Yes progress- prefer subversive memory to ironic history- we can break the chain of continuity of antiblack violence by adopting epistemic humility

(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)

So for West, like the Afropessimist, history is indeed catastrophic. Indeed, he explicitly invokes Benjamin’s melancholy contention that, for the oppressed, the state of emergency is the norm, not the exception.87 He argues that the “gravitas of the catastrophic” obligates us, in a spirit of mourning, to make “radical disappointment and profound disenchantment our constant companions” and be aware that we have an overwhelming chance of failure in our attempts to realize any utopian aspirations. However, we must persist “with a level of integrity and a quest for moral magnanimity” in the struggle for democratic justice. What allows us to keep faith with this demand is, in part, “a subversive memory in the folks that survived, and the texts that were written, and the stories that were passed on, and the narratives that were bequeathed to us.” West is worth quoting at length on this point: Here I would fall back on Adorno when he says that any exhaustion has leftovers even in defeat. Even the memory of those lost doesn’t fit within commemorations, because deep remembering is dif­ferent than conventional commemoration. And so our task is to never lose sight of the leftovers, or what the great Arthur Miller would call “the misfits,” the people who don’t fit in, the experiences, and the doings and sufferings of fellow human beings who can’t find a place in a moment of exhaustion, even though the exhaustion never goes all the way down. . . . You start with the leftovers, you start with the defeated, you start with the subjugated, and you start with the ways in which, even in the moment of exhaustion, they are not subsumed under the vocabulary of the exhausted.88 West’s approach here calls for the cultivation and protection of a specific mode of historical consciousness, and resonates with the approach to history that Seyla Benhabib has characterized, building on Arendt and Benjamin, as “fragmentary historiography.”89 The thinker who uses this fragmentary historiography breaks “the chain of narrative continuity . . . [inherent in] chronology as the natural structure of narrative, to stress fragmentariness, historical dead ends, failures, and ruptures.”90 The aim is one consonant with recognizing the dignity of past actors and the ideals and principles they championed, even though they will not benefit from it. Dignity could be said to enter into historical judgment through the hope “to do justice to the memory of the dead by telling the story of history in terms of their failed hopes and efforts.”91 More fundamentally, the incorporation of a duty to show reverence to dignity (thinking from the standpoint of others) into historical judgment, is above all, a rejection of those overarching approaches to history that refuse to place the value of “defeated causes” and their proponents at the center of historical judgment, or fails to take seriously the hermeneutic challenge of seeking out the “thought fragments” that might speak powerfully to a present changed by intervening developments.92 Tragedy, given its focus on human agency, even amid epistemological limitations, unintended consequences, and the fleeting opportunity structure for particular actions, can bear more easily accounts of history that emphasize the interpenetration and semi-autonomous logics of various political practices (e.g., antiblack racism, capitalism, sexism, and colonialism) rather than inflating one axis to a comprehensive, seamless totality and flattening out all human desire and action along its arc. Such a stance trains our judgment to see the seams for movement that emerge through the interpenetration of power systems and their emergent properties that no one can predict in total. Contingency is crucial. The hopes embodied in struggles are only possible and not guaranteed—meaning that natality and tragedy go together in tandem. Thus, the recognition of the interrelation helps steel us against both the fetishism for spectacular eruptions that dominate romantic narrations and the paralyzing disappointment that governs ironic thought. Narrating the complex, long-term web of actions that coagulate into the statement of important ideals or, even, the achievement of partial victories helps orient political struggles toward the kinds of dispositions needed for what Du Bois, in one of his more prescient, if less lyrical moments, called “the long siege”— an appropriate description for emancipatory struggle without guarantees if there ever was one.93 This subversive, tragic imagination also helps inoculate us against a particular form of nihilism, one born from the lack of epistemic humility at the heart of the historical imagination promoted by Afropessimism. The insistence on, and demonstrated recovery of, contingency, unpredictability, and natality give reason to be critical of Afropessimism’s unwarranted faith in the (metaphysical) ability to predict a permanent future of antiblack abjection. This epistemic arrogance is “sustained,” as Theodor Adorno wrote of such doctrines, “by the false inference that because there has been no progress up until now, there will never be any.”94 While Warren excoriates “optimists” for shielding themselves from critique by appealing to an unknown and unknowable future, his futural gestures toward the “impossibility” of alternative political arrangements are even more insulated in a posture devoid of epistemic humility. This is especially bewildering given that, for Warren, black abjection is not ordained by God, written into cosmology or biology, forged in a messianic transformation, or even the necessary outcome of human history. The antiblack order, insofar as one can discern from his account, is the artifact of a complex, interdependent web of human decisions, ideas, practices, desires, and other myriad strivings and sayings of human beings that fused to create the African slave trade, imperialism, and antiblack racial ideology. It is unclear how, without escaping these human dynamics into the realm of metaphysical speculation, the Afropessimist can presume, a priori, to predict the whole range of possible outcomes of interpenetrating complex systems of scientific research global governance, economic markets, cultural production, etc. It is impossible to avoid the sense in which the most extreme blend of ironic history and pessimistic prophecy is extraordinarily flattering to its proselytizers’ supposed oracular, spiritual, and cognitive gifts.