Optimism is a farce – lies of rediscovery lead to a mummification of freedom that reproduces civil society’s “emancipation” of the slave into an object if invisibility always asked to retain appeals to humanity without any of its own.

Strong black nihilism imposes a confrontation with white nihilistic values and forces recognition of blackness as a source of values. Upon emancipation, in America, black people were not necessarily regarded as equal to their former masters. White nihilism and antiblack racism remain the case. Phenomenal consciousness implicit to human existence continues to be treated as secondary qualities benevolently bestowed from some whites onto blacks. The “freedom” so accorded to black people entails a form of humanity whereby blacks are simply allowed to be as weak nihilistically situated as traditional whites. In this way, antiblack racism continues to situate blackness outside the self-other dialectic by essentially locking black people into a reality where we function as beings without perspectives, or original points of departure from which to insist upon and fight for. What does the requirement of fighting for one’s humanity mean under such circumstances? How does one accomplish one’s humanity? There is no legitimate form of inclusion on this view. One cannot go from (black) chattel slave to free (black) subject without theoretically questioning the conditions of (white) Humanity that demand enslavement in the first place.

Black existential freedom requires nihilistic struggles against traditional (white) human values. It requires producing languages, meanings, traditions, ways of being that push beyond traditional boundaries defining the antiblack world. The experiences of human freedom, those fleeting series of seemingly infinite moments experienced within the vicissitudes of each phenomenal spirit, for many black people, remain a tragic tight rope balanced between felt potential and the foreboding facts of antiblackness. Fanon encouraged producing an “authentic upheaval.” He described the effects of what I call, white nihilism, constructing the spaces of black existential invisibility, creating the situation of what I call black nihilism, which, in Fanon’s terms, amounts to a “zone of nonbeing,” or, an “utterly naked declivity,” where, nevertheless, “an authentic upheaval can be born.”41 On this view, black upheavals against antiblack racism entail rejecting white nihilistic valuations of humanity. For instance, once, when a white woman remarked of how handsome Fanon, “the negro,” was, he retorted, “Then come and fuck the handsome Negro, Madame!”42 Strong black attitudes can and do emerge through the lived fact of blackness, and they often cause even the most liberal white racists to flush with the embarrassment of having been recognized.

Black humanity comes into the antiblack racist world “imbued with a will” to find a meaning in things, but instead finds that it is “an object in the midst of other objects.”43 It goes from being totally erased through slavery, to being a self that is “put together again by another self,” through emancipation.44 In antiblack racist societies, as Fanon demonstrated, the humanity of black people arrives on the scene, far too late. The human world already exists, and is “anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of.”45 What options remain outside of a sudden and violent insisting upon one form of humanity for another? In, Towards the African Revolution (1964), in an essay entitled “Racism and Culture,” Fanon argued, “In order to achieve liberation,” the inferiorized man brings “all his resources into play, all his acquisitions, the old and the new, his own and those of the occupant.”46 Yet, he warned against a “mummification of individual thinking” which tends to produce decadent values.47 In Fanon’s terms, white nihilistic values seek the “destruction of [black] cultural values, of ways of life.” Here, “lines of force, having crumbled, no longer give direction. In their stead a new system of values is imposed, not proposed but affirmed, by the heavy weight of cannons and sabers.”48 Black humanity is induced under “the heavy weight of cannons and sabers” toward weak nihilistic, including black optimistic, responses to antiblack racism. Black people are inundated with commands to retain appeals to “humanity,” “love,” and respect for “supreme values,” which in this case, means being induced into committing the mistake of “forgetting racism as a consequence” that “obeys a flawless logic,” and not necessarily a lack of “love.”49 Antiblack racists do not have a pathological disposition against loving and respecting; clearly, they love and respect one another. It is when it comes to loving and respecting those who are not white, the black, that “the white man remains intractable.”50 The attitude of antiblack racism is not “a constant of the human spirit,” on Fanon’s view; it is “a disposition fitting into a well-defined system.”51 Understanding the dispositions involved require understanding the systematic production of white values. By collapsing black phenomenal perspectives into an object of nonexistence, antiblack racism accomplishes “enslavement, in the strictest sense,” enabling white people to live in a reality where they function as Gods, authors of universal value, or masters of the universe.52 Antiblack racism demands that black strength, freedom, and being for-it-self collapses into a weak thing-in-itself; it attempts to stop all black phenomenal systems from self-referencing outside of whiteness. As a result, the entire social panorama of black existential life is “destructured,” and values are, as Fanon said, “flaunted, crushed, emptied.”53

Under these circumstances, black people in an antiblack world may, at first, discover “dignity” as a form of optimism, as if “having discovered a spontaneous truth,” where “the inferiorized rediscovers a style that had once been devalorized.”54 One could interpret black Christian responses to antiblack racism in this way; it is a “traditionalism,” according to Fanon, which is a hallmark of weak nihilism.55 On this view, having rediscovered their freedoms in terms of powers to alternatively interpret white nihilistic Christian narratives, the traditional black Christian utilizes his spontaneous truth, and “goes into ecstasies over each rediscovery . . . formerly inferiorized, [they are] now in a state of grace.”56 But, at this point, Fanon offers a warning:

The culture of the enslaved people is sclerosed, dying. No life any longer circulates in it. Or more precisely, the only existing life is dissimulated. The population that normally assumes here and there a few fragments of life, which continues to attach dynamic meanings to institutions . . . in a colonial system these are the traditionalists.57

One must resist attaching certain “dynamic meanings” to antiblack racist institutions, which I interpret to mean avoiding what I call “weak black nihilism.” Nodding at the ways black optimists strive to preserve “a few fragments of life,” one is ultimately forced to criticize the underdevelopment of thought, or “mummification” of human freedom entailed by such approaches to black struggle.