Gets coopted by bad faith reactionaries.

Finally, it is worth discussing the political upshots of Afropessimism, and how the book “reads” within our current political moment. Wilderson’s own political stance is clear enough in its broad outlines: Black liberation requires the total destruction of the existing relation between Slaves and Humans. In one of the book’s more hopeful moments, Wilderson grants that “social death,” like class and gender, can be overcome, since it is ultimately “constructed by the violence and imagination of other sentient beings.” Overcoming social death, however, is necessarily apocalyptic: “The first step toward the destruction is to assume one’s position… and then burn the ship or the plantation, in its past and present incarnations, from the inside out” (103). Afropessimism proposes a political ethic for those outside politics, whose engagement with the political would signify the end of politics as we know it.

Wilderson’s political vision is a “grenade without a pin,” or a “looter’s creed” which strives to bring about the Fanonian “end of the world” (174). Yet if your politics requires you to “burn the ship or the plantation…. from the inside out” with yourself inside, you should be extremely sure that this politics is rooted in a true and comprehensive vision of Black people’s situation in the world. Pinless grenades and looter’s creeds can fall into anyone’s hands. They can harm countless bystanders. Their volatility makes them unpredictable. What if the theoretical conceits of Afropessimism not only fail to bring about the end of the world, but give succor to projects dedicated to making an already awful anti-Black world worse? Ironically, those with reactionary anti-Black politics, or those in thrall to the magic of Whiteness and convinced of the subhumanity of Blackness, should appreciate the work that Wilderson accomplishes here. In fascist hands, a claim like “it is absolutely necessary for Blacks to be castrated, raped, genitally mutilated and violated, beaten, shot, and maimed” in order for non-Blacks to achieve “confirmation of Human existence” is just the sort of work a society running on the myth of Black inhumanity and subpersonhood requires.

More predictably, Afropessimism takes aim at leftist coalitional, solidarity-based, and intersectional politics. It is not just that historically existing forms of socialism, feminism, and multiculturalism have left Black people out (which they often have). Rather, in Wilderson’s mind, these forms of politics terrorize Black people simply by positing analogies and similarities among diverse forms of Black and non-Black oppression (220). The monolithic view of Blackness Afropessimism presents seems to have little room for the idea that Black people are lots of things besides Black, and that their interests and concerns are often formed in ways similar to non-Blacks’ interests. To be sure, we should mark a distinction between Wilderson’s politics and misappropriations of his vision. Yet if Black people are literally terrorized by working-class struggle, multicultural coalitions, immigration rights, feminism, and other forms of counter-hegemonic politics, one might wonder why Black liberation strategies should bother accommodate the stated interests of people who are, in addition to Black, queer, religious, anti-capitalist, female, poor, immigrant, working class, indigenous, and/or incarcerated.

Those sympathetic to Wilderson might suggest that Black people have little to lose by abandoning solidarity-based politics. Yet not-so-ancient history suggests that there may be higher stakes here. As Paul Ortiz (2018) has recently demonstrated, many of the material, political, social, and symbolic gains for Black and Latinx people throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were generated by an emancipatory internationalism that drew explicit analogies between Black and non-Black freedom struggles. The United States’ interest in slavery of course first and foremost oppressed Black people. Yet because slavery was so deeply interwoven with the oppression of non-Black people as well (in the form of Indian removal and extermination, violent expropriation of Mexican land in a war to expand slavery, etc.), Black and non-Black abolitionists were able to engage the problem of Black oppression not in isolation, but with a view to how it undergirded a more generally unacceptable social order. Of course, just because solidarity was a useful tool for achieving those political goals doesn’t mean it will work now. Yet in a time when Black oppression has once again become one of the clearest symptoms of a more broadly unacceptable social order, perhaps it is wise to remember this emancipatory spirit.

Finally, one wouldn’t think that a political imaginary that at first seems so radical would be so amenable to the status quo. Wilderson suggests that his view of the fundamental distinctiveness of Black suffering extends “the critique of neoliberalism,” and registers surprise that leftists do not welcome his perspective (182). Yet it is just as easy to see Afropessimism’s performative transcendence of the political as embracing a neoliberal class politics. The book’s simplistic social ontology and monolithic conception of violence makes each Black person into All Black People, thus aiding a crucial neoliberal elision: even if Wilderson draws no essential distinction in station and suffering among Black people, the market certainly does and will continue to do so. Afropessimism’s Sturm und Drang is often a pleasure to explore, but it fits right in with a masochistic cultural moment that cedes the floor to public proclamations of suffering and rituals of deference to it while simultaneously cordoning off these performances from any political will to eradicate the causes of such suffering in the first place. Performing catharsis itself may be a political act, but it is increasingly one whose relation to subversive strategies is not always clear. Whether had by feminists, anti-racists, anti-capitalists, or Afropessimists, the small pleasures of lamentation do not threaten. One imagines the dominant social order quoting Nietzsche to itself: “‘what are my parasites to me?, it might say, ‘may they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!’” (Nietzsche 1967: 72).

In a final irony, perhaps Afropessimism is not pessimistic enough. We occupy a stultifying political moment whose routines have been so corporatized that even avowed anti-racists must negotiate racism roughly the same way a human resources department must negotiate an unruly employee: correct, cancel, or cash in, depending on what the cost-benefit analysis says. As a result, self-congratulatory anti-bias training, identification with the “right side of history” (on which side of course can be found the most “socially conscious” brand-name corporations), underclass tourism, performative wokeness, cyclical rituals of call out and contrition, and perhaps a “diversity initiative” here and there seem to be the only intellectual and practical tools current institutions are willing to raise against the nexus of racial and socioeconomic oppression. Wilderson of course recognizes that racism is a deep feature of the social order, and so is rightly pessimistic about the efficacy of the usual “anti-racist” tools. But he may be right for the wrong reason: pessimism about the end of racism isn’t warranted because Black suffering necessarily anchors the world, it’s warranted because it is nigh-impossible to imagine a future world so thoroughly reorganized around the well-being of the dispossessed that racism and anti-racism themselves have ceased to be useful strategies for consolidating and protecting elite power and wealth. Perhaps this is the source of the unsettling feeling that Wilderson’s tools might simply be retrofitted to the neoliberal apparatus. The content of Wilderson’s version of Afropessimism makes it a stranger cousin than most, but its uptake in the mainstream may signal neoliberal politics as usual: a lucrative but politically impotent brokerage relationship between elites willing to monetize Black suffering and its supposed antidote, and the audiences happy to consume both.³