, but is it essentially a skin color? One problem with the old physiognomic view was that it admitted gradations of mixture, and although in the Old South the ‘one drop of black blood rule’ had been the legal norm, these degrees were part of the psycho-sexual and aesthetic mores of pre-Civil Rights America, and faint vestiges of the old distinctions live on in black America. Two developments put this graded conception of a disavowed Blackness out of commission. The first was a politico-cultural affirmation of the color itself, sweeping away all the ornate subcategories of mulattos, octoroons, high yellows, and the rest. In the United States a second development came to reinforce Blackness without qualification as a sacrosanct liberal political commitment: affirmative action. The daughter of a UC Berkeley professor who might have passed in the old days now had good reason to assert a bona fide, undivided Blackness, with African Americans for a time preserving the boundaries of the category while permitting some other groups into the fold of those deserving preferential consideration. The new essentialism qualifies that invitation, reasserting the prerogatives of black uniqueness in an often extravagant, quasi-mystical form. The black body of contemporary race talk is a vaguely material prop of no defined color or physiognomy, upholding an identity of higher significance. 

These categorical preliminaries might help us bring into sharper focus the central claims of Afropessimism, the purest expression of the new black essentialism whose short history will be sketched in what follows. Afropessimism arose as part of a broader wave of black pessimist literature that began during Obama’s second term. Its foremost proponent was the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates who blazed the path for Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah Jones, and many lesser lights. The perceived inability of the Obama presidency to alleviate the exceptional distress of black America following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis created an opening for the new discourse within the broader political context of challenges to the failed policies of neo-liberalism. In the political season that followed, American progressives would eventually be confronted with the alternative: was race derivative of a capitalist structure of social relations, or was the latter derivative of an even more fundamental, symbolic structure of recognition, one grounded in a constitutive, violent exclusion of the abject black body? 

While many people on the Left I knew felt they had to square this ideological circle, the new black public intellectuals grabbed the spotlight by boldly upholding the latter view with a few perfunctory gestures to economic inequality. As evidence for their thesis they cited high-profile police killings of black people and hugely skewed incarceration rates, but also the failure of New Deal and Great Society social programs to dent a black-white racial hierarchy propped up, they insisted, by unmitigated terror. While this harping on ‘violence’—a phenomenon that stretched from chokeholds to the more imaginary micro-aggressions of faculty meetings—sounded radical, their analysis buttressed a conclusion that would be music to the ears of a liberal, Democratic Party establishment fighting off challenges from Occupy and then the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020. If social programs had consistently left this legacy of slavery intact how could one now expect universal healthcare to make a difference?

The upshot of the new race discourse was that capitalism could remain essentially unreformed provided that the far greater enormity of White Supremacy was toppled with policies explicitly benefitting Blacks. At a time when the majority was taking a more hostile view of Affirmative Action, proposals for a massively expanded Affirmative Action mark II got a sympathetic hearing from the liberal establishment and its main constituencies, creating a modest opening for a new discourse of reparations, long a fringe issue. Gesturing to the pie-in-the sky goal of reparations kept the policy commitments conveniently vague, but to the extent that concrete measures were foreseen, those closer to the center of American politics understood that whatever sums might eventually have to be doled out, it would all be handled in a fiscally responsible and largely symbolic form, satisfying the modern American taste for grand symbolic gestures of reconciliation. That was a given, though in the meantime new layers of black subalterns and their allies would get their voices centered, in media, academia and in all the ethically advanced corporations and billionaire funded NGOs. Good work if you can get it. 

Then came the shocking Trump victory in 2016. Although this defeat occasioned no serious introspection by American liberals and very little from their progressive allies –overwhelmingly, the blame falling on an outside power and its legions of domestic dupes—it did occasion an immense, cathartic confession of tremendous moral failure: We the White People had failed to appreciate the depths of White Supremacy. We let Trump happen. Why? We’re racist, no use denying it now. But unlike the truly evil people on the other side, We see this evil in ourselves and are determined to overcome it with mandatory civic, workplace and even familial rituals of atonement. Whites now needed to ask the black community for forgiveness, and fortunately there was now an expanding a cohort of well-situated, intellectually sophisticated representatives to manage these heart-felt outpourings, to say, “no, you’re not doing it right” or “ok, that’s a little bit better” or maybe, eventually, “we see you’re trying, we appreciate it.” The new crop of black spokespeople could only shake their heads and say: “We told you so.” They had been doing all the hard work of racial care and now it was time to get paid.

Academic Afropessimism grabbed the extreme end of this black pessimist franchise by rejecting any talk of civic inclusion. There would be no happy ending to the aftermaths of slavery. Scholars of this tendency offered an uncompromising diagnosis that reasserted the unique radicality of black suffering that had been lost sight of as race discourse from the 1980s diversified to include other groups in the progressive rainbow coalition. To counter this dilution of the legacy of slavery, the overly-inclusive term racism itself would have to be shelved for a more pointed expression: antiblackness. The high priest of this new church, UC Irvine Professor Frank Wilderson pronounced: “the violence against us is not a form of discrimination; it is a necessary violence; a healthy tonic for everyone who is not Black.” Let’s be more specific. “It is absolutely necessary for Blacks to be castrated, raped, genitally mutilated and violated, beaten, shot and maimed.” But why? For Frank, anti-Blackness was a kind of a mystery of evil: an expansionary, world-making spirit, feeding off black flesh.

Where did this strange fixation on the black body come from? Looking into it, I found out that the body everyone was talking about was what the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben had called the homo sacer, a being outside the human community whose murder was a restorative ritual for the community, except the Afropessimistic Black was understood to somehow not be a homo at all, but rather its opposite. Apparently, Agamben wasn’t that fashionable anymore, so you could now rip him off without acknowledgment and tweak him a bit. Anyway, it occurred to me that this abject, sacral body was the main character of the ideological script from which many of my professors and fellow students were taking their cue. I had discovered the proverbial bone of contention: it all came down to who among us occupied this coveted position of the lowest of the low, the non-human human? Would it be the Jews of Auschwitz, the Indigenous, the Black or perhaps it was the Black Trans? ^. The struggle continues.

Although it shared a language of violence to the black body with the BLM movement, Afropessimism was a one hundred percent academic phenomenon, headquartered at UC Irvine, where renowned French philosophers had long ago established an enclave for the latest in Theory in the midst of an indifferent, largely Asian-American student body. Sadly, the wing nut tale of American liberal arts as a world of competing victimhood claims has more than a grain of truth to it. On this ideological stage, Afropessimism would not have been able to differentiate itself by simply playing the race card against Whites. In the zero sum games of contemporary humanities academia, larger returns might be knabbed by going after one’s hapless, erstwhile allies. Let’s recall that this was a moment when non-black feminists and queers, scholars in the field of Asian American studies, loquacious South Asians and even the up-and-coming Latinx, all became strangely open to accusations of being “junior partners” of White Supremacy, of being honorary Whites. That must have stung like hell. On the other hand, like the wages of Whiteness, the material return on such unhinged assertions of Blackness was pretty low, being mostly of a psychological nature. 

After the immense transformations in the racial makeup of American society over several decades, everyone was now supposed to pretend we still lived in the early 60s, when Frank was just coming up, when America saw itself as a White-Black society, when feminism and the queers weren’t a thing yet. This was the world of Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, except the lead character was going to be the biggest asshole you’ve ever met in your life.   

“I want to be one of those people who is known for just staying in the hole of the ship. Even when they open up the gate and say, “You can come on up and get some air,” no, no, no, no. I’m gonna stay right down here with all the slop and the shit and the oatmeal and the dead bodies and the chains, and I’m not coming up because we haven’t done enough work on this. I think that’s where our power is too. I think it’s my job to make sure that I do not pay attention to all those other forms of possibility so that at least I’ll leave behind something that celebrates the absoluteness of the rage.” 

As performance, Afropessimism departed from the passive aggressive, HR enforced norms for bickering in the modern day Ivory Tower. It seems hard to believe that this literally misanthropic assertion of Blackness got any traction in any part of academia, where representatives of all these marginal communities are usually pretty prickly in defending their victim status. Maybe the Afropessimists had some well situated, and vocal White allies who could sense the advantage of being re-centered by this new discourse in which they would be the privileged nemesis and have only one interlocutor, with all the others fading into the background as secondary characters. Nice move. Who knows? In any event, this frontal attack on the pieties of progressive multiculturalism represented Afropessimism’s distinctive contribution to the recent history of ideology, for what that’s worth.

Civilization and its Black Discontents  

According to Wilderson, since the onset of modernity the whole of human civilization hinges on a structural antagonism between White Humans and Black Slaves. Blackness is an ontological condition incommensurate with that of any other non-White people whose experiences of oppression are, by contrast, historical, and thus amenable to political solutions. Allies? Solidarity? Liberation? No thanks.

Since the origins of slavery in British North America, Wilderson holds that Blackness has been coterminous with slaveness, and that the latter condition is one of social death. He borrowed the latter term from the sociologist Orlando Patterson, whose classic 1982 book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, compares various ancient and modern regimes of enslavement and identifies one overarching commonality: whether in Republican Rome or South Carolina, the slave’s social death was a “permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” For Patterson, social death was not necessarily a racial status— although he recognized that throughout the New World race had reinforced the division between the socially living and the dead, most notably in the Old South where black slaves were held down by a white citizen body with no tolerance for the widespread, boundary-blurring miscegenation practiced elsewhere in the New World. Here the antagonism of White and Black was at its sharpest. In its Hegelian definition, civil society is grounded in a status of the generic human, as the bearer of rights, but, as contemporary radical theory tells us, this order of these things is by necessity predicated on the constitutive exclusion of the generic non-human, who is by a fateful contingency, Afropessimism maintains, the ex-African slave as Black. Wilderson extrapolates from this that in the most inclusive, democratic civil society of Whites and their junior partners, the absolute opposition to Blackness reaches its peak. The Black is the enemy of this civil society, with all its promises of universal inclusion, and thus of humanity itself.  

“I think the American Black knows it quicker, like say at age 3, the Caribbean and African Black might know it a little bit later on in life, like Fanon says, “I was 18 when I learned it”—that we cannot enter into a structure of recognition as a being, an incorporation into a community of beings, without recognition and incorporation being destroyed.”

Wilderson’s case starts from the axiom Black=slave, which he attempts to justify as more than a definitional fiat. Why should we think of today’s Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Reds – we’ll get to that later) as Masters? If you try to prove this claim by citing statistics on “police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection” you get caught in a “downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and public policy debates?” So let the facts be damned, it’s time to speculate and get to the bottom of this spiral. 

The underlying, philosophical premise behind this positivism of real conditions turns out to be a metaphysics of productive labor. From Locke to the Young Marx, this conception of suffering as the alienation of the laborer from his product, i.e. exploitation, laid the foundation for the positivist paradigm of an objectively measurable distress that in turn supports the legal-civic project of enfranchisement. This measurable exploitation that Marx represented with the ratio of S/V fails to do justice to the immeasurable pain of Blackness. Underlying the mystification involved in seeing the Black as a potential citizen is the conception of the Black qua worker whose plight can be reduced to exploitation. In the prevailing, Marx-influenced view, the paradigmatic form of unfree labor is slavery, albeit in the veiled form of ‘wage slavery.’ This is where Wilderson appropriation of the notion of social death comes in, for he understands the latter as entailing the conceptual separation of slavery from labor, and thus from any telos of civic emancipation and inclusion whose basis is this laboring society.         

“Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state” – the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position – disintegrates into thin air.”

According to Wilderson it was the excessive violence of the Atlantic passage and the subsequent never-ending exposure of the enslaved to the merciless separation of families, torture and murder, “without reason or constraint, triggered by prelogical catalysts that are unmoored from her transgressions and unaccountable to historical shifts” that stamped the Black as Slave.” The regime of forced labor that slaves were subject to was, by comparison, structurally derivative of that prior fungibility: “forced labor is not constitutive of enslavement, because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not.” What does define this power relation? “The constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but rather…the condition of being owned and traded.” But why are slaves owned and traded? It appears that they are, or were owned in order to be dishonored, mutilated murdered. What can one say? To tweak a Barbara J. Fields line from her seminal essay “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” if the slaveholders had produced antiblackness without their slaves producing cotton, the business of plantation slavery would have folded pretty quickly, and with it the slave trade. So while the Aristotelian slave is a talking instrument who’s there to do all the heavy lifting for the citizen, in Wilderson’s world, the citizen needs to expend a lot of energy beating and mutilating the slave while apparently only getting a psychological boost. Hardly seems worth it.     

This conception of the slave as the permanent foundation of the American body politic drastically diminishes the significance of Abolitionism and all subsequent anti-racist struggles by Blacks and their allies up to the present. In fact, Frank says we need to take a hard look at the motives of these so-called allies – progressive Whites and other races, but really the main false friend is conceived not as a directly racial figure, but rather as the Left. 

“It is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses. It is highly conceivable that the discourse that elaborates the justification for freeing the slave is not the product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously recognized the slave…Exploited Humans (in the throes of class conflict with unexploited Humans) seized the image of the Slave as an enabling vehicle that animated the evolving discourses of their own emancipation, just as unexploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase their profits.’

The rhetorical appropriation of the figure of slavery to class struggles, the socialist’s “wage-slavery,” and all the other deployments of this trope by liberationists of every variety, is just like, and is presumably just as bad as slavery itself (although in the quote above it seems like profit might after all be the whole point of the ‘seizing’ of black flesh.) The ‘cultural appropriation’ that you hear so many PoCs complaining about doesn’t plumb the depths of any such radical pain. By comparison, it’s all superficial and ultimately optimistic. Worse still, Wilderson holds that the sunny liberationism of both today’s PoC and yesterday’s Left actually parasitizes on the dark, underworld body of the slave.

“Without this gratuitous violence…the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity – Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement – political discourses predicated on grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation, might not have developed.”

It turns out that the philosophical root of the problem goes even deeper than a metaphysics of productive labor and its exploitation/alienation. For this philosophical anthropology of productive labor is only a comforting mediation of the abyssal, absolute freedom that modern political thought supposedly begins from—although it seems as if we’re talking more about Shelling here than Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau: “political discourse recognizes freedom as a structuring ontologic and then it works to disavow this recognition by imagining freedom not through political ontology—where it rightfully began—but through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses its ontological foundations.” If you can get the gist of that, you might ask, why does political discourse do that? It’s simple. “In allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die.” In absolute freedom, everyone would be black and descending to this ontological ground would be experienced as death. Since few are willing to take the plunge into absolute Otherness, it’s safe to say, Blackness is not going to win any elections. “Given the reigning episteme, what are the chances of elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and communicable, political project out of the necessity of freedom as an absolute?”

Wilderson offers an account of the period from the 1960s to the present that strangely runs parallel to the narratives of an older Left which typically also speak of retreats and betrayals. As with the old, or old New Left narrative, for Wilderson the terminological index of this flight from struggle with deepest antagonism is the reinstatement of ‘civil society’ as the central category of a new generation of radical democratic political theory, essentially a rehash of the old Robinsonades. 

“But by 1980 White radicalism had returned to the discontents of civil society with the same formal tenacity as it had from 1532 to 1967, only now that formal tenacity was emboldened by a wider range of alibis than simply free speech or the antiwar movement; it had, for example, the women’s, gay, antinuclear, environmental, and immigrants’ rights movements as lines of flight from the absolute ethics of Redness and Blackness. Today, such intra-settler discussions are the foundation of the “radical” agenda.”

The terms of these disputes and discussion between these settlers conceal the underlying structure of a (presumably American) civil society grounded in the extermination of the Red and the enslavement of the Black. Here the term ‘settler,’ in contradistinction to ‘master’ or ‘citizen’ underscores a connection Wilderson entertains between the Black and the Red, as names of the two structural positions that are irreconcilable to the premises of civil society. Just as most well-intentioned people recognize that there is nothing much that can be done to address the enormity that befell the native inhabitants of North America, it is time for these same people to recognize that Blacks should be seen the same way: as a ghost people who forever haunt the citizen-settlers, reminding them of the crimes that lay at the structural foundations of their world. I have to admit that that’s an interesting way to think about it, but it’s also pretty creepy.  

It might surprise many to learn that Wilderson, who has been accused of falling back on anecdote whenever argument fails him, professes to reject the testimonial, ‘story telling’ mode of the cultural studies talk.   

“Since the 1980s… it is hardly fashionable anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power relations—such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on specific and “unique” experiences of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions.”

As was mentioned earlier, the structure in question is not of one of social relations but rather of a supposedly deeper symbolic order specifying three discourses.      

“The three structuring positions of the United States (Whites, Indians, Blacks) are elaborated by a rubric of three demands: the (White) demand for expansion, the (Indian) demand for return of the land, and the (Black) demand for “flesh” reparation (Spillers).”

The third term of this Toquevillean triangle, the Red, occupies more of a midway position between the between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black) than a corner of its own. This alignment is far from obvious. After all, a sizable part of US society is Black, and with so many prominent black politicians, celebrities, athletes, and professors, you might have thought that the Red would designate the most excluded, abject position as its occupants are by comparison so few and far between, so to speak. But these sociological issues are secondary, for what matters is the symbolic, or mythological order in which the Red designates a noble savage, a tragic figure of lost nationhood: “sovereignty or sovereign loss, as a modality of the “Savage” grammar of suffering, articulates itself quite well within the two modalities of the Settler/Master’s grammar of suffering, exploitation, and alienation.”

This is a matter not so much of politics but rather of cultural politics, or more specifically the cultural politics of cinema, the subject of Wilderson’s main published study. Wilderson constructs his system from his reading of a small number of films, a couple of Hollywood tear jerkers, one more alternative black lesbian film and another from a native American director. The burden of his criticism seems that whenever the narrative and cinematography of these films, but maybe all films, departs from the underlying structure of racial reality he’s identified, this is to be accounted for by the fascinating ideological mystifications of the film itself and its director. 

So “whereas the “the genocidal modality of the “Savage” grammar of suffering articulates itself quite well within the two modalities of the Slave’s grammar of suffering, unfortunately, Native American film, the small corpus of socially engaged films directed by Native Americans privilege the ensemble of questions animated by the imaginary of sovereign loss.” Blackness is antithetical to sovereignty and assumes the role of what George Bataille called the ‘acéphale,’ the headless. It seems like his position may have changed over time. While initially open to seeing the Red alongside the Black as two figures of irreconcilable, radical pain, Frank, I suspect, must have gotten fed up with all the land acknowledgements. We can all relate to that. 

But there is another unavoidable figure of absolute victimhood lurking in the background that Wilderson is compelled to fend off in making the claim for the Black, which is the Jew. 

In the early 2000s, Norman Finkelstein railed against the “Holocaust Industry” and its “crass exploitation of Jewish martyrdom” in promoting the cause of unconditional U.S. support for Israel. The ideology of this powerful lobby asserts the incommensurability of the Jewish experience of suffering that supports a civic religion of permanent atonement for the absolute evil of the Holocaust. It seems we have uncovered Afropessimism’s secret idol. But the differences are conspicuous. Unlike political Zionism, Afropessimism rejects nationalism and its search for sovereign solutions. And whereas Zionism is the ideology of a powerful hegemonic bloc capable of steering U.S. foreign policy, Afropessimism is more like a cultural Zionism for the academic-DEI world of the contemporary humanities. 

Far more than the Native American, the Jew so conceived is a more formidable competitor in the struggle for the summit of this ideological heap. How does Afropessimism understand the Holocaust? The issue can’t be resolved by measuring the scale of the violence nor the depth of the suffering, for it is ultimately a matter of categories.  

“Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust.”

The categories speak to an opposition of being to non-being. The argument seems to be that the category/name Black was wholly constituted by slavery, for while there were Africans of various tribes, lands, and languages prior to their enslavement, there were no Blacks. Hence Black = slave. By contrast Jews, who, after all, have done pretty well for themselves and have a state of their own, are like other non-White groups in that they existed as peoples with their own names and internal reality prior to their being oppressed, and thereafter retained that positive identity. Wilderson reasons as follows: blackness/anti-blackness is “ontological” in that it was brought into being from nothing, while the oppression and struggles of others are merely “historical,” in that they entail modifications of a pre-existing being. Taken on its own terms, the argument is spurious. For that would make Blackness a pure product of history, as coming into being out of nothing, while accepting the terms of this contrast, other oppressed groups, as beings formed prior to any event of punctuated coming into being, would only be partly historical and thus of a more ontological order.  

Unaware of this lapse in logic, Wilderson builds his case on a conception of history as a specific narrative structure, in opposition to an ontology that defies narrative emplotment.

‘The narrative progression of most films moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium (restored, renewed, or reorganized). This is also the narrative spine of most political theory (e.g., Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s writings on the fate of the commons under capitalism).”

We probably already have a sense of why the Black cannot be placed in this uplifting narrative-historical sequence.

“The three-point progression of a drama for the living cannot be applied to a being that is socially dead (natally alienated, open to gratuitous violence, and generally dishonored). Disequilibrium then becomes the period of enslavement, and the restoration or reorganization of equilibrium is the end of slavery and a life beyond it.”

Whereas an older Afrocentrism attempted to forge links political and imaginative links to Africa,    Afropessimism severs them: there was no idyllic African prequel, just like there won’t be a happy ending. This relieves the Afropessmist critic of the burden of having to argue with other scholars about the color of the oldest Egyptians and the details of African history. 

Internationalism and the Palestinian Question

Severing the connection to Africa belongs to the wider pattern of Wilderson’s politics that can be encapsulated by the slogan: No solidarity, not with Africa, not with anyone but ourselves. When asked whether there is a comparison to be made between the plight of black people historically and the Palestinians, Wilderson was beside himself: