Afropessimism K Supplement - Michigan 2024 HHIRS

K---Afropess Supplement
Theory of Power
Antiblackness is distinct – a perpetual condition of invisibility violently subjugated to preserve the civility of whiteness. Blackness is cast out from society and forced to its underbelly to be purged.
Johnson 21 [Devon; 2021; Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy, University of Tampa, PhD, Temple University, MA and BA, Florida State University; “Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism,” p. 2-4 $P]
Most people consider “racism,” in terms of what critical race theorists call, “racial essentialism,” which is an assertion of there being essential traits, essences, or ways of being, necessarily inhering in people, due to their race.3 Racial essentialism is the imagining of what races of people really are. They employ Aristotle’s conception of essence, where certain properties are deemed inherent to the meaning of an object, in this case, the “raced” person.4 From this perspective, “antiblack racism” merely suggests a qualifying of the object of reference. However, according to black existentialist approaches, the prefix, “antiblack,” adds more than a specification for a type of racism. “Antiblack racism” is an existentially descriptive term that designates the phenomenon of racism itself.5 In particular, “antiblack” connotes denials of one’s subjective capacities. “Black,” here, assumes an ontologically descriptive meaning, denoting situations of existential invisibility, where one is seen as a nonexistence in relation to normative conceptions of humanity, that is, “white.” Thus, terms such as “black existential life” resists charges of essentialism, because whether or not one exists as “black” is not, in an existential sense, a matter of personal identity formation. There are subjective dimensions of personal identity formation, or what one might call, phenomenal activity, involved in living blackness; there are also objective existential dimensions of blackness in spite of which one lives. Frantz Fanon illuminated the philosophical uniqueness of phenomenal perspectives developed from spaces of black existential invisibility, where critical dimensions of subjective capacities develop in relation to objective, lived, experiences of blackness.6
There is textual evidence of antiblack racism in European philosophy, dating back as far as the medieval period, through the “discovery” of the “new world,” and modern European colonization of Africa. There, one finds obsessions with the category of “Man,” understood as Humanity, but grossly reduced to the perspectives of (European) “Man,” understood as (white) Humanity. This reduction entails axiomatic conceptions of white-normative and antiblack racist ideals and is a consequence of (European) “Man’s” innermost existential struggles. I use a capital “H,” in Human being, and a capital “M,” in “Man,” to designate philosophies, descriptions, and thoughts developed and understood to be true of all Humankind. However, I use the parenthetical and quotations, in (European) “Man,” and (white) Humanity, to designate philosophies, descriptions, and thoughts developed and understood to only be true of European descended, racially white people. The results of those attempts are reflective of failures, and weaknesses, evident in the struggles and desires of (European) “Man,” which further resulted in European Enlightenment philosophies producing antiblack racist practices and institutions, all under the banner “civilized (white) Humanity.”
Disregarding the first paragraph of this book as “vulgar,” and perhaps being tempted not to read further, may indicate an appeal to traditions championed by people who, along with claiming to “know” philosophical ideals stratifying human beings along racial and sexual lines, also claimed to occupy a transcendent position from which to discern the vulgar. This amounts to the claim that certain forms of expression fail to beget any real meaning. The antiblack racist, for example, simply announces that expressions such as the ones above have no valuable meaning, and if they have any meaning at all, it is vulgar, violent, and unnecessary. This is another way of saying, “We should not care about what that person says; that person has nothing to say.” That someone who has just made an expressive utterance has nothing to “say,” depends upon the idea that what that person says is of no relevance; even worse, it implies that person thinks “nothing.”
Vulgar black rejections of antiblack racism suggest both a failure and an achievement. At the symbolic level, “vulgar” expressions of blackness might signal an achievement in resisting one’s presumed invisibility. If black people are signifiers of nonexistence in antiblack racist societies, then black “vulgar” rejections potentially become reasonable responses to an unreasonable situation. It is unreasonable to respond to unreason with reason. An attempt to reason with the unreasonable can lead to a debilitating neurosis. This is a crushing realization for one whose sole means of defending oneself against invisibility is the deployment of reason. Reason, it seems, must become creative.
Black people in antiblack racist societies are not simply a part of society. We are a part of society’s underside: the underbelly bolstering its frontal dimensions. We embody the cultural limits of antiblack racist societies, displaying everything they are, by virtue of what they are not. Black perspectives in the United States, for example, are typically seen as “vulgar.” “Vulgarity,” however, need not necessarily be associated with inarticulateness, ignorance, lack of thought, erudition, and/or perception. Black vulgarity in an antiblack racist society can also take the form of highly articulate, theoretical questions about the relation of black invisibility to the ontological and epistemological dimensions of Western society and humanist thought, in general.
White reality assumes the nonexistence of blackness deemed meaningless by civil society – black values are trapped in existential invisibility and a double-consciousness always seen through the racist gaze of whiteness.
Johnson 21 [Devon; 2021; Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy, University of Tampa, PhD, Temple University, MA and BA, Florida State University; “Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism,” p. 119-122 $P]
Black nihilism undertakes the project of value creation through the additive experience of black existential invisibility. Black invisibility is the phenomenon of experiencing one’s being through a reality that coalesces around presumptions of one’s nonexistence. “A feeling of inferiority; no, a feeling of nonexistence.”6 The black nihilistic situation involves valuing against value structures of whiteness which render black values inherently meaningless. Black pessimistic devaluation of white nihilistic values is a first step toward producing strong black values. Black pessimism creates an opportunity for strong black nihilistic value projections, by rejecting not only white nihilism but all metaphysically affirmed ideals in public and political affairs. Seeking to establish political realities based upon values justified solely in terms of each human’s freedom and responsibility for constructing Human reality is the goal. The Promethean endeavor to transvalue white nihilistic humanity from the existential space of black invisibility is an utterly nihilistic task, and, indeed, the weak perish of it.7
Frantz Fanon’s work provides a descriptive account of black consciousness living through invisibility, experienced as a denial of human freedom, against people who refuse responsibility for the values they produce. Fanon’s thought deepened Sartre’s elucidation of human existentialism by analyzing the additive absurdity of the lived situation of blackness within an antiblack racist world. Fanon advocated for what I call a “strong nihilistic” response to antiblack racism. He announced the nihilistic strength of his position when he proclaimed, “I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances. Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said.”8
Fanon announcing that he does not come with “timeless truths” was a direct shot at the philosophies of (European) “Man.” The entire affair of modern European philosophy, from this perspective, is seen to be a smoke screen covering up colonial lusts for domination, rape, and murder, while being concerned with how to best hide these forms of pessimism and nihilism behind weak facades of universalism. When Fanon said, “My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances,” he signaled the earthly contextualization of his critical engagements with whiteness. When he said, “Nevertheless . . . I think it would be good if certain things were said,” he inverted the axiological schemas rendering such perspectives as valueless. By invoking the term “good” he announced himself as a determiner of value outside of modern (white) Human traditions. Fanon announced his strong black nihilism; then he offered a narrative that can be read as foretelling of the pitfalls encountered while maturing into this perspective. I will explicitly address this point in the final chapter. Here, we will cite Fanon in support of my general theorization that strong black nihilism is a healthy means for transvaluing the white nihilism underlying antiblack racism.
Fanon’s thought provides a healthy alternative to the options of black optimism and black pessimism as a response to antiblack racism. He would have been compelled to reject the “ultimate radiances” of West’s response to black invisibility, and perhaps would have challenged the strategic utility of Bell’s pessimism regarding the values of antiblackness. If antiblack racism depends upon unsubstantiated claims of God being on the side of whites, how long can unsubstantiated claims of God being on the side of blacks remain motivating? On the other hand, can treating antiblack racist values as permanent be a useful means for eradicating them, even if that strategy might allow for some relief? Fanon’s thought helps to identify strong black nihilism as an appropriate response to antiblack racism. His analyses insist upon a transvaluation of white nihilistic values through a strong black nihilistic response. He proposed nothing short of “the liberation of the man of color from himself,” for which, he said, “There are two camps: the white and the black.”9
The liberation of Humanity from white nihilistic ideals of antiblack racism is the goal of strong black nihilism. Fanon’s thought supports this mission. He employed a black existential understanding of human freedom in analyzing the lived situation of blackness. According to this approach, the existence of human consciousness is understood to precede its essence. Human essence is fundamentally indeterminable, or nonexistent, precisely because consciousness exists prior to experiencing questions concerning the meaning of itself.10 The essence of human being, so to speak, is to lack a predetermined meaning outside of freedom and nothingness through which it constructs value. Thus, there is nothing we may know a priori about the meaning of human existence aside from the fact of its freedoms in producing value. We simply found ourselves existing with others at some long-ago point; then, we came to question our meaning while constructing reality. Antiblack racism, however, is a direct injunction against the participation of black people in constructing reality. Existence precedes essence in the human world, but essence precedes existence in the antiblack racist world. In the antiblack racist world, Human reality is a construction, and so it is not unlike Paley’s clock. However, the intuition behind Paley’s analogy is that God must be the author of reality; the intuition behind antiblack racism is that whiteness must be the author of reality.11 Through weak nihilistic, bad faith conceptions of themselves, whites desire to be God, or at least godlike in relation to black people. White nihilism and antiblack racism introduce metaphysical ideals partitioning human existential spaces along racially somatic and semiotic lines indicating the presence or absence of full humanity. A complete rejection of antiblack racism, therefore, requires rejecting weak nihilistic conceptions of race and developing strong ones. Yet, nihilists have been regarded as scourges, the wretches of civilization, going as far back as Jacobi’s criticism of Fichte, precisely because they are perfectly willing to be viewed as “wrong,” in light of traditional values. This is why, as Nietzsche warned, the weak tend to perish of it. Strong nihilism requires valuing in the face of traditional values, normatively held and metaphysically affirmed. It means, sometimes, battling people who claim to have God, and the truths of the universe, on their side.
Blackness in an antiblack racist world is a peculiar space of nonexistence, within a universe of whiteness, that situates black subjectivities. The objectivity of the category of blackness, in antiblack racist worlds, contextualizes the subjectivity of each phenomenal black perspective. Blackness is thus, at first, not a choice but a predicament concerning how one will choose to live their life; it is a situation against which, and through which, people live and attempt to make their lives valuable. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wrote about black people in America living through denials of humanity, which he described as a “peculiar sensation”: 12
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.13
What Du Bois described was an inability to function as the source of legitimacy for the value of his own being. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” ultimately implies white denials of black phenomenal existence. Fanon addressed black invisibility on a similar level, where the meaning of one’s existence becomes uncertain because it is not simply being determined through the eyes of others but being demanded by the other to not exist. “Colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question, ‘Who am I in reality?’”14 It is as a form of nonexistence that black humanity functions as an antithetical “No,” according to Fanon, in relation to the positive thesis of white humanity. But rather than become a “man of resentment,” a pessimist who treats antiblack racist values as immutable, or perhaps, a black optimist that requires belief in God’s benevolence to fight, Fanon attempts to live blackness as a “yes,” on the sole grounds that he insists upon himself. This is what I call “strong black nihilism”:
Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.15
Optimism is a farce – lies of rediscovery lead to a mummification of freedom that reproduces civil society’s “emancipation” of the slave into an object if invisibility always asked to retain appeals to humanity without any of its own.
Johnson 21 [Devon; 2021; Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy, University of Tampa, PhD, Temple University, MA and BA, Florida State University; “Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism,” p. 128-130 $P]
Strong black nihilism imposes a confrontation with white nihilistic values and forces recognition of blackness as a source of values. Upon emancipation, in America, black people were not necessarily regarded as equal to their former masters. White nihilism and antiblack racism remain the case. Phenomenal consciousness implicit to human existence continues to be treated as secondary qualities benevolently bestowed from some whites onto blacks. The “freedom” so accorded to black people entails a form of humanity whereby blacks are simply allowed to be as weak nihilistically situated as traditional whites. In this way, antiblack racism continues to situate blackness outside the self-other dialectic by essentially locking black people into a reality where we function as beings without perspectives, or original points of departure from which to insist upon and fight for. What does the requirement of fighting for one’s humanity mean under such circumstances? How does one accomplish one’s humanity? There is no legitimate form of inclusion on this view. One cannot go from (black) chattel slave to free (black) subject without theoretically questioning the conditions of (white) Humanity that demand enslavement in the first place.
Black existential freedom requires nihilistic struggles against traditional (white) human values. It requires producing languages, meanings, traditions, ways of being that push beyond traditional boundaries defining the antiblack world. The experiences of human freedom, those fleeting series of seemingly infinite moments experienced within the vicissitudes of each phenomenal spirit, for many black people, remain a tragic tight rope balanced between felt potential and the foreboding facts of antiblackness. Fanon encouraged producing an “authentic upheaval.” He described the effects of what I call, white nihilism, constructing the spaces of black existential invisibility, creating the situation of what I call black nihilism, which, in Fanon’s terms, amounts to a “zone of nonbeing,” or, an “utterly naked declivity,” where, nevertheless, “an authentic upheaval can be born.”41 On this view, black upheavals against antiblack racism entail rejecting white nihilistic valuations of humanity. For instance, once, when a white woman remarked of how handsome Fanon, “the negro,” was, he retorted, “Then come and fuck the handsome Negro, Madame!”42 Strong black attitudes can and do emerge through the lived fact of blackness, and they often cause even the most liberal white racists to flush with the embarrassment of having been recognized.
Black humanity comes into the antiblack racist world “imbued with a will” to find a meaning in things, but instead finds that it is “an object in the midst of other objects.”43 It goes from being totally erased through slavery, to being a self that is “put together again by another self,” through emancipation.44 In antiblack racist societies, as Fanon demonstrated, the humanity of black people arrives on the scene, far too late. The human world already exists, and is “anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of.”45 What options remain outside of a sudden and violent insisting upon one form of humanity for another? In, Towards the African Revolution (1964), in an essay entitled “Racism and Culture,” Fanon argued, “In order to achieve liberation,” the inferiorized man brings “all his resources into play, all his acquisitions, the old and the new, his own and those of the occupant.”46 Yet, he warned against a “mummification of individual thinking” which tends to produce decadent values.47 In Fanon’s terms, white nihilistic values seek the “destruction of [black] cultural values, of ways of life.” Here, “lines of force, having crumbled, no longer give direction. In their stead a new system of values is imposed, not proposed but affirmed, by the heavy weight of cannons and sabers.”48 Black humanity is induced under “the heavy weight of cannons and sabers” toward weak nihilistic, including black optimistic, responses to antiblack racism. Black people are inundated with commands to retain appeals to “humanity,” “love,” and respect for “supreme values,” which in this case, means being induced into committing the mistake of “forge

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