Reject ontological accounts, they obscure the material reality of diverse black experience

(Chris, CompLit@SantaCruz, Race and the Politics of Recognition in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory , ed Best, Bonefeld, O’Kane)

Contemporary black studies scholars have increasingly challenged the pluralist, coalitional logic at the core of liberal multicultural state and institutional policy. Offering a comprehensive theory of antiblack racism dubbed ‘Afropessimism’, scholars such as Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton have rejected a liberal multicultural imaginary ‘wherein cultural diversity is managed as a depoliticized term of experience’ (Sexton, 2008: 247). Both theorists also argue for the structural impossibility of attaining of recognition for black subjects. This cohort returns to the concept of race contra culture as a set of what Wilderson calls ontological positions: whiteness, blackness, and the indigenous ‘Savage’ (Wilderson, 2010: 23). For Wilderson, Sexton, and other Afropessimist critics, blackness is less as an affirmative ethnocultural identity than a negative social category. On this view, the sacrificial expulsion and subordination of blackness guarantees the coherence of civil society and its subjects. Framing blackness as existential abjection, non-relationality, and non-communicability has led critic Fred Moten to offer a sympathetic though critical interrogation of Afropessimism’s capacity to think the relation between antiblack racism and black subjectivity and political agency (Moten, 2013). For both Wilderson and Sexton, the severity and historical durability of antiblack racism is ultimately grounded, not in colonial domination or capitalist exploitation, but in the psychic pathology of nonblack subjects structured by what Wilderson calls the ‘libidinal economy of civil society’ (2010: 15). That psychic economy simultaneously conditions a history of nonblack enjoyment of and empathy toward black suffering (Hartman, 1997). These theorists thus elaborate blackness as a structural category defined primarily through historically durable forms of antiblack racism: gratuitous violence, non-sovereignty, existential abjection, literal and metaphorical fungibility, and what sociologist Orlando Patterson has called the ‘social death’ (Patterson, 1985) of the slave condition. For Afropessimist theorists, the politics of nonwhite interracial coalition encoded in multicultural ideals fundamentally depend upon a form of permanent structural misrecognition of the singularity of antiblack racism. That misrecognition is enforced through spurious racial analogies that render ‘equivalent slavery and other forms of oppression’ (Sexton, 2008: 293). Afropessimism’s critiques of indigenous studies has occasioned ongoing debates over the historical relationship between black chattel slavery and US settler colonialism (Sexton, 2014; Day, 2015; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). At the same time, Afropessimism’s ontological turn, grounded in a conception of an unchanging and originary libidinal economy of black suffering, has been the target of criticism for its anti-materialist, radically dehistoricized conception of black racialization (Dawson, 2016). Despite breaking from a prior multicultural logic of coalition, therefore, Afropessimism’s ontologization of blackness as a racial position, or perhaps the singular racial position, raises the question of the historicity and internal homogeneity of the category of blackness itself. Considering blackness as a unitary ontological condition of permanent civic nonrecognition faces three broad theoretical challenges. First, the ontological turn raises the question of the relationship between antiblackness and blackness, or between an ascriptive condition and the affirmative heterogeneity of black life (Moten, 2009; Shelby, 2009). Second, accounts of the psychopathological roots of antiblackness have been challenged by scholarship on the changing articulation of black subordination within capitalist social relations (Hall, 1996) from the political economy of black chattel slavery (Oakes, 2016) to the racialization of wagelessness and contemporary surplus populations (Johnson, 2011). This scholarship has often attempted to register the impact of deepening internal economic divisions within black populations on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century black political movements (Reed, 1999; Dawson, 2001; Johnson, 2007; Dawson and Francis, 2015). Finally, treating blackness as an ontological category raises the question of racial unity, and the subsumption of other cross-cutting axes of social differentiation, that has been a persistent object of critique for contemporary black feminist critiques of black nationalism (Collins, 1998; Lubiano, 1998) and theories of intersectionality (Hancock, 2016). (940-1)