The alternative’s totalizing rejection of all epistemic frameworks perpetuates a conservative and anachronistic view that maintains Western political epistemologies. Their critique of power relations does not align with historical realities of Black anti-colonialism.

The great anti-colonialist poet of Négritude, Aimé Césaire wrote famously in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party that he wanted Marxism and communism to be placed in the service of Black peoples and not Black peoples in the service of Marxism or communism. He maintained in 1956: “it is clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle.” 28 As always, he was writing on behalf of Black people who were, proverbially, the only people on the planet who have been excluded from the “human race” by the “modern” history of Western racism and colonialism which obstructs “a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.”29 What is this Négritude if not Blackness, Black anti-colonialism, or anti-colonial Blackness? This tradition is not a tradition in Wilderson who regularly critiques the analogical arrogance of Marxism, feminism, and an academic paradigm of “post-colonialism” with less common reference to “queer” or “gay and lesbian” categories of analysis as well—all in the name of pessimism. For him, none of these political frameworks with their privileged identarian subjects can capture the condition of “Blackness” and “slavery” (or “the Black/Slave”). While that perspective can allow for some insights—ones certainly seen before around the Black world and ones certainly avoided by so much institutional scholarship—it leaves the general categorical grid of established Western political epistemologies intact. The familiar academic terrain of “race, gender, class, and sexuality” frames the critique for “Blackness” of “gender, class, and sexuality” in addition to “post-coloniality” or “post-colonialism.” The most conventional US academic categories of identity and analysis are still rendered in full as discrete, monolithic, and monological categories and referents (e.g., workers, women, etc.), like the respective political ideologies based upon them in the traditional ideological history of the white West (e.g., Marxism, feminism, etc.). There are “workers” and then there are “women,” generically, and then sometimes there are “gays” by whatever name, not to mention “natives” or the colonized in this culturally specific epistemology of a specific culture of colonialism itself. The upshot is quite conservative, even anachronistically so. This critique is an internal if damning critique embodying and encouraging pessimism largely from within the established order of knowledge that it analytically engages and categorically replenishes and preserves. The grid politics of Wilderson’s critique of “the ruse of analogy” leaves all manner of “Blackness” in a wasteland. The routine categorical contrast with “Native Americans” reduces all that and any colonial condition to a startlingly oversimplified matter of “land” (or “land restoration”); and it occludes “Afro-Indian” history as well as “Red-Black” maroonage all across the Americas. The constant generic contrast with “feminism” or “non-Black women” eclipses the more mammoth criticism of “gender” writ large in Diop and Amadiume’s Black-African studies of Europe or “Western Civilization” as a “racial patriarchy” of pessimism and “anti-Black” imperialism. The contrast with Marxism and its “workers” never resurrects any issues of “class” or economics from any other perspective to recognize or to resist, for example, the white invention of Black elites as vital instruments of racism, anti-Blackness, and white-supremacism. There never appears a trace of any critique of Black “social class’ (or political class) elitism in “Afro-pessimism” (2.0), which is a tell-tale sign of petty-bourgeois or “lumpen-bourgeois” articulations. Lastly, Wilderson’s occasional categorical contrast of “Blackness” with Palestinians or al-Nakba (which aligns in Arabic with the Swahili substitution for the term “Middle Passage”—Maafa, the “Catastrophe”) comprehends no Blackness in Palestine or among Palestinians. His Afro-pessimism can envision no Afro-Palestinianism, unlike a great tradition of Pan-African discourses that also do not dislocate Palestine from an anti-colonialist mapping of the African continent or the Afro-Asian landmass of a Pan-Africanist and “Bandung” imagination, one powerfully shared by Malcolm X and Fayez A. Sayegh. For “Black Power” internationally, Kwame Ture would refer to Palestine as the “tip of Africa” and uphold Fatima Bernawi, the iconic Black woman who’s been named the “first Palestinian female political prisoner,” as the paragon of “Black and Palestinian Revolutions.”30 She is likewise canonized by other AfroPalestinian icons themselves, such as Ali Jiddeh and Mahmoud Jiddeh of the African community of the Old City of Jerusalem, for example— or, say, Ahmad and Jumaa Takrouri of Occupied Jericho—who are each among the greatest of all icons across Historic Palestine, a country which has produced multiple Black Panther formations in Hebrew as well as Arabic in the 1970s and the 1980s. Again, Wilderson tacitly “nationalizes” his category of “Blackness” although this is scarcely in the interests of Black people in or outside of the US colonized mainland of Americanism; and so none of the above “Blackness” survives the critical grid of a very Anglo-American (and white racist state-bound) critique of “analogy,” regardless of the “Afro-pessimist” text at hand. Do not the vulgar colonial-nativist politics of Incognegro’s strangely overlooked comment on “West Indians” go full blown then in Red, White & Black and elsewhere?31 There is here a general critical erasure of the massive tradition of Black anti-colonialism—or anti-colonial Black resistance to “anti-Blackness” and anti-Black colonialism, which transcends nationalization. Wilderson’s “Afro-pessimist” rejects the anti-colonialist paradigms of supposedly “other” peoples, and yet in a manner that reinstates US or Western coloniality nonetheless—a white colonialism that oppresses “the Black” inside and outside the United States’s official geopolitical limits. This position can thus make a virtue out of automatic and absolute anti-alliance postures with no further, actual political action then required for Black people, “the Black critic,” or any Black liberation struggle on this view. Such chauvinism without political commitment or engagement beyond critique is logically consistent, for pessimism, where mere resentment or ressentiment can masquerade as resistance or “pro-Black” “radicalism.” After all, Afro-pessimism (2.0) begins with a proud suspicion of Black liberation or Black liberation movement, itself, no less than of its potentially “anti-racist” or “anti-Black” political alliances. This provincial “American” pessimism reveals more affinities with Créolite in the Caribbean than Césaire’s anti-colonialist eruption of Pan-African Négritude, in reality, its narrowly and negatively delimited rhetoric of the “Blackness” of “the Black” (as “Slave,” of course) notwithstanding. As if this too is a virtue, pessimism is not just suspicious of power but possibility—while, upholding dystopia, it is casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not support a pessimist paradigm, orientation or sensibility. Analytically, moreover, there is somehow no white colonialism for Blacks to fight in Africa or Black countries of Black people anywhere and no terrible landlessness that afflicts the African diasporas of Blackness captive within white settler and/or imperial state formations, for Wilderson and Afropessimism (2.0).