Afro-pessimistic frameworks face conceptual challenges of addressing the intersection of antiblackness and antiqueer. It is limited in differentiating between various forms of violence against black bodies. We must utilize a more nuanced understanding that transcends the simplistic conflation of antiblack violence with all forms of violence.

It also throws us into a conceptual crisis because the violence directed against the “Gay Nigger #1” is inconceivable and inarticulate within Afro-pessimistic logics (although the violence against the “Nigger” at least has a gram-mar under the sign “antiblack”). Put differently, we lose something (whatever this something “is”) under the banner “fungibility” when the particular violence that Steen, and others structured similarly, experienced is broadly characterized as antiblackness. How do we then understand the “Gay Nigger #1” philosophically and theoretically within Afro- pessimistic discourse? Are antiblack violence and antiqueer violence indissociable? And if they are indissociable, why are some black commodities the targets of “anti- gay” violence and other black commodities are not? If antiblack violence serves as the unifying ground of fungible commodities, then differentiating violence might just fracture this commodity, such that it is interchangeable on one register (antiblackness) but not on another. The problem space that opens this article circulates around these inquiries as it concerns the “Gay Nigger #1.” In essence, this problem space is nothing more than the double bind of humanism that lingers despite our investment in invalidating and disarming it. To avoid the “structural adjustment” that many scholars rely on to incorporate blacks into the fold of humanism and its liberal narratives, Afro-pessimists have rejected, to the extent that we can reject, this humanism and its structural adjustment. In the vacuous space of undifferentiation, differences such as “gender,” “sexuality,” “ability,” and so forth are also rejected because they belong to the human and not the fungible commodity. But this rejection leaves us without a way to understand the particularities of violence and the way this particular violence constitutes ontology. Thus, the “black gay,” the black lesbian, and the “black heterosexual” object might bond over the pulverizing technologies of antiblack violence, but fracture around antiqueer violence. We lack a procedure to theorize this fracturing outside humanism. But, again, I am writing gay, lesbian, and heterosexual under erasure here to docket the double bind that this inquiry presents. Without the differentiating grammar of humanism, we are unable to talk about the fracturing between fungible commodities that renders some the targets of certain violence and others not. Afro-pessimism becomes uncomfortably silent when confronted with issues of sexism experienced by black women and antiqueer violence experienced by black gays or lesbians, for example, to avoid the performative contradiction. The assumption that antiblack violence will offer a theoretical/philosophical covering for these beings neglects the particularities of the violence experienced and the particularities of the fungible commodity that becomes the target of specific violence. If fungibility creates a blob of black commodities, certain sociopolitical violence cuts this blob into unthinkable parts—parts that we have yet to name or provide a sufficient grammar to describe. I would argue that this fracturing is significant if we take Wilderson’s (2010) argument seriously that “violence is a matrix of (im)possibility, a paradigm for ontology” because it speaks to the way that the fungible commodity is constituted through different procedures of violence, which cannot be easily subsumed under the banner “antiblackness.” But scholars have attempted to reconcile blackness with sexual difference and sexual identity through logics of equivalence. This scholarship operates under what I call “the intersectional approach.” Although this approach provides intellectual space for contemplating and representing sexual difference and sexual identity, it often does so precisely by way of a structural adjustment. Thus it enacts a performative contradiction (between blackness and humanism) that it either ignores or neglects.