Shirking nuanced engagement for the sake of “abstraction” doesn’t make them radical, it obscures their own investment in every structure they critique.

Afropessimism trains its reader in the leaps and bounds of faith necessary for this notion to be entertained. Though Wilderson sheds considerable ink critiquing nonBlacks for analogizing their condition to Black folks, his own understanding of his Blackness gets established through analogy, too. Early on in the book, a young Frank is with his grandmother. They are watching the rebellions in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Their conversation reads as if a dress rehearsal for Afropessimist philosophy.

When, prompted by the billowing smoke and the scenes of looting, young Frank asks Grandmother Jules, “Why are we mad?” The reader is not prompted to question the integrity of the “we” that extends from the mansion in Kenwood—the well-heeled Minneapolis neighborhood that the Wildersons are integrating—to the unspecified Black postindustrial ghetto [zone] that “could have been anywhere and everywhere.”7 Kenwood is nowhere on that map, but it’s a nowhere that extends, by way of a gaze accompanying the presumption of shared affect, to a Black anywhere and everywhere.

The presumption of shared feeling does the work of analogy without calling attention to it. When young Frank’s grandmother shouts “Go ahead, son!” at a man depicted on television as a looter, it doesn’t strike the budding Afropessimist as theoretically significant that the looter can neither hear nor speak back. The gap between Frank and Grandmother Jules on one side, and the looter on the other, gets bridged through affective projection, not a solidaristic expression among equals.

For Wilderson, the defining features of the violence foundational to modern slavery (and therefore antiBlackness) are its gratuitousness, its freedom from having to serve any rational purpose, and, above all, its personal nature. (I’ll elaborate on this final point below.) Such a theory of violence makes for a situation where a reader who is left skeptical about the conclusions Wilderson draws as a narrator or theorist is encouraged to see herself [themselves] as sort of like Dr. Zhou—as someone unwilling or unable to face that nonsensical violence is precisely what makes Blackness.

To insist that antiBlack violence make sense would be to impose onto it an ahistorical rationality. It would force antiBlack violence to be recognizable within the norms of violence that nonBlacks face. So, while there are moments when I questioned whether there might have been other plausible interpretations of many of the book’s pivotal scenes, part of the thrust, it would seem, is to challenge its reader to suspend disbelief. Gratuitous violence doesn’t make sense. That’s the point.

It’s a hell of a rhetorical mechanism, and one of the reasons why I advocate for reading Afropessimism with a certain degree of care. Any theoretical formation with a self-defense mechanism that refashions those that disagree with it into a symptom of the problem it is diagnosing has most likely crossed the line from theory into theology. Like Marxists who reflexively label any criticism as petty bourgeois, or Lacanians anxious to read any pushback as the outcome of unconscious repression, there is no way to test it except on the terms that it has itself provided.

At times it seems like Wilderson’s reading of the slave relation as a personal one turns the self into an upscaling mechanism. If second wave feminists insisted that the personal was political, Wilderson’s interpretive practice suggests that the personal is always already peculiar-institutional. It provides a means of refashioning one-on-one dynamics and interactions such that they become immediately available for generalization.

Wilderson’s descriptions of the concrete seem overwhelmed by an apparent demand to represent people, in the first instance, on the model of archetypes. It is not simply that nonBlack people are always invested in the position of the master in some hazy or general way. Wilderson’s narrations indicate that nonBlack people are invested in the personal character of that relationship in such a way that makes him their slave, in particular.

THE DISAPPEARING STATE

This analytic practice of turning social relations between Black and nonBlack persons, formal and informal, into one organized in the first instance by the slave-master dualism has serious implications for Wilderson’s ability to assess complex relationships. In the art center, his co-worker Sameer, an immigrant from Palestine who seems to share with Frank an interest in revolutionary internationalist politics, is grieving. Sameer has just received news of the death of his cousin who, in a tragic accident, was trying to craft a bomb in Ramallah. As Sameer is relating his grief, he shares stories with Frank about life under settler occupation. Yet the account hinges on Sameer’s comment that, for the Palestinian under occupation confronted with Israeli troops, “shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew.”

Wilderson is quick to dispense those questions of the complex and contradictory imbrications of racialization, religion, and nation. He instead makes Sameer’s expression of grief into one not only about Blackness, but about a Blackness that Wilderson, in spite of his geopolitical location, has an obvious and transparent claim to immediate understanding. That Sameer and Frank stand in for the possibility—now, more specifically, the impossibility—of Palestinian-Black solidarity simply goes without saying.

Details of actual coalition building needn’t be fussed with. These proportions, and the idea that they can be generalized, must be treated as obvious or unspoken in order to offer the encounter its dramatic framing. With Sameer’s words, Wilderson explains, “The earth gave way. The thought that my place in the unconscious of Palestinians fighting for their freedom was the same dishonorable place I occupied in the minds of Whites in America and Israel chilled me.”8

The assumed personality of the slave relation offers a hair-trigger impulse to abstraction and analogy. With stunning quickness, it turns a state soldier into a slave and a suffering comrade into a theoretical occasion. As selves scale across space and time, they scale up in proportion: Sameer, in his grief, appears to offer unyielding access to a Palestinian collective unconscious that is already fixated on putting the slave in his place.

As it scales, the Afropessimist practice of abstraction has to erase, or ignore, a lot of complicating details. The reader is not invited to consider the possibility that Sameer might have meant something quite different, that it might not make sense to analogize the racial organization in a different geopolitical context, or the significance of the fact that a Black person might participate in the consolidation of state power as anything other than its unwilling instrument. The Ethiopian soldier’s gun, for instance, is explained away in a dependent clause.

But those who have embraced Afro-pessimism will likely not be swayed by anything I have said above. In the final instance, the Afropessimist imaginary is fueled by a confidence toward which it gestures but rarely states explicitly. The idea is that the virtue of Afropessimism consists in the fact that it does something important for Black people, that it allows Black people to speak deeply repressed truths about the social world, truths that make their nonBlack enemies and allies feel profoundly unsafe.

My first response to this repressive hypo- thesis would of course be, “which Black people?” The second would be about the nature of the relationship between speech and action envisioned here. While many who embrace Afropessimist ideas imagine that doing so will animate a radical politics that can live beyond a kind of collective world-historical recognition of antiBlackness, that is not a confidence shared by its principal theorist. He is consistently vague: “[Afropessimism] makes us worthy of our suffering.” Or “Afropessimism is Black people at their best. . . [It] gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would other- wise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks.”9

Or, the virtue of the theory exists in the pleasure of scaling itself. Speaking of the relief of being in an all-Black group at a multiracial conference, Wilderson writes,

I was able to see and feel how comforting it was for a room full of Black people to move between the spectacle of police violence, to the banality of microaggressions at work and in the classroom, to the experiences of chattel slavery as if the time and intensity of all three were the same.10

Extending the feel-good experience of this proto-Afropessimist scene of affirmation, for Wilderson, is the fact that no one asks any questions, inserts any uncertainty, or demands any specificity when group members talk about the contemporariness of chattel slavery. “Folks cried and laughed and hugged each other and called out loud for the end of the world. No one poured cold water on this by asking, What does that mean—the end of the world?”11

But when the all-Black group’s breakout session ends, they are at an impasse, because they are supposed to talk with their nonBlack “allies” about what happened. Eventually one member of the group suggests what will become their ultimate course of action: “We would go back in and refuse to speak with them. Not a protest, just a silent acknowledgement of the fact that we would not corrupt what we experienced with their demand for articulation between their grammar of suffering and ours.”12

Wilderson offers little insight into the process that led to this decision, partly because the point of the scene is to teach us to read silence in the Afropessimist register. Just as young Frank viewed Grandmother Jules laughing and yelling at the television, the reader is led, by the overwhelming sense of joy and relief in the scene, to read the absence of disagreement as the presence of assent. Silence, here, appears to affirm the criticality of Afropessimism.

THEORY—CRITIQUE—THEORY

In the book’s final pages, Frank tells a student who is visiting his office that “the thing that prevented most students from getting their heads around Afropessimism was the fact that it described a structural problem but offered no structural solution to that problem.”13 My read is different. It is not that Afropessimism offers no solution so much as it substitutes itself for one. It offers knowledge itself as the end, as a good that resides in the place that other theories would put the exhortation to practice—and in practice, to test the theory.

This is something different than saying that, when it comes to Afropessimism’s political imaginary, there’s no there there. My point is that in the end, Afropessimism is a view from somewhere, and that somewhere is, perhaps all too obviously, the university. The place where all roads in Afropessimism ultimately lead, that place where theorizing is a valued mode of practice in and of itself, and where it does not need to be justified on any other terms. The modern university does not only enable the practice of diagnosing problems with no solutions to hand, and to develop critiques that do not open immediately onto strategies of redress; it enshrines the right to do so and valorizes the subject that does. Afropessimism claims to offer no sanctuary while its practitioner is in fact modeled on the privileged subject of Enlightenment humanism, which sought to liberate knowing from being judged by the actions it did or did not enable.