The black/white binary in sociological analyses of race is overly simplistic and fails to account for the structural aspects of racism. Only Afro-Pessimism can shift focus from the binary.

Sociologists of race have argued that the dominant “social contract” of society can be contextualized within the notion of a Black/white binary (). Their analysis of racism and racial oppression and inequality has largely examined Black people in relation to whites. This racial paradigm has been widely critiqued for how it invisiblizes other racial and ethnic groups, such as Latinos/Latinas and Asian Americans. For example, legal scholar Juan Perea () observes that binary thinking excludes the histories and experiences of Latinx peoples and works to sustain negative stereotypes. Perea points out that a focus on Black and white negates the ways that other groups have experienced racism in America. Further, he defines the Black/white binary as “the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White” (p. 1219). Additionally, education scholars have warned against binary thinking as it relates to schools. Howard () identifies problems with the Black/white binary, which has overtaken the analysis of various types of racism that impact school experiences. He explains that educational equity “cannot be fully understood in only Black and White terms.” Criticisms of the Black/white binary follow at least three themes. The first theme suggests that the binary is an overly simplistic, one-dimensional analysis of race. Second, scholars argue that the Black/white binary links racism exclusively to skin color and denies the structural aspects of racism. Finally, another set of criticisms recognize how binary thinking on race misrepresents history while also obscuring the experiences of non-Black people of color. Further the Black/white binary does not account for how Latinos/as, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Native, and other racialized groups practice discrimination. It is the latter theme that has most utility for this article. Afro-Pessimism is less interested in the Black/white binary, per se, but rather a Black/non-Black divide. They suggest that all non-Blacks can have antagonisms against Black people. Instead of regarding race-based systems as primarily and solely an extension of white supremacy, Afro-Pessimism contends that anti-Blackness is upheld by its own set of logics that intersects with white supremacy, but is also operates separately in service to the dehumanization of Blacks. Lipsitz’s notions of the Black spatial imaginary and the white spatial imaginary does not fully account for the centrality and specificity of anti-Blackness. The white spatial imaginary does not explicitly explicate how non-Blacks and non-whites come to make sense of space and how those spatial logics work to subject and dehumanize Black people. The experience of slavery and its afterlives give Blacks a particular ontological position—that is, a grammar of suffering that has no analogy to any event endured by other racial groups. Thus, the plight of Black people cannot and should not be understood through a Black/white paradigm. (; ). Instead, what is needed is a specific spatial imaginary that centers on the specificity of anti-Blackness. Given the significance of anti-Blackness in the U.S., as a separate but related form of racism, attention to anti-Blackness is a critical component in unmasking how spatial imaginaries function as an unspoken grammar in society. Anti-Blackness is spatialized in bodies, buildings, memories, minds, and social ecologies that extirpate the potential of Black people to reach full humanity and thus be consigned to “a paradigmatic impossibility” (p. 9), as  posits. As a spatial imaginary, anti-Blackness is circulated through discourses, images, and texts that tell a story of Blackness as a problem, non-human, and placeless. Subsequently, the stories materialize into geographies and spatial practices that people act in relation to, and through, this spatial imaginary. These practices work to reify the imaginary. The anti-Black spatial imaginary promotes policies and practices that structure the social death of Black individuals and groups. It produces the destruction of social identity and social networks through modes of displacement, exclusion and estrangement. It endorses natal alienation—the disassociation of community, kinship, and familial bonds. The anti-Black spatial imaginary inflicts gratuitous and wanton spatial violence upon Black people’s flesh, spirit, and psyche. It attacks, wounds, and breaks the connections that bind Black populations together. Black communities witness their neighborhoods, schools, and classrooms dislodged from their places as anchors in Black communities. The anti-Black spatial imaginary marks Black bodies as undesirable and therefore extractable from spaces and places that have been envisioned for their exclusion. The careless removal, displacement, and dispossession of Black bodies is anchored in spatialized anti-Blackness; it is anchored by the assumption that Black populations are spatially illegitimate and, moreover, part of a larger anti-Black project to exterminate Afrocultural traditions, values, and ways of being and celebrating Blackness. The visible presence of Blackness and Black people is seen by non-Blacks as a credible threat poised to unsettle normative and “pure” white spaces (). As the dominant social warrant of society, the anti-Black spatial imaginary views Blacks as captives, unfree subjects lodged in the nowheres of Black life. Anti-Blackness remains a powerful way of reading and interpreting the painful relationship of the Black condition within a context of disregard, disdain, and dismissal of Black people, particularly within environments that champion colorblind and anti-racist discourses. The architecture of education policy has “spatialized Blackness” by restricting movement and constructing Black bodies as needing to be surveilled, monitored, and policed. The anti-Black spatial imaginary is riddled with fear and presupposes that Black people are aspatial. Spatial imaginaries are effective vehicles for the transmission of social anxieties and/or hopes about the future. In conceptualizing an anti-Black spatial imaginary, it is not my intention to provide an articulation that is inflexible or intractable. Spatial imaginaries are not secure or unwavering. We produce narratives and ideas about spaces, and we produce their embedded meanings. Instead, I consider the spatiality of anti-Blackness not as a clearly demarcated thing or a unified imaginary of causes and consequences, but as a pliable framework that explores the violent conditions that seek to debilitate the persistence of Black people.