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So does Baudrillard really support terrorism? Do we? Once again playing the devil's hand, he seduces us to play the avenging angel by taking a moral stand. But suppose we take the Nietzschean turn, with Baudrillard, and view the issue in aesthetic terms: can moral goodness not still succeed in being beautiful if it avoids making metaphysical claims? When morality is conceived in aesthetic terms, it loses its guarantee of universality, but not its symbolic force. And yet by forcing Good on the world, the U.S. only forces Evil to gain strength. "Terrorism," Baudrillard tells us, "is immoral," but it is a

response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. . . . In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by declining to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence. (Simulacra 15)

Hall’s structuralist orientation to race, while groundbreaking and profoundly important, reinforced some of the biases and preferences of the Western thought. First, in arguing that racial meanings are coded into visible physical differences, Hall’s conceptualization of race emphasized the predominance of vision in the construction of racial differences. That is, seeing is believing—we see different skin color, hair texture, and body shape to confirm some underlining, presumably biological and innate, differences. Then again, as expressed in colorblind racism—not seeing is believing—dismissing the cultural practices of race and realities of racism extends and carries on inequalities, prejudice, discrimination, and violence (Doane and Bonilla-Silva, 2003). While it is still commonly assumed that racial differences are visually self-evident, various scholarship has addressed that the construction of racial differences involves more than vision and the role of other intersecting senses cannot be underestimated (Boswell, 2017; Fretwell, 2020; Obasogie, 2014; Sekimoto and Brown, 2020; Smith, 2006). Second, Hall’s approach to race as a language resulted in treating the human body as text to be inscribed, read, and interpreted. The idea is that racial difference is an “inscription” on the body, or a text written on the surface of the body, which can be “read” and “decoded.” Yet, if we turn our eyes—and other sense organs—to the lived experiences of racialized subjects, we realize race is lived as more than a surficial inscription on one’s body. The impact of racialization is more than symbolic or ideological, but corporeal and visceral (Ahmed, 2007; Fanon, 1967; Lee, 2014; Menakem, 2017; Samatar, 2015; Yancy, 2012). Race inhabits the racialized body and mind as something more than a language that can be systematically interpreted (and potentially re-written), but as something more material and concrete, physically installed and habituated (Bourdieu, 1977; Ngo, 2017; Saldanha, 2007). In his lecture, Hall (1997) said:

The body is a text. And we are all readers of it. And we go around, looking at this text, inspecting it like literary critics…We are readers of race, that what we are doing, we are readers of social difference. And the body hair, which you know is sighted as if, this is what terminates the argument. When you say race is a signifier. No it is not! See the folks out there they are different! You can tell they are different. Well, that very obviousness, the very obviousness of the visibility of race is what persuades me that it functions because it is signifying something; it is a text, which we can read (15)

As 2020 unfolded, I found daily inspiration in a new generation of leaders who seized America’s attention—often young Black women who practiced a synthesis of educational, journalistic, policy, legal, and artistic social justice activism, and who were as interested in scaling radical knowledge production for masses of Black and multiracial people as they were in mastering conventional electoral politics. The journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s intellectual leadership in creating the 1619 Project—a multimedia exploration of racial slavery and its legacies, initially published by The New York Times Magazine in August 2019 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May 2020—inspired a national debate on the uses and abuses of history in crafting American conceptions of race, identity, citizenship, and democracy. It also helped to expansively reimagine what leadership in service to Black dignity and citizenship looked like.

Black history is not immune from historical blinders of patriarchy; nor from an overreliance on documenting the activities of famous, wealthy, and credentialed figures; nor from a reticence to see the world through the eyes of those residing in America’s lower frequencies. Stories of prisoners and poor people, of Black LGBTQIA+ communities, and of the disabled and neurodivergent rarely figure into our heroic models of civil rights leadership. Turning once again to history as a political guide, cultural weathervane, and emotional resource, I dug deeper into the past. I became particularly interested in how parts of the Black community unable to run for elected office, raised in challenging circumstances, and faced with the brutality of racial terror had become leaders in earlier periods. Most intriguing during the nineteenth century were the Black women, many of them born during the era of racial slavery to parents living in bondage, who assumed a mantle of transformational leadership by sharing parts of our national history— including America’s long practice of gender-based sexual violence, exploitation, and incarceration—that many others preferred to be left unspoken.

Social media explodes with more of the same: posters, slogans, photographs, and video clips all documenting the new social movement that is intent on eradicating, once and for all, racial inequality and all other forms of discriminatory practices. Minority groups form Zoom-enabled alliances, and every supporter quickly proclaims heartfelt encouragement through enthusiastic social media posts advertising the movement’s trendy catchphrases: “Black Lives Matter,” “White Silence is Violence,” or “I Can’t Breathe,” which becomes an ironic pun when coupled with the mandatory face mask. No longer interesting, no longer new, the global virus is thrown off the stage in favor of a widespread virtual uprising intent on reinstating justice. In the age of the hyperreal, and of course during the pandemic, one is not required to actually march the streets with the angry crowds or even leave the house at all. Joining the movement is made easy by attaching the right hashtags to Facebook and Instagram posts, donating to the cause (the Black Lives Matter website accepts all major credit cards as well as PayPal), and buying the official merchandise, which includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, yard signs, bumper stickers, baseball caps, and—of course—face masks. In addition, to be an antiracist, one is expected to shop at businesses owned by people of color and catch up on appropriate entertainment by choosing to watch social-justice-themed films and television shows (Netflix immediately started advertising special lists of recommended must-see productions).

The appropriation and commodification of black lives and the visual representations of social struggle are not a new phenomenon. Leigh Raiford’s (2011) examination of photography as a tool of resistance used by grass roots African American movements reveals the uneasy dynamics by which self-defining images intended to challenge the dominant order are taken up, publicized, and commercialized by the very mainstream culture they originally attempt to counter. Photography, Raiford argues, was used with careful intention by early twentieth century anti-lynching campaigns as well as the civil rights and the black power movements to mobilize participants, define goals, narrate histories, and construct visible identities for marginalized individuals and groups marked for racial exclusion. While visual self-representation “offered activists a seemingly democratic and versatile medium through which they could visually reference, reframe, or reject dominant political categories” (9), it only partially succeeded in reclaiming and remaking black identity. Because, as Roland Barthes ([1957] 1980) suggests, the subject in a visual representation merges with the object that is the photograph and becomes one with the medium, the distinction between signifier and signified becomes unclear. The human eye perceives things as they appear in their simulated depiction, and as the medium itself (of photography or any other visual recording) does not offer or encourage critique, it is the viewer, the observer, the interpreter, who must subvert the convincing façade of mediated documentation. Following Barthes’ commentary on photography’s stifling, fixing quality—the “death mask” that images carry as they suspend subjects in time as unchanging presences—the pictures, video footage, manifestos, merchandise, and catchy slogans of social movements appear to emancipate as they simultaneously capture and pin identities, reinforce racial hegemonies, and hold subjects imprisoned in history and memory. Within the contradictory tensions between liberation and entrenched captivity (now aggravated and accelerated by digital media), the struggle itself seems to collapse into a vortex of endless regurgitation of defunct verbal and visual information that advertises resistance, protest, or dissent, but ultimately fails to achieve lasting change.

Gunnar's growing engagement with mortality is indicative of the complex interplay between death and commodification in The White Boy Shuffle and Negrophobia. These works provide distinctive meditations on the problems that attend speculation about what Maurice Blanchot aptly terms "death as possibility." Blanchot coins this phrase in part to interrogate the commonplace notion that one's death can provide a mode of agency. He traces such assumptions in matters ranging from authors who assert their enduring legacy in death to the veneration of suicide as an affirmation of being. For any number of thinkers, the "decision to be without being is possibility itself: die possibility of death" (96). In this sense the recourse to death, having "death within reach, docile and reliable, makes life possible, for it is exactly what provides air, space, free and joyful movement: it is possibility" (97). Thus, Blanchot rewrites evocations of death as discursive operations that concretize the autonomy of the subject. He punctures this mystification by asking, "Do I myself die, or do I not rather die always other from myself, so that I would have to say that properly speaking, I do not die?" (98; original italics). He questions the assertion of the subject's autonomy in death precisely because mortality insures no agency for the subject but rather erases the "I." Or as he writes in relation to suicide, "Whoever wants to die does not die, he loses the will to die. He enters the noctur- nal realm of fascination wherein he dies in a passion bereft of will" (105). For death is "never a relation to a determined moment any more than it bears any determined relation to myself" (104). It is therefore the endeavor to commute the unknowable into a concrete determination of the subject that Blanchot so powerfully demystifies.

The questions that Blanchot raises with respect to death's possibilities only multiply as one addresses works of literature that equate commodification with death. In Beatty's novel, the difficulties of that risky proposition are nowhere more apparent than in the novel's evocation of suicide as a national poetics. Frustrated simulta- neously by the absence of viable political alternatives for black Americans and his own inability to slip the noose of commodification, Gunnar inadvertently posits black suicide as an option. This prospect comes about at Boston University where Gunnar serves double duty as poet and basketball celebrity. After being asked to give a speech at a divestment rally, Gunnar laments, "today's black leadership isn't worth shit." These "telegenic negroes not willing to die. Back in the old days, if someone spoke up against the white man, he or she was willing to die" (200). Retooling one of Martin Luther King's civil rights era maxims, Gunnar pronounces, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die" (200). In this articulation Gunnar acknowledges the impossibility of reviving the modes of bodily sacrifice that civil rights activists forged, and begins to articulate suicide as an alternative. Gunnar eventually proposes to consolidate human agency and autonomy by determining his own death. He articulates this logic in a conversation with his friend Psycho Loco who sees suicide as "taking the easy way out" (226). Viewing America's treatment of black men as inevitably lethal, Gunnar retorts, "Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). To take away the nation's capacity to issue death is thus to reclaim the autonomy of the subject by rendering morbidity a possession that can be reclaimed. It is this very instrumental notion of death that might lead readers to interpret the novel as one that holds a lingering nostalgia for the wholeness of civil rights activism or black nationalism. The text elaborates this interpretive prospect when blacks across the nation become utterly seduced by the idea of national suicide. Gunnar's speech inspires a black nationalist named Dexter Waverly to abandon his superficial rhetoric and kill himself in protest against Boston University's financial support of a corrupt African leader. The fact that this suicide actually forces the university to rescind its financial commitment to the African nation seems to confirm the instru- mental use of death and makes Gunnar a national celebrity. Reports "of black peo- ple killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States" soon emerge in the national media (201). Additionally, at Gunnar's request, masses of people begin for- warding him their suicide poems. In a world in which all blackness has been thoroughly commodified Gunnar recommends a poetics and politics that seeks to reassert black national agency by rewriting death as a possibility. Or to frame this challenge to commodification somewhat differently, black suicide offers an intriguing twist on Baudrillard's vision of agency within capital. In his formulation, late capital achieves its hegemony through a symbolic substitution of labor for death. The "equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker," for a "man must die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage" (Symbolic 39). In this sense, then, the wage labor system is always a curious commu- tation of an execution that capital itself has already performed. Capital's "gift" is the sleight of hand whereby it induces the worker's symbolic death by making him a wage earner and then allows that worker the "gift" of buying his own resurrection through labor. This is the unilateral nature of die gift that sustains capital's domi- nance. But if "domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without countergift . . . then the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death" (Symbolic 36-37; original italics). Following a parallel logic, national suicide in Beatty's novel draws its power from its simulation of capital's own unilateral gift, the production of black death as that which refuses exchange.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to analyze varieties of disappointment, disillusionment, and exhaustion in contemporary Black critical theory, which I argue is linked to an ongoing crisis of temporality. By “crisis,” I mean a theoretical and affective discrepancy between temporality and history, an experience of time lived and theorized as an accretion of exhausted past possibilities and foreclosed futures. I argue that the experience of living in the aftermath of subverted, annulled, or still unfulfilled freedom dreams across the diaspora has intensified the feeling of disordered time, distorting or displacing an impulse toward engaging what Hortense Spillers calls the “total perspective against which the work of the intellectual unfolds” into ontology, which tends to obscure material conditions and the complexities of Black living (431, italics in original). A “crisis of temporality” has as its flipside a crisis of history, a conceptual blockage on navigating unresolved antagonisms and attachments to outmoded forms of thinking and desiring even as those antagonisms now assume new forms. I offer “Black situation” as a critical and theoretical framework through which to link the experience of time with historical analysis and engage such a perspective toward the end of theorizing what Lauren Berlant has called our “stretched-out present” (5).

The crisis of temporality, as a sense of temporal stuckness, manifests in some prominent strands of contemporary Black critical theory that rely on the sense of a static, quasi-ontological antinomy rather than antagonism or dialectical struggle to account for Blackness. I write more than a year following George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent uprising, a month after his murderer’s unlikely conviction in a Minnesota court, and as the COVID-19 pandemic exhaustingly continues. Ian Baucom’s claim in Specters of the Atlantic (2005) resonates: “Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates.” Time accumulates, he continues, “even in the work of forgetting or ending, even in the immense labor it takes to surrender what-has-been, or to make reparation on it, or to address its ill effects” (330–331). A critique of progress narratives becomes method. He is not alone. We can read him alongside Saidiya Hartman’s 2008 analysis of the “afterlife of slavery”—“skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (6). To a similar effect, Christina Sharpe, invoking Maurice Blanchot, has described the ongoing “wake” of chattel slavery as a “disaster”: at once historical and “deeply atemporal” (5).

A growing number of theorists are elaborating on racial capitalism, though not always using the term, working broadly in the Fanonian tradition but pushing the ontological envelope on how race pries open the consistency of the notion of humanity as such (from Chakrabarty, 2012 in postcolonial theory to Yusoff, 2018 in new-materialist feminism via Mirzoeff, 2016 in critical race studies). It can be said there is an “ontological turn” in the theorization of race in that long-standing philosophical questions of “man,” being, life, death, temporality, historicity, embodiment, the thing, the earth, language as such, and the limits of knowledge have come to the fore (Wynter, 2013). In black studies, the ontological turn often has implicit and explicit echoes of Heidegger, ethically assuming an “Afropessimist” or even black-nihilist stance in that the hopefulness associated with African American political aspirations is shown to itself perpetuate the structural erasure of the possibility of black human-being as inaugurated in the Middle Passage and the commodification of African bodies, which are continued directly in the present (Sexton, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Warren, 2018). Antiblackness is in this literature a fundamental feature of both modernity and scholarly thought itself. The erasure of Indigenous peoples has a similar and related profundity, and the category of settler-colonialism has in recent years allowed Indigenous scholars to radically question the legal, metaphysical, and political parameters of the socius (Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2014; Whyte, 2018; Wolfe, 2016). While there is no space to do justice to the nuances and sophistication of this new effervescence in black, Indigenous, and decolonial theoretical discourse—in particular their varying relations to Marxism, feminism, ecological thought, and poststructuralism—their growing international influence warrants some brief comments to distinguish the approach sketched here.

First, while the social death imparted on Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans are certainly two originary catastrophes forming the basis of global modernity and systematically repressed in discourse, the question is not only how they are entwined, but how they interact with later violent as well as ostensibly more benevolent racializing processes, from the European conquest of the Pacific to multiculturalism in Scandinavia and Singapore, from Soviet Union ethnic policies to the exploitation of South Asian workers in the Middle East and Palestinian workers in Israel. Insofar as capital intrinsically “aims” to become-planetary, we cannot limit ourselves to the Atlantic world, or even primitive accumulation, when explaining its racial implications. Following internationalist black feminists like Angela Davis and historians of global settler-colonialism like Patrick Wolfe (2016), racial capitalism can be seen to have from the beginning involved multiple continents at once, potentializing all of the human species and planet for marketization, with varying degrees of annihilatory biopower and differential inclusion.

The leveling of distinctions characteristic of immediacy theory often broaches a dissolutionist nihilism that absolutizes and dematerializes states, laws, and power relations, and abnegates alternative formations or alternative affordances of political-institutional forms. When that kind of argumentation prevails, its ambition is indistinction: harm-seeking laser vision sees particular injustices impugn the notion of justice; turtles all the way down. A brilliant and much-laureled example of this indistinction is the discourse of "university abolition" in the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and their students/followers. Rather than distinguish between the institutional operations and effects of the university and the prison system, Harney and Moten recurrently assimilate the one to the other. In their essay "The University (Last Words)," for instance, they directly liken a research fellowship to one of the cruelest of carceral practices, solitary confinement:

The university is a fortress whose various appearances—refuge and refugee camp, writer's colony and colony betray its deep, various, nefarious functions . only in the university can winning a fellowship mean access to solitude . . a set of fantasies, ranging from transparency to blackening, held in relational solitary confinement that mistakes the restricted (re)forms of the academy's general population for the 49 revolutionary force of a general intellectual metaeconomy.

What is immediately striking in these extracts is the role played by affect, or more accurately yet, by the “pained stimulation” of the aroused passions of enjoyment. What both authors highlight—and this speaks to the analytical value of the concept—is that forms of excess stimulation (the “negative pleasure” of jouissance) underlie and propel Symbolic and political constructions of otherness. Different cultural modes of enjoyment are, furthermore, fundamentally discordant. We have then not so much a “Clash of Civilizations”—to reference the Samuel Huntington’s (1997) much cited thesis—as a clash of enjoyments.

Moreover, the difficulty that we have in realizing “full” enjoyment—something that is impossible in Lacanian theory for “castrated” speaking beings—is dealt with by imagining the supposedly unimpaired and inevitably disturbing enjoyment possessed by cultural/racial/sexual others. In short, the fact that we cannot attain the jouissance we feel we deserve results in perceptions of an unhindered, illegitimate, and undeserved enjoyment on the part of others. As Sheldon George notes: “the other’s jouissance, or enjoyment, [is] … the very core around which … otherness articulates itself” (2016: 3). Political jealousy, as Žižek calls it, is thus (at least in part) the result of incompatibilities and more importantly yet, perceived sacrifices of jouissance.

Last year, the American Psychological Association issued an apology for its role in “promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism” and resolved to do better (American Psychological Association, 2021). It acknowledged that addressing historical and contemporary harms due to racism will require redress at the individual, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels. Psychological research—with its focus on individuals— can speak to individual and interpersonal redress. But this focus can also provide a narrow lens. A casual reader of psychological research could come away with the impression that Confederate monuments reflect heritage, that guns promote felt safety, that health-care disparities in pain management are the result of physicians’ faulty perceptions, and that policy responses to pandemics are grounded in legitimate fears of contagion. They could also come away with the impression that debates over Confederate monuments, guns, health-care disparities, and pandemics are overblown and simply require individual-level change. Psychological research that is centered on history and its legacy, however, reveals important nuances: Confederate monuments are associated with hate, guns are tied to the maintenance of White supremacy, physicians’ perceptions follow from a long history of medical racism, and responses to pandemics are biased in ways that further the reach of long-held racist narratives. Such research can make people more mindful of individual- and system-level solutions.

Looking ahead, how can psychological research make history and its legacy more legible? The first step is relatively straightforward: Psychologists can provide historical and sociocultural context when presenting individual-level research. The next steps are decidedly harder: Psychologists will need to incorporate historical and sociocultural analysis into research questions, hypotheses, designs, analyses, and conclusions. These steps will require diverse multidisciplinary teams, which can make research harder and more time- and resource- intensive. They will require acknowledging and challenging racism in who is included in the research process and how the resulting work is reviewed and valued (e.g., Bharat et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2020). They will require reimagining the promotion and tenure process, which is currently driven by the number of publications in top-ranked journals. Multidisciplinary work is often more difficult to publish in disciplinary journals and is increasingly difficult to publish in top-ranked multidisciplinary journals (Callier, 2018). A related point is that social psychologists will need to value other methodologies (see Lewis, 2021). Although social psychologists can experimentally manipulate perceptions and knowledge of history (see Salter et al., 2018), incorporating historical context and measures may not always fit experimental paradigms.

There is a long history of pessimists in African American thought that would today, more than ever, hold that we just need to give up on the idea that whites can be saved. Scholars like Thandeka must then face these skeptical challenges that use history, sociology, and law to support their pessimistic stance in regard to where we go from here. They have claimed that all the historical evidence warrants giving up on waiting for whites to be reformed. From Frederick Douglass to Tommy Curry, there have been pessimistic critics of “the Black philosopher’s obsessive hope in the redemptive character of white innocence.”11 The stronger pessimists’ challenge argues that historically, groups in power are not likely to give up power easily and the lives of black people are at stake; therefore, we cannot wait until whites have some affective transformation as suggested by Thandeka. Only some political radical action has a chance of bringing about genuine change. Thandeka is by no means alone in the hope that whites can change. In fact, there is plenty of new and exciting research in support of her side. In her most recent publication, The Future of Whiteness, Linda Alcoff argues that whiteness is not inextricably tied to white supremacy. There are no fixed social categories and therefore no grounds for fatalism. There is hope that white people will face the truths of who they are and how they got here, and will push back on the seductions of white supremacy.12 I am not going to pretend to solve this long-standing debate but will critique the assumption that proper appeal to facts and reason will settle the issue. Often both sides think their side is empirically grounded and the other is ideological. Because of the predominance of white supremacy in US history, the pessimist’s side is the one that usually feels more secure that the facts are on her [their] side. They thus portray those with some hope, like Thandeka, as committed to some value-ethical commitments that blinds one to [obscures] the facts and what they call for. From the pessimist’s standpoint, someone who brings value considerations is another case of moral rhetoric that ends up masking the reality of exploitation, mass incarceration, poverty, and militarized police murdering unarmed black men. For them, it is obvious that efforts to save the whites or forgive them are not warranted by the evidence. However, as sympathetic as I sometimes am to their side, it is clear to me that none of the pessimist’s postures in regard to whites follow from a mere empirical study of the facts (e.g., history, sociology). The notion that the pessimist is the one who is adopting an objective “valueless” Archimedean standpoint in this debate is false. Any posture or resolution such as revenge, separation, resistance, or killing presupposes a value standpoint that goes beyond the facts. Thandeka and the pessimist may agree about all the historical evidence against whites and still reasonably disagree about where we go from here. If evidence alone does not determine the issue, then what reasons account for the disagreements? Here is my hypothesis: the issue of “Where do we go from here” is one of those “intellectually undecidable” issues presented by William James in The Will to Believe. Even when there is a preponderance of evidence on one side, it cannot be decided on only empirical-theoretical grounds. More importantly, our metaphysical and value-affective commitments play a key role. Let me explain. In a discussion-debate about where we go from here, we must lay out all the facts or evidence that supports our belief, but we rarely lay out all the operative background assumptions or “put all the cards on the table.” For instance, both sides may appeal to historical evidence, but history is after all just that, history. The issue is about what should be done today, where we should put our hopes, or what we should try now. For instance, at this point in history, should we trust “white” people? “Hope” and “trust” presuppose risk, and the issue of whether something is worth the risk or not is not totally decided by adopting some theoretically detached “objective” study of the facts or history. In disagreements about this sort of issue or belief, there is a lot going on in the background that has nothing to do with the empirical evidence or “facts.” The Role of Metaphysical13 Assumptions in “Where Do We Go from Here?” The issue of where we go from here cannot be addressed without assumptions about the reality of the temporal or history. In deciding where we go, one must presuppose a view about the “here” (the present) and how in general it relates to the past and the future. Let me return to debates among black intellectuals to illustrate the profound difference one’s metaphysical beliefs about history make, and in particular black history, in figuring out where we go from here. A good place to start is a statement by James Baldwin that has received much attention since the release of the film I Am Not Your Negro: “History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.”14 Baldwin is raising a criticism of a certain view of history, one in which the past atrocities suffered by blacks can be forgotten because in reality they do not exist anymore. White ignorance or amnesia may be self-serving and have different causes, but Baldwin is correcting a metaphysical assumption about the past and history here. However, Baldwin’s assertion is ambiguous or can be subjected to different views of history. In a recent article in Slate, 15 Ismail Muhammad notices this ambiguity and argues that we have misunderstood the importance of James Baldwin for today’s black writers. The statement that “we carry history with us” can be interpreted in different ways depending on our views of the past and history (our metaphysics of time). What is the alternative to the sort of presentism where the past just drops from existence as we move forward in time? What does “we carry our history with us” mean, and what weight does this have for blacks in deciding where we go from here? Muhammad is critical of interpretations of Baldwin and black history that assume that “[b]lack people are merely living through endless repetitions of slavery and Jim Crow, which white supremacists massaged into subtler forms of control. According to this thesis, black Americans exist in a moment of foundational violence—slavery—that repeats ad infinitum.”16 Hence, distinct historical moments can be collapsed into one; Jesmyn Ward, among other African American intellectuals, sees “Trayvon Martin’s death as the latest episode of a recurrent nightmare. Replace ropes with bullets. . . . Nothing is new. . . . [E]very aspect of contemporary life has a corollary in the Jim Crow past. . . . White supremacy might have swapped guises, but its power remains interminable and total.”17 This take on black history cannot help but result in the more pessimistic answers to “Where do we go from here?,” but for Muhammad, this is not Baldwin. On the contrary, Baldwin should be used today to challenge this “logic of perpetual trauma.”18 It is true that “we carry history with us” implies “history’s inescapable purchase upon black life,” but “history is not immutable; . . . it is a practice we always conduct in the present tense, reshaping the past in order to imagine desired futures.”19 This way of understanding black history acknowledges that black history has been traumatic, but also acknowledges “the long shadows that slavery and Jim Crow cast on our present without standing in them.”20 According to this metaphysics or history, racist violence persists, regularity exists, but it is not cyclical. There are no historical necessities and immutable truths. White supremacy continues to generate anxiety, fear, and anger (i.e., it persists), but it makes little sense to claim it is perpetual or has such a grip that there are no felt possibilities beyond it. Muhammad is pointing to important assumptions that have received little attention in discussions about white supremacy. Scholars like Charles W. Mills have alerted us about not being blind to the legacy of white supremacy in our present society.21 The way he understands the phrase “We carry our history with us” presupposes a historical perspective in which the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. There is nothing problematic about this historical perspective, but is it one that is adopted in the present (as the locus of reality) or from an Archimedean or God’s-eye view of history (in which the past and the present can be gazed upon)? Muhammad interprets Baldwin as assuming the former; when Baldwin says “History is the present” and “We carry our history with us,” he means that to be in history is to be in a present and open situation that is continuous with previous ones and where structures that have persisted weigh heavily in our present memories, bodies, habits, and communities. We can say that the reality of exploitation, mass incarceration, poverty, and militarized police murdering unarmed black men is continuous with previous forms of, or is the legacy of, “white supremacy,” but there is really no white supremacy as a single and fixed evil across history. This is basic to understanding why there is some hope in Baldwin. Whether Muhammad is correct about Baldwin is secondary to my main point: the role of metaphysical assumptions in debates about where we go from here. Pessimists and optimists have these assumptions, and making them explicit in debates may advance communal inquiry more than pretending that the issue can be decided by being “empirical” and objective about black history. Many blacks would agree that “history is the present” and “we carry our history with us,” but exactly how the horrendous past of whites bears on the present depends in part on the extent to which we believe that what anchors all historical accounts of the past is the present, or if we see the present as just the effect of the past. How open-endedly we conceive the universe bears on having some hope. The Role of Affective-Value Reasons in “Where Do We Go from Here?” There is no sense in denying that personal-idiosyncratic reasons may play a role in deciding where to take a stand on where we go from here, whether we are aware of them or not. What I have in mind are personal experiences or the possible slant or bias as a result of being a member of some social group (class, gender, etc.). However, here, I wish to highlight the role of the affectivevalue dimension in the sense that is emphasized by Thandeka. The fact is that a value slant seems unavoidable since people come from different moral sensitivities and value commitments. James calls some of these hidden reasons “the passional.” This is important in understanding disagreements among thinkers in the black intellectual tradition. The disagreement between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X cannot be understood unless we consider, for example, the religious-moral background and values that informed each side. Thandeka shares the same Christian value-laden slant of Martin Luther King, Jr., when she proposes to “save” whites. There is nothing inherently problematic about this value commitment, but it needs to be made explicit. Again, not even the most rigorous empirical-scientific pessimist can avoid taking a value standpoint on where we go from here. I can easily imagine someone being in total agreement with Thandeka’s diagnosis of whites in America and still disagree that whites are capable of being saved or that we should try to do something about it. How Should We Approach “Where Do We Go from Here?”: A Proposal If I am correct, does it mean that discussion on this issue is a waste of time since at the end of the day, it is undecidable, and all a matter of people’s subjectivevalue commitments?22 Does it mean there is just no way to determine better from worse positions in regard to where we go from here? Not at all. Not all views are equally supported or reasonable. Moreover, the lesson of James in regard to genuine options that are “intellectually undecidable” is not to stop serious inquiry about facts and history or the appeal to them as the basis for justification from our stance.23 We should continue to aim at engaging in an open and inclusive communal inquiry about this issue, but ideally all parties must make an honest effort to put all the cards on the table in the discussion. The acknowledgment that there are “affective” commitments that guide our most factual-empirical inquiries is an important step; the alternative is a repression that does not work. This last proposal is not easy. Our intellectual arrogance often gets in the way, and even under ideal conditions, most of us are not even aware of our deepest affective-value reasons that guide our inquiries. In other words, we resist or are incapable of putting all the cards on the table. However, this is not a good reason to not try, and it points to the importance of trying to have the most inclusive community of inquiry. Finding out what “our cards” are is not a matter of self-introspection of our beliefs or in our minds; it is a matter of social interaction, of being confronted by others. The best way to find out our slant, bias, and blindness is via communication, especially with those we disagree with. There is no Archimedean standpoint that we can appeal to in deciding who is right in the disagreements about where we go from here. The lack of such a standpoint should not be a source of despair. There are better and worse understandings of others and the possibility of learning from them. More importantly, especially in regard to issues such as where we go from here, all the options on the table have their own risk; there is no certainty or way of really knowing beforehand which is correct. This requires a lot of epistemic humility. All parties should be fully committed to taking a stand, but should be aware of their fallibility. This demands adopting an experimental attitude that is nowhere to be found today in public discourse. The source of this proposal is the shared insights of the American melioristic democratic philosophical tradition—James, Du Bois, Baldwin, Addams, Dewey, Locke. There are important differences between these thinkers, and they do not share a particular answer to the question “Where do we go from here?” that we can recover for today. In fact, if there is one, it is that different times (and contexts) call for us to revisit the question in light of all of the best present intellectual resources we can muster. An intelligent stance requires a serious inquiry into the diagnosis about the proper means relative to the present context. Even if we come to agree that a revolution is called for today, there is still the issue of what particular sort of revolution and what means are needed. To be sure, some of these thinkers defended prima facie reasons for preferring democratic means, but in principle, they are open to any particular means, even killing. I would not be honest or be putting all the cards on the table if I did not disclose the common metaphysical beliefs and the melioristic affective backbone that animate this tradition. This is consistent with my previous analysis on what is operative in the background of “Where do we go from here?” Let me elaborate. In regard to “Where do we go from here?,” this philosophical tradition resists or is critical of both the optimism of white denial and the pessimism of black despair. Insofar as both assume we live in a “block universe,” there is no basis for such determinism in reality. This philosophical tradition assumes an open nature of a pluralistic cosmos, and this makes a difference in how American philosophers think about and confront evils-injustices as events in life as a present process. For them, the comfort from the certainty of both optimism and pessimism seem shallow and usually lead to total passivity in the form of either waiting for the unavoidable progress to come or pessimistic resignation, despair, and cynism. Injustices are usually events with a history, but in an open and unfinished horizon of a world still in the making; therefore, where we have been does not determine where we should go. More importantly, even our best-grounded optimistic or pessimistic stances are likely to be mistaken and corrected by unexpected events.

The reason anti-Blackness critique is welcome in schools is because it is devoid of praxis and politics, or, to be more precise, because it celebrates its lack of politics. The impossibility of praxis and the rejection of organizing are fundamental tenets for two reasons. The first is that there is no answer to the question “what is to be done?” and the second is that the mass movements necessary for transformation are “from the jump, an anti-black formation,” as Wilderson told IMIXWHATILIKE.[14] Of course, the only thing to do is to condemn every attempt at fighting oppression and improving material conditions. For example, when a student group at one of our schools staged a protest when Condoleeza Rice came to speak, they were denounced as “anti-Black.” There was no political criteria for such a denouncement, no defense of Rice, and likely no knowledge of the reasons behind the protest. It didn’t matter that Rice was a key figure of the white supremacist imperialist power structure, or that she played a major role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the torture of thousands of Arab and African people.

Examples of “anti-Blackness” that often come up in organizing are that non-Black people of color are to be met with suspicion when organizing on issues that sharply affect Black people. One such issue is immigration. In the struggle for immigrant rights, which is often overcoded as a “Latinx” issue, some Black activists and organizers point to the fact that 44% of those caged by ICE, for example, are Haitians. Instead of directing their ire towards the racist state that holds many Black immigrants in horrendous conditions, the focus then becomes the irrevocable anti-Blackness that exists in Latinx communities. Ideologies like Afro Pessimism have working class people of color (Black people included) fighting amongst each other, with the same framework as liberal identity politics. They both reduce solidarity to checking one’s privilege and fashioning oneself as the consummate ally of Black people and their liberation. So, instead of building a united front against the racist state, the lack of corporate/mainstream media focus on the fact that there are many Black immigrants, and immigration is a “Black issue” unnecessarily shifts attention to other workers who are subjected to the same “anti-Black” ideology of the ruling class and it’s media apparatuses. Instead of calling out the “Latinx community” for their “anti-Blackness” a revolutionary perspective frames the issue as not one stemming from any said community, but from the ruling class which oppresses the vast majority of immigrants in this country.

Given that the endgame of Afro-pessimism as an academic enterprise is limited by its location within the neoliberal university (see Fred Moten and Stephano Harney’s ‘‘The University and the UnderCommons,’’), the most generative aspects of its analysis of anti-blackness and Western civilization are indebted to knowledge about black life and liberation produced outside the academy and on the ground of struggles for freedom. The pessimism of conventional philosophical concern presses on the ontological foundations of a person’s individual sense of agency and purpose, throwing one’s will to live into question.

Prophetic despair, such as that which Baldwin expresses in an often quoted interview between James Baldwin Dr. Kenneth Clark in May of 1963, presses on the material cohesion of our moral infrastructure. In the interview Baldwin professes to remaining pessimistic with regard to his own life when he says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?’’ He goes on a bit later to refuse, in no uncertain term, pessimism as a politics of the future.

Afropessimism trains its reader in the leaps and bounds of faith necessary for this notion to be entertained. Though Wilderson sheds considerable ink critiquing nonBlacks for analogizing their condition to Black folks, his own understanding of his Blackness gets established through analogy, too. Early on in the book, a young Frank is with his grandmother. They are watching the rebellions in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Their conversation reads as if a dress rehearsal for Afropessimist philosophy.

When, prompted by the billowing smoke and the scenes of looting, young Frank asks Grandmother Jules, “Why are we mad?” The reader is not prompted to question the integrity of the “we” that extends from the mansion in Kenwood—the well-heeled Minneapolis neighborhood that the Wildersons are integrating—to the unspecified Black postindustrial ghetto [zone] that “could have been anywhere and everywhere.”7 Kenwood is nowhere on that map, but it’s a nowhere that extends, by way of a gaze accompanying the presumption of shared affect, to a Black anywhere and everywhere.

To say the intervention of afropessimism has been contentious, for both black studies and the general public, would be an understatement. The reviews of Frank Wilderson’s latest work alone express a kind of resentment that is so sharp it’s hard not to believe that these writers did not interpret Wilderson’s work as a hand sealed personal condemnation of their livelihood (McCarthy 2020) (Cunningham 2020). These reviews are often written with a semi-performative defiance of Wilderson’s contention about their ‘social death’, but what cannot go overlooked in these types of responses is that even in their avowed defiance these reviewers cannot escape the political ontology that locates them on the other side, as opposed to the other end, of humanity. These reviews are written from an experience the reviewers often feel can approximate the experience of their apparent fellows, but Wilderson is concerned with the metanarrative of structural positionalities and not the performative capacities perceived in everyday existential experiences or personal expression. Wilderson is not challenging how they may feel from day to day, but what they are, or are not, in the grand scheme of things that exceeds performative political gestures through an extra-ordinary vulnerability.4

The distinction between the performance of blackness and its ontological status that motivates Wilderson builds primarily from the term social death, originally attributed to Orlando Patterson. The term has been adopted and deployed by many to describe the depraved or degraded status of persons under conditions of oppression. Wilderson adopts the definitional components of naked (gratuitous) violence, natal alienation, and dishonor from Patterson, but interprets them beyond certain ontic conditions—where, for instance, for Patterson anyone may become a slave—to a specifically black ontological paradigm that is crystallized phenomenologically and psychoanalytically in the work of Frantz Fanon and the interpretations of his work by David Marriott. Wilderson also takes up Hortense Spillers psychoanalytic framing and vocabulary of a foundational grammar of suffering that reoccurs indefinitely through a violation of the flesh over against a grammar of freedom of the body. Additionally, he builds off Saidiya Hartman—who also has Spillers, Patterson, and Fanon in mind—by replacing the terms of human degradation with logics of the object of commodification, whereby black social death is better conceived in terms of fungibility and accumulation instead of exploitation and alienation. Wilderson conceives the continuity and coalition of these black theorists—and others—to paint the picture of a black existence that demands an entire reimagining of the political through the lens of extra-ordinary vulnerability in three registers that will be explicated in the rest of this chapter: discursively, materially, and psychically.

That complicated forms of the nonconscious mind play a significant role in race-based bias is supported by studies of specific group preferences for their racialized group. In the psychological literature generally speaking, “the nonconscious” means mental processes not mediated by consciousness. The nonconscious does most of the mind’s work encompassing automatic, rational, intuitive, dream, and repression processes.46 Here “repression processes” refers to a post-Freudian idea generally excluding Freud’s topologies, their variations on the idea of the unconscious, and dramatic ideas such as the Oedipus complex and the life and death drives.47

One body of studies I looked at highlights a disjunction between peoples’ conscious racial attitudes and their perceived nonconscious race-biased beliefs. Elizabeth Phelps et al.48 and Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji49 confirm, and build upon early stages in this body of research. In their work, the white subjects tested tended to consciously affirm belief in racial equality but nonconsciously affirm the superiority of their in-group, which is to say, of whites. The black persons tested in a companion study, by contrast, explicitly affirmed, unlike the whites, a preference for their racial group.50 But nonconsciously they registered a lower in-group preference than the white people did. The studies suggest that both groups’ conscious avowals are masking complicating competing feelings and ideas perhaps unavailable to direct awareness.

‘This revolt’ is also an invitation to the other to observe not just the unethical world of antiblackness, but the more elusive ethical im-possibility that escapes that world and its worldliness; the invitation to be other than human escapes in fugitive moments like these and it can only be acknowledged in and through passing because of its impropriety. Sukie is not freed in this act, in fact, the condition of her unfreedom is brought into full relief, but there is something else besides her political unfreedom, that is, a fugitive escape. This is to say, the fugitive nature of blackness that cannot be contained, that which is a thinginess that transcends objectivity, is also traceable through the revulsion of the other that cannot bear to witness and yet must; and also in the transmission of a story of blackness doing the impossible, that is, of revolting from a position of non-being, if only for a moment, as escape; not freedom. The political conditions are never fully transcended but are instead highlighted in a flash; and that flash is a beckoning, an ethical invitation, for all to embrace black hospitality..

The ethics of Sukie’s transgression is where the political ontology of whiteness, the first yes, is transgressed, for a moment, by a second yes of black social fugitivity. Sukie is the transgressive host and the criminal stranger, as she is forced to welcome the other at the threshold, but she also brings to light the im-possibility of an unconditional black hospitality through a gesture at the social level that unveils the intangible and fugitive breech of decorum that is blackness. She is constitutively indecent and improper, and the impossible flashing of her black body vivifies this sordid ontology—which is just one of many names for paraontology. The act’s fugitive brevity is not a temporal iteration, but a logical anomaly, an escaping moment, where the object bears resistance to an idea of the human that cannot be reconciled with itself or its ‘other’. In this sense she welcomes her guests to the auction block—the black home —to the realities of black life, the impossibility of domesticity, with a curtsey and a threat. That ethical moment does not come to us, now, firsthand, directly, but escapes through the archive, through black social life, through Fannie, through Hartman, through the others within … the black home .

Although this argument is not without merit, its ultimate dismissal of a rather essentialized and reified conception of folk politics in favor of less anti-systemic politics and more state-based methods is in the end a form of methodological whiteness that fails to acknowledge lasting contribution that these politics—which are indeed often steeped in decolonial, feminist, and indigenous types of knowledge—have made.16 Following Gurminder K. Bhambra, methodological whiteness “fails to recognize the dominance of “‘whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective—that deriving from white experience—as a universal perspective.” 17 This is not to say that Srnicek and Williams do not criticize the subversive universalism of Eurocentrism and its relation to the so-called dark side of European modernity (i.e., the history of colonial dominion, indigenous genocide, slave trade, and colonial extraction) or that they do not recognize some the positive effects of folk politics.18 Yet the fundamental problem with their discussion of folk politics—which they argue has produced critiques that are “largely accurate”—is that it tends to enshrine these contributions as historical tactics that have either accommodated existing power structures that have corrupted the new left, or have remained marginal and therefore unable to trans- form society more broadly. 19 Although this is not the same as directly whitewashing the colonial and racial violence that continues to struc- ture the majority of working and living conditions in the non-western world—dismissing decolonial, feminist, and indigenous politics simply because they “aren’t winning” 20 is deeply problematic, for it contributes to the normalization of a discussion of Eurocentrism that fails or omits to account for its epistemological racism or indeed meth- odological whiteness. Without being firmly rooted in an engagement with coloniality, the discussion of folk politics—which as a term is itself deeply colonial 21 —leaves the argument as a whole fatally impeded from discussing the extent to which conditions of coloniality continue to structure global flows of labor as well as the waves of resistance against them. Indeed, the entire project seems to be premised on the goal of reinvigorating white western leftism. It is for these reasons that Srnicek and Williams regard folk politics as a welcome yet never sufficient step in overcoming the capitalist order. Their frequent refer- ence to anti- and decolonial movements thereby fits within a typical Eurocentric narrative of referencing decolonial, feminist, and indig- enous interventions into the operations of coloniality yet ultimately dismissing them for not heralding the monumental rupture of the capitalist order. Of specific importance for the present argument is the fact that their account of a future-oriented politics is one that does not shy away of making tactical use of state power, as theirs is indeed a project on the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as opposed to dismantling the state as a fundamentally colonial institution that enables and maintains distributions of racial violence.22 On a theoretical level, their argu- ment is all but explicitly aimed at John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. Yet Holloway’s argument is by no means a naive, folk-political celebration of horizon- talism and localism. Changing the world without taking power entails starting from a more profound analysis of global capitalism and its effects on both the construction of the subject and the composition of class power. More than mere hyper-individuality, capitalism—through its emergence from colonial slavery and exploitation—has reconsti- tuted the subject in a fundamentally dehumanized form. Indeed, colo- nial capitalism was fundamentally a project of turning people into things. The subject is not just atomized and violently separated from its entanglement in the social world but also stripped of its dignity and capacity to flourish and live with dignity as a human being. Holloway therefore argues that a struggle that only frames itself as a positive one in terms of explicit demands negates the dehumanized conditions that determine the lives of a global surplus population:

To treat the subject as positive is attractive but it is inevitably a fic- tion. In the world that dehumanizes us, the only way in which we can exist as humans is negatively, by struggling against our dehumanization. To understand the subject as positively autonomous (rather than potentially autonomous) is rather like a prisoner in a cell imagining that she is already free: an attractive and stimulat- ing idea, but a fiction, a fiction which leads on to other fictions, to the construction of a whole fictional world.23

I close with a set of qualities I enacted to engage with complex, stirring arguments in an essay like Day’s. While the medium I use to demonstrate my approach is Day’s essay, what I discuss here is about the more everyday experience of being confronted by writing about “the ways the world is made up.” I allow performativity in practice to lead this research project. Traditionally, the purpose for a researcher to establish their ontological grounds is to allow them to have a sense of what they are and are not investigating, to ask how they know what they know, and to articulate the relationships between the components of the research project. Alternatively, I argue that the purpose of situating scholarly work in theoretical foundations can be beyond an abstract, haughty asking, articulating, or even sensing.

I assert that, for some, this project of establishing an ontological position is a highly personal, existential matter. In this essay, these concerns are not attended to with objectivity, distance, abstraction, or even a passionate dedication to the given issue. Jared Sexton argues, for Black folk, having one or not can be a matter of health and psychopolitical necessity. Some of us need a stable conception of how the world works to cling to precisely because of its everyday incoherence and its tortured logic. Knowing the world is first an embodied thing (Diatta 45–46) that comes in the form of terror and illegibility—far before this knowledge is ever theorized on by scholars. Terror and incoherence can serve as “structures of feeling” in order to think critically (Sexton). Finding a worldview to stand on is important to this extent because we must also swiftly survive the structuring irrationality 1 that makes white life coherent (Wilderson). From my non-white, Black, Asian, Senegalese, Japanese, North American, Queer, immi- grant to the United States positionality, tugging at the threads of these kinds of “ontological” or “epistemological” frames matters at the level of existence; not only to the degree of asking or articulating. The process of naming worldviews in this essay is for survival, not primarily in terms of physical persistence, but at the level of consciousness. In this work, it is specifically through an understanding of white supremacist structures (i.e. Anti-Indi- geneity, Anti-Blackness, etc.) that some sense can be made of our complex positionalities.

In order for us to save the planet, to save us all, we must save Black people. This is not tantamount to saying we must save Black people first or even we must only save Black people, which seem closer to the U.S.-focused, racial reparations debates. Instead, it is to say, much like Rodney, that Black people are a global people, inseparable from the tentacles of Western colonial rule.57 It is also to say, much like Davis, that to consider how Black people are affected in the United States and to solve such problems extends out to solving other problems as well. For example, both Davis and Atiya Husain contend that to end the militarization of policing in Black ghettoes could impact U.S. militarized approaches to the war on terror, which also has inspired other country’s approaches to the war on terror.58 In a similar vein, to take seriously the raced, gendered, and sexual assumptions of nature in our climate crisis discussions would not only point toward Black people, but toward the role of the Western-led climate crisis on the lives and futures of non-Western locales that have been deemed unworthy of saving by the West. In such a context, racial reparations are not solely about U.S. Black people, even as they are about us; reparations become inseparable from considerations of saving our environment—the time-space where we all live.