Wilderson’s critique of the “ruse of analogy” does not challenge Western bourgeois liberalism but rather reifies it – Afro-pessimism inadvertently perpetuates Western epistemic frameworks and fails to challenge neo-colonial dynamics.

A glaring absence of Black radical and revolutionary intellectual history should be expected from any expression of “Afro-pessimism.” Indeed, could Afro-pessimism 2.0 take hold as another trend in mainstream academia except in the political void produced after the 1960s and ‘70s by local as well as global counter-revolution and counter-insurgency? This absence affects the shape and agenda of the critical analysis of “anti-Black racism” in essential ways. Wilderson’s critique of the “ruse of analogy” in Red, White & Black becomes a refrain that naturalizes academic approaches to politics now institutionalized with the continued reign of Western bourgeois liberalism. For older and enduring Black radical perspectives, the existence of “anti-Black racism” among non-Black peoples, organizations, and movements is neither a new nor shocking phenomenon. For many Black revolutionary movement logics of the ‘60s and ‘70s, for instance, this did not preclude alliance (or the exhaustion of alliances made) or lead to a doctrinaire rejection of “solidarity” work and its international (or “intercommunal”) possibilities.27 “Contradictions” were expected, so to speak, in theory and practice, which might be resolved or not, depending on material interest, circumstance, etc. For them, this work was not about gauging identity, or the perfection of a projected analogy, but mobilization for the political accomplishments of revolution—a revolutionism that could or may not work toward the development of a new humanism not white or racist or anti-Black after all. The reach for potential solidarities was not construed as a gift or an act of good-willed benevolence, wise or unwise given the risks. Even solidarity work with obviously problematic, openly enemy forces could be a strategic or tactical mode of advancing Black collective self-interests that might dispense with any alliance at any given moment in time without seeing the relationship as a statement of some total identity or non-identity of condition and interests. The notion of solidarity has nowadays been superficialized, remaining riveted on mere rhetorical proclamation and aesthetic or representational identification in neo-colonial culture industries here and there. An older, praxical approach to alliance, perhaps “analogy,” and solidarity is not taken up by current analyses of identity conflicts that prevail with the resurgence of a more academic political-intellectualism and a now much less contested liberalism. This is imperial “multiculturalism” and its malcontents. As much as Afro-pessimism (2.0) may object to certain instances of liberalism, or regulation white racist liberalism at least, it assumes these Western epistemic frameworks of white academic liberalism all the same, thereby ensconcing the colonialism and neo-colonialism it constantly and symptomatically denegates in text after text.