Black Nihilism doesn’t combat ressentiment, it produces it

(Brandon M., Nihilism, Pessimism, and Tragic Hope: Black Nihilism Reconsidered in Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Unfortunately, as with many inquiries into the ethical life of black peoples in the New World, the reception of West’s argument has largely been misguided and confused. The shallow, albeit persistent, criticism insists that West, in naming a black nihilism, inadvertently bolsters the neoconservative and even racist ideology of black pathology.10 For such critics, describing a sizeable cohort of black ghetto denizens as having “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world,” or “a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook,” was to reproduce the terms of racist discourse and pathologizing stigma that undergird antiblack stigma in the post-Jim Crow era (Race Matters 14). Yet any attempt to reduce West’s argument to unwitting conservatism fails in two respects. First, it fails to read the essay alongside West’s longstanding neo-Marxist analysis of the interpenetrating structural, ideological, and aesthetic foundations of racial and economic domination.11 As he briefly reiterates in “Nihilism in Black America,” his views on these matters are in stark opposition to conservative social theory. To describe a condition of “black nihilism” is not to endorse an explanatory social theory of black disadvantage that gives causal priority to abnormal cultural patterns that prevail in the ghetto. Nor does it deny the causal or ethical significance of the “basic structure” of society, with its historically cumulative and unjust patterns of group-based inequalities.12 Nor, moreover, does West’s worry that the decline of civic associations and social institutions helps engender nihilism commit him to the argument, made famous by Robert Putnam among others, that an objectionable spirit of individualism and technology-enabled withdrawal is chiefly responsible.13 Instead, West points the blame for social fragmentation at the effects of economic inequality and the intensifying privatization and marketization of all spheres of human life. Such forces destabilize neighborhoods and institutions, with profit imperatives proving particularly corrosive to the ethical ideals of churches, schools, and other domains once more insulated from such pressures (Race Matters 24–25). Second, it is incumbent upon such critics to clarify whether they think that nihilism of any sort is possible. If so, we might ask whether such a phenomenon could have any meaningful social consequence or whether it is possible to diagnose it through any extant form of cultural criticism or social theory.14 While West’s attempt to connect the interpretation of some range of self-undermining or objectionable practices that were apparently increasing or intensifying in black communities (e.g., violence, drug addiction, and suicide) to the broader philosophical literature on nihilism was indeed novel, the claim that forms of hopelessness and meaninglessness embedded in particular practices or stances toward the world represent an existential threat to the flourishing of some members of the group is a familiar one in black letters. James Weldon Johnson, for example, wrote of a “general spirit . . . of hopelessness or acquiescence” amid the wake of Reconstruction’s defeat and the “triumphant materialism of the age.”15 Mary Church Terrell, at the end of the Great Depression, lamented how the “colored man . . . resigns himself to his fate” in “a sort of stoical despair” created by “the helplessness and the hopelessness of the situation in this country.”16 James Forman likewise complained that in Mississippi, before the civil rights insurgency, “years of terror, economic intimidation, and a total, grinding, day-in, day-out white racism had created a black population numb with fear and hopelessness.”17 The psychologist Kenneth Clark despaired, in the 1970s, of the “racial prisons of America’s ghettos” and argued that the “frustration, despair, and a sense of hopelessness” forged by such domination is manifest in drug abuse, crime, and other behaviors.18 Perhaps most stridently of all, Malcolm X argued that a clear-eyed assessment of ghetto conditions “is primarily responsible for the ever-increasing sense of frustration and hopelessness that exists” and is manifest in substance abuse, violent crime, and other vices. “We are trapped,” Malcolm warned, in “a vicious cycle of economic, intellectual, social, and political death. . . . Giving birth to children who see no hope or future but to follow in our miserable footsteps.”19 The persistence of such claims does not dissolve, of course, the reasonable debate over what behaviors or dispositions might persuasively express, enact, or embody “nihilism” in particular contexts. Nor are such voices, despite their admirable commitments to black liberation, immune by default from the habituated contempt toward the poor or the fear of deviance characteristic of so much modern social thought. We should treat charges of “nihilism,” therefore, in a spirit of receptivity and fallibility. Assessing such judgments should obligate us to produce or reconstruct comprehensive accounts of what our interlocutors think constitutes flourishing and dignity, rather than enervation and degradation. Perhaps even more important, nihilism-talk must remain open to revision and reformulation in response to arguments advanced in defense of the practices or dispositions described in such fashion.20 Nonetheless, the accumulated weight of this tradition amounts to a view that critics of nihilism-talk would do well to take seriously. Forms of hopelessness and the threat of meaninglessness have proved so persistent in the face of intergenerational oppression that they may not be waved away by triumphalist romanticism about “resistance” or rationalist evasion of the darker currents of psychic life. This is because, in part, they reflect genuinely reflective ruminations on whether life is worth living in the face of suffering and evil.