Maximum captivity frames that reduce the material history of slavery to libidinal drives are reductionist, unethical, and disavows textures of blackness

The most troubling aspect of Afropessimism, however, may be its treatment of slavery. Despite the fact that Wilderson knows this is one of the most fiercely contested components of his worldview, he treats it as if it were a minor point, relegating an important statement of his position to a footnote: “It is worth reiterating that, through the lens of Afropessimism, slavery is, essentially, a relational dynamic, rather than a historical era or an ensemble of empirical practices (like whips and chains).” I submit that there is something deeply troubling about a casual parenthetical that proposes to evacuate the significance of the entire material history of antebellum slavery. It’s also logically bizarre, since it seems constitutive of the entire project that slavery have been real at least at some point in order for the relation to obtain in the first place. But these issues are brushed aside, since this erasure is necessary for the theory to do what Wilderson wants it to do; slavery must be transformed into a portable and fundamentally psychological relation untethered from historical memory and founded purely on the basis of melanin and the antagonism that an all-encompassing and all-powerful “whiteness” poses to it.

For many of us, such a leap is neither ethical nor comprehensible. But for Wilderson the portability and paradoxical fungibility of slavery fits perfectly with his interest in film and his Lacanian and Fanonian readings of it. How else to explain passages in Afropessimism in which incidents involving a terrible white roommate situation he and his girlfriend find themselves in circa 1979 are, for Wilderson, obviously comparable to Steve McQueen’s 2013 film, 12 Years a Slave, which was based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 slave narrative. This is not a jest, but a sustained and intensely explored analogy, in which the whipping of Patsey (played by Lupita Nyong’o in the film), descriptions of the cool sadism of Mary Epps (the slaveowner’s wife) from Northrup’s 1853 narrative, and Wilderson’s troubles with a batty white roommate all share the same stage. We are asked to imagine them as coequal and even coeval psychological theaters of cruelty, whose mise-en-scène simply involves different props. The plantation is everywhere and all the time. It is ontological, which means that it attaches trans-historically to all Black persons regardless of their social position.

How far does this go? In his academic monograph on film studies, Red, White & Black (2010), Wilderson forthrightly asserts that Black academics are not subalterns in the academy but “Slaves of their colleagues.” Is being talked down to in the faculty lounge really the same as being whipped at the post, or slinging rock on the corner, or being placed in solitary on Rikers Island as a juvenile? Is working at Merrill Lynch in New York as a Black woman really the same as working shifts as a Black gay man in a McDonald’s in Alabama? Is it ethical or desirable to confound all of these into a tortuous equivalency while telling those who propose to fight at your side to shut up because you don’t like the analogies they are using to connect themselves with your suffering?

It is fair to ask of a “lens” whether it actually sharpens our view and, if so, to perform demonstrations of clarity? A major problem for Afropessimism is that its claim to revealing the underlying structural truth seems to repeatedly require abandoning any significant contact with historical reality. With social categories like class, gender, and material facts made irrelevant, the theoretical work is forced to concentrate itself in rhetorical aphorisms that seem to be slouching their way toward slogans. “The antagonist of the worker is the capitalist. The antagonist of the Native is the settler. But the antagonist of the Black is the Human being,” Wilderson tells us. The problem with this, apart from its faux-syllogistic form, is that human identities are not fixed and rigid boxes, but dynamic rings of change that merge and overlap. The Black Americans involved in the colonization scheme of Liberia in the 19th century were both Black (formerly enslaved on US plantations) and also settlers. Obviously, there are Black capitalists just as there are Black workers. Is there a double-jeopardy principle for antagonisms or some calculus by which they can be selectively negated?

“Blackness and Slaveness are inextricably bound in such a way that whereas Slaveness can be disimbricated from Blackness, Blackness cannot exist as other than Slaveness,” Wilderson assures. Was Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first president of Liberia, not capable of really being a settler or a capitalist because of the inescapable “Slaveness” of his Blackness? How should we evaluate the categories, both legal and political, that Black people themselves brought into world history? The only antagonists Jean-Jacques Dessalines recognized in 1804 were the French, whom he violently reviled, refused to grant any rights to, and often cruelly put to death (in the context of what is arguably the most just war ever fought and the only successful example of a slave revolution in history) — while simultaneously decreeing that all citizens of the Republic of Haiti henceforth would be considered Black, even the small Polish population on the island which had joined forces with the slaves against the French slave power. Dessalines also believed that a convergence of interest and identity with the “native” population was both possible and desirable, which is why he called his forces L’Armée Indigène and changed the name of the island from the colonizer’s Saint-Domingue to Haiti, a word from the language of the indigenous Taíno people.

What are we to make of the Blacks who owned slaves themselves, the imbricated weave that historians Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark describe in their classic study, Black Masters, and that Edward P. Jones meditates upon in his great novel, The Known World? What of the fact that Black and white laborers banded together and fought against the planter elite during the years leading up to and including Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676? And if the categories of racial Blackness and whiteness are so crucial to Wilderson, why is none of the scholarship on the historical production of “whiteness” (Theodore Allen, Noel Ignatiev, Nell Irvin Painter, David Roediger) cited in either Afropessimism or Red, White & Black? Where do the unique polities of the Jamaican Maroons and quilombos of Brazil fit into this picture? Can it really be true in the full light of history that there is no Blackness at all that is not Slaveness? Is a flat reductionist dichotomy really capable of comprehending the truth of human history? I understand Wilderson’s point about his Palestinian friend, but what does his theory clarify for us about that Ethiopian Jewish soldier?

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Carter G. Woodson, in The Mis-Education of the Negro, said that “to handicap a student by teaching him that his Black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.” There is no reason to think Afropessimism is anything that severe. But I invoke Woodson here to remind us that more pragmatic points of view are neither new nor the product of superficial analysis. They cannot simply be breezily dismissed. Let’s not pretend that there are no voices that represent the best of Black folk as much as anyone else, and yet take a radically different point of view on race, racism, and what to do about it. Whatever position one eventually comes to, they are owed some serious account, not consignment to the oubliettes of history, as if intelligent thinking on the positionality and politics of Blacks in the United States only began yesterday.

No serious Black intellectual today thinks antiblack racism is not a matter of life and death. The question is still the old one: what is to be done? There has to be room for a serious debate and the flexibility of open-minded conversation on that score. It’s simply implausible that the answers are easy, obvious, or one-dimensional. The fact that Black Lives Matter has done more to explode the Overton window in American politics than any movement since the 1960s has to be fully and duly appreciated for the extraordinary achievement that it is. But Adolph Reed Jr.’s countervailing contention that Black Lives Matter is merely a rebranding and retreading of Black Power for millennials is a barb nonetheless worth reflecting on seriously.