Reject nihilism as the major enemy of Black survival – recognizing the agency of Black communities is crucial to challenging normative white epistemologies.

Both West and Gordon clearly stand in a long prophetic tradition of Black thought which challenges the unjust status by urging a “revolution of value” (Glaude 2016: 233). Throughout American history, Glaude argues, African Americans have resisted their legal statuses to advance a more inclusive vision of democracy: “[T]his is the heart of democracy in black—efforts to imagine a democratic way of life without the burden of the value gap or the illusion that somehow this country is God’s gift to the world” (236). All major social movements have been driven by both the desire for greater justice and the belief that it is not impossible to achieve it. Small acts of individualized resistance have equally been driven by a serious concern for people and their well-being. Both are grounded in a profound love ethic. In Race Matters, West identifes nihilism—“the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness”— as the “major enemy of black survival in America” (2001a: 22–23). Beyond economic and political inequality, the absence of meaning poses a serious threat to Black people. For West, it is consequently important to uncover the structural and cultural workings of racism and simultaneously maintain an attitude that affrms African Americans’ (self-) worth. West emphatically insists: “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affrmation of one’s worth—an affrmation fueled by the concerns of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion” (29). It is precisely this attitude that informs Black humanist thought and guides transformative action in the world.13 Humans produce meaning through actions—both positive and negative. A fragile hope is also an important measure to keep untamed optimism checked. West “hopes against hope if only to hold out the dream of freedom in a never-never land […] in order to survive in the deplorable present” (1984: 10–11). We can then borrow from philosopher Jeffrey Stout: “Hope is not the same thing as thinking that what one ardently desires is likely to happen. It is the virtue one needs when grim facts might tempt one to give up on promoting or protecting important goods. [It is the assumption] that we have a chance of making a signifcant difference for the better” (2010: 283). Aware of the long history of antiblackness, Black humanists know this to be one of many possible worlds, one that is historically grown and not forever and ontologically fxed. Even though Black humanist thought offers an alternative conception of hope to liberal humanism’s investment in optimism, discussions around hope have come under critique as naïve and potentially harmful to Blacks by Afropessimists. Afropessimists reject any sentiment of hope that antiblack racism can potentially be undone. In Afropessimist thought, Black existence equals absolute social death, and nothing can upset the antiblack world order. As one of the most prominent Afropessimists, Frank B.  Wilderson III claims that the position of the Black subject has not structurally changed in contemporary society when compared to the time of slavery because Blackness is not only the backdrop against which whiteness still defnes itself but also the foundation of civil society (2010: 20). Blacks are “the very antithesis to the Human subject,” and the Black and the Human stand in everlasting opposition (9). In fact, he points out that while violence against all non-Blacks is contingent, it is mandatory against Blacks for the world to exist: “The violence perpetrated against us is not a form of discrimination; it is a necessary violence; a health tonic for everyone who is not Black” (2020: 40). Violence is the structuring principle of Black life as “Black people’s saturation by violence is a paradigmatic necessity” for human renewal (245). Antiblackness is ontological in Afropessimist thought. Since the relationship between white and Black is one of structural “antagonism” rather than (reconcilable) “confict,” Wilderson asserts that change is not possible within the confnes of legal society (2010: 75). Wilderson writes: “The Slave needs freedom not from wage relation, nor sexism, homophobia, and patriarchy, nor freedom in the form of land restoration. The Slave needs freedom from the Human race, freedom from the world” (141). The end of the world is necessary for the Black subject to gain meaningful freedom. Calvin Warren echoes many of Wilderson’s ideas and is particularly critical of hope in the political sphere.14 Antiblackness, for Warren, “will continue without end, as long as the world exists” even as antiblackness might take on different forms (2018: 3). Warren writes further that “humanist affect (the good feeling we get from hopeful solutions) will not translate into freedom, justice, recognition, or resolution. It merely provides temporary reprieve from the fact that blacks are not safe in an antiblack world” (3). Warren insists that hope is a dangerous discourse that does nothing but manifest the current state of injustice while luring African Americans into believing that they can bring about change. He thus strongly rejects any account of (political) hope. Such hope, for Warren, is cruelly meant to maintain the status quo rather than inspiring people to press for the end of the world. Afropessimism does invaluable work by highlighting the persistence of racism and cautioning about setting too much hope into political processes. Black humanists share many of these insights, but several observations strike as problematic. Gordon has been particularly vocal in his criticism. First, he notes that “‘an antiblack world’ is not identical with ‘the world is antiblack.’ The latter is an antiblack racist project” (2021: 75; emphasis in original). Whereas Afropessimists take the world to be forever so, Gordon emphasizes the contingent nature of antiblackness. Rejecting the closed off state of Afropessimism that ontologizes the structural opposition between Blackness and the human, Gordon advocates exposure of the system that alleges white superiority: “[If] the question of racism is a function of power, why not offer a study of power, how it is gained and lost, instead of an assertion of its manifestations as ontological?” (2017: 297). This request includes studying the processes of racialization which render antiblackness visible as a product of human conduct. Finally, Gordon asks: “Why must the social world be premised on the attitudes and perspectives of antiblack racists? Why don’t blacks among each other and other communities of color count as a social perspective?” (297). Shifting the perspective away from the normative white epistemological framework to Black people who are committed to each other’s fourishing also renders the notion of ontological social death untenable. Moreover, precisely because they are invested in uncovering the larger structures of racism, Afropessimists lose sight of the individual; mourning the individual becomes impossible for them. Afropessimism overlooks the individual’s capacity at agency, stripping any form of resistance—slave revolts, individual and personal small acts, or organized movements—of meaning, let alone effect. The simple fact, however, that the enslaved managed to maintain parts of their original cultures despite slavery’s attempts to destroy them, Vincent Brown notes, indicates resistance (2009: 1241–1242). Afropessimism impairs the potential for agency and self-effciency, both of individual and collective attempts at social and political reform. This is true for Blacks and whites alike and absolves both from taking responsibility for and action against the world as it is. While Afropessimism can be a meaningful analytical tool, it does not translate into practical consequences. Unlike Afropessimism, Black humanism encourages critical and active engagement with the world because the world is organized through intercorporeal exchanges. Consequently, it fnds meaning, hope, and potential in individual and communal struggles to transform the world. However, resistance to world transformation does not simply reside in structural impediments but also in peoples’ embodied ways of being so that Black humanism always considers the affective world. A fragile sense of hope that ‘it could happen otherwise’ has guided everyday resistance to reductive external forces in thought, action, and aesthetic expressions. In the following chapters, I explore how Black humanist literature both develops and employs critical phenomenology in its theorization of Black existence and dismantling of white supremacy in the everyday—all while pointing to the fact that the world could indeed be otherwise.