[ A guide for the perplexed, the puzzled, and the politically
confused.] [[link removed]]

AFROPESSIMISM AND IT'S DISCONTENTS  
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Greg Tate
September 21, 2021
The Nation
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_ A guide for the perplexed, the puzzled, and the politically
confused. _

Greg Tate, This work is marked as being in the public domain.

 

Afropessimism is all the rage among millennial Black academics and
activists—most notably among Black feminist critical race theorists,
who themselves are now the prime targets of the MAGA crowd. Black
intellectuals haven’t enjoyed this much pop currency among the right
wing since Black Power took over buildings to demand Black studies in
state universities and the Ivies 50 years ago. 

Afropessimism’s recent emergence in the mainstream of Black
political conversation could not have been better timed. Particularly
for that critical race sistren group, given their issues with suddenly
woke white America—especially their _bête blanche_, white academic
feminists. Here the grounds for suspicion are not gratuitous but
experiential and statistical: 48 percent of white women voted for
Donald Trump. Beyond that tempestuous internal struggle between
feminists of different hues, though, just what is Afropessimism? And
why should you, dear _Nation_ reader, even give a good goddamn?

The titular Godfather of Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III, states
the case best in his 2020 book _Afropessimism_. In a nutshell—and
consider this nutshell more kola-sized than pecan—Wilderson believes
that the binary frame for the world’s pathological anti-Blackness
shouldn’t be whites vs. Blacks but “Slaves” (Blackfolk) vs.
“Humans” (white dudes, mostly). In that construct, the structural
violence legally inflicted on Black flesh on the antebellum plantation
has been sustained into the 21st century. According to Wilderson,
Blackfolk have never transcended slave status to become human in the
eyes of the law, and are therefore still subject to routine systemic
violence by various white authorities—not just the police—and
routinely treated as a population who have no constitutional or human
rights.

As _The New York Times_’ special issue “The 1619 Project”
revealed, anti-Black outcomes remain algorithmically inscribed in
every dominant American institution—legal, medical, economic,
educational, cultural, scientific—anywhere the power of life and
death is held over Black bodies by anti-Black institutional authority.
Hence not just police brutality but mass incarceration, medical
racism, infant-mortality-rate racism, environmental racism,
cyber-surveillance racism, etc. Malcolm X may have most succinctly
defined and caught the spirit of AP when he told a 1960s Black
audience:

You don’t catch hell because you’re a Methodist or Baptist. You
don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican. You
don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk. And you sure
don’t catch hell because you’re an American, because if you was an
American, you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell because
you’re a black man…. So we are all black people, so-called
Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves. You are nothing but an
ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You
are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the “Mayflower.” You came
here on a slave ship, in chains, like a horse or a cow or a chicken,
and you were brought here by the people who came here on the
“Mayflower.” You were brought here by the so-called Pilgrims, or
Founding Fathers.

Where Wilderson has proven most controversial, however, is not in
ID’ing the usual pale-skinned-male suspect and source of global
oppression, but in his opposition to what he describes as
“mystifying analogies” drawn in multiethnic coalitions between
Slaves and every other oppressed group we may find ourselves allied
with. These include Indigenous folk, non-Black feminists and non-Black
queer folk, Asians, even Palestinians. (Wilderson tells of a young
Palestinian named Sameer he worked with at a security job who fell out
of favor when he made a shocking revelation: In Palestine, there was
nothing more disgusting for his brothers than to be stopped and
frisked by Israeli police when the cop was an Ethiopian Jew.
Wilderson’s realization that Native Americans could be anti-Black
came when his father met with a group of tribal leaders to help
resolve a dispute with his university employers. During the meeting, a
Native man shouted at Wilderson’s dad, “We don’t want you, a
nigger man, telling us what to do!”)

As Wilderson sees it, our movement allies’ negotiations with the
Humans never start with the assumption that they are nonhuman or
slaves. To Wilderson, all non-Blackfolk—even those he personally
loves, partners with, and politics with—are “junior partners” of
the Humans. Not least because Wilderson sees the junior partners’
oppressions as resolvable by a restitution of rights that we Slaves,
still being legally violated as nonhumans, have never had. Most
resonant is the point he makes that non-Blackfolks’ oppressions have
a transactional potential to be remedied through wealth redistribution
or restitution of land. 

Whereas anti-Black violence, Wilderson argues, has since the
plantation always been and remains gratuitous: random, reflexive, and
providing no benefit to the Humans other than to reproduce the slave
status of Blackfolk by feasting on Black flesh. And it is this
bloodfeasting that Wilderson, in his most zombie-apocalyptic mode,
argues that the rest of global society—Humans and junior partners
alike—are dependent on for their own psychic and hierarchical
coherence and continuation. In other words, nobody wants to be the
nigger no matter how oppressed they are, though as Mama Tate so
eloquently liked to put it, “They want everything about being Black
but the burden of being Black.”

Wilderson both critiques and refuses the critique of an alleged
“Oppression Olympics” frequently hurled at Black activists in
multiethnic coalitions. He notes—as he recently did in _The
Nation_—that everybody in current multiethnic justice movement
settings wants to feed off Black rage and expressive culture “as
long as they don’t have to hear about Black suffering.” 

That burden is what Wilderson underscores when he writes, as he did in
the article “Social Death and Narrative Aporia in _12 Years a
Slave_,” that “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness.” For
Slaves, Humans, and junior partners alike, this post–George
Floyd–martyrdom moment in the nation’s history—arguably as much
a _When They See Us_ awakening for Blackfolk as the Nazi
concentration camp footage was for American Jewry—offers an
embarrassment of riches to illustrate just how that burden sits in the
world and weighs down on the bodies and souls of American-born
Blackfolk.

Wilderson’s Afropessimism appeals powerfully to
critical-race-and-gender-theory millennials because it provides both
an ingenious analytical framework for Black oppression and a novel,
weaponized language for blasting away at the silencing of Black
suffering, Black trauma, Black despair, and Black depression by the
junior partners in academia and progressive contemporary
multi-identity coalitions.

Wilderson devoted several pages of his first memoir, _Incognegro_, to
recounting the betrayal of Black feminist academics by white feminist
academics at his college in San Jose once they’d achieved
administrative power. In this aspect of his agenda, Wilderson recalls
Frantz Fanon’s warning that Black revolutionary cohorts need to be
wary of opportunistic comrades who don’t want to defeat their
oppressors but instead merely replace them. Or the comedian Dave
Chappelle, who has a bit where he tells a white woman that her only
problem with white supremacy was that she didn’t get a big enough
cut.

In _Afropessimism_, Wilderson—a snarky signifying furthermucker on
the page—describes a moment of extreme annoyance after a film
lecture he gave in which junior partner exceptionalism figured in his
narrative analysis. A distraught white female academic beseeches him,
“What about solidarity between races?” Wilderson’s now-infamous
reply: “I don’t give a rat’s ass about solidarity.” 

Shocking and enraging as that response might be to some—and
hilarious and rallying to others—the fact is Wilderson, who teaches
at UC Irvine and is in a long-term partnership with a white female
poet, can’t actually escape solidarity with the junior partners.
There are, in fact, according to one prominent Black woman race
theorist, Asian women in academia who now describe themselves as
Afropessimists. Which speaks to the cool factor of AP as yet another
example of Blackfolks’ ability to make any odd thing we touch—like
Timberland boots and scratch DJ battles—seductive and hip to the
non-Black junior partners.

James Baldwin said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be
relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of
the time.” But what he didn’t say was that, on a good day, it is
mostly a sublimated state of rage since folk got bills to pay and
sanity to keep. There are many successful Black women in the corporate
world and in academe who are currently angry as f**k at having been
hauled in to wet-nurse Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion sessions by
their employers—in addition to doing their 80-hour-a-week jobs.
Since they don’t want to be identified as That Angry Black Woman, no
one is the wiser in the hierarchy. This may partly account for the
current Afropessimism boom, in which Wilderson’s desublimation of
his own rage into the highfalutin language of anti-racist structural
analysis provides the sisters a safety valve and an intellectual
alternative to depression or going all “Pirate Jenny” (see Nina
Simone’s slave-revolt take on the Brecht-Weill ditty) on fools at
their gig.

According to a couple of Black critical race feminist profs we know,
there are undergrad students who haven’t actually read Wilderson but
have nonetheless adopted AP as their rallying cry after coming home
from Black Lives Matter protests despairing that nothing they do “is
going to stop these cops from killing us.” For some, this despair
leads to their own feelings of “Fuck solidarity” and a petulant,
pissed-off urge to withdraw from interaction with white
people—especially the staunchest of former allies—while they sort
themselves out.

Nonacademic Black-folk from the grassroots activist side of the table
sometimes ask: So what’s Wilderson’s “solution”? In the late
’80s and early ’90s, Wilderson lived in South Africa, where he was
a mostly report-writing member of uMkhonto we Sizwe—the military
wing of the African National Congress. He
dedicates _Afropessimism_ to “Assata Shakur and Winnie Mandela,
for everything.” So it’s not a huge leap to guess his vision for
making real change in the systemic anti-Black state of things is
aligned with a version of theirs. But Wilderson has never positioned
himself as a movement savant. AP is not a political directive toward
anything—other than Blackfolk not getting fooled again by the
promises of solidarity from junior partners whose reality-construct is
as dependent on the reproduction of Black suffering—upon not being
the nigger—as the titular Humans (white boys by any other name).

While Wilderson’s hard line on the place of Slaves, Humans, and
junior partners might lead you to believe _Afropessimism_ is a
full-throttle tract, the book is much more of a classic bildungsroman.
Wilderson has led a dramatic life—and he is also an adroitly and
acerbically self-dramatizing furthermucker, and an exquisite writer of
modern, novelistic prose.

Among our key critical-race-theory guiding lights, he is hands down
the one you read for pleasure, pathos, cringingly vulnerable
interpersonal confessions—and sometimes even wrathful, biting
comedy. The brother has a theatrical flair. And he doesn’t eschew
self-deprecation on an operatic scale.

It’s hard to imagine, for example, another Black male writer who’s
devoted himself so unsparingly to excavating scenes from his
parents’ marriage—Spike Lee’s _Crooklyn_ is the only work that
resonates on similar frequencies—or detailing his multiple,
tear-jerking inadequacies in nearly every romantic relationship of his
teen and adult life (though not without much picaresque laughter as
well).

The annoying and earnestly woke young Wilderson’s torture of his
bewildered parents with his _Soul on Ice_–inspired ultra-Blackness
sets up _Afropessimism_’s best one-liner. One 1960s
pre-Nixon-impeachment day, young Frank, ever the adolescent
scamp-provocateur, rolls up on his mother and blindsides her by
proclaiming his newfound desire to fight in Vietnam. Mom exhales, then
professes pride in her renegade Marxist-wannabe spawn finally
embracing the American way. At which point Wilderson launches his
spring-loaded ambush: “You don’t understand me. I didn’t mean
the White man’s army, I meant the _Viet Cong_!”

By contrast, some of the most moving and painful writing
in _Afropessimism_occurs in the book’s conclusion, when the author
recounts his deeply admiring final reflections and memories of his
mother, before dementia renders her a complete stranger to him:

Then she asked me if I had just come from the Washington Monument.
When I said no, we’re in Minneapolis, not in D.C., she said I never
did have a sense of direction, no wonder I’d come late for my
sister’s recital.

“What recital,” I wanted to know, “where?”…

“What do you mean, where? The _Jack and Jill_ convention, down the
hall in the ballroom, silly.”… [S]he held up her index finger.
“Listen. Your sister plays beautifully.”

The Jack and Jill convention must have been in 1970, and my sister had
not played the piano for almost forty years. But I sat with Mom and
listened to the end of the concerto, or was it an étude? Then came an
ice age of silence in which she said nothing and seemed not to notice
I was there. Snowplows groaned in the street below her window. The
branches of trees were bare and starred with frost. Where was the
woman who danced slowly in her stocking feet with my father in the
living room at night, Johnny Hartman on the hi-fi and not a worry in
the world? The woman who said my stock was good and my mind was
strong. Where was she, the woman who made me want to write?

Her hair was as white and thin as dandelion puffs….She had not
spoken for a while. Then, as if she’d been reading my mail, she sat
up straight as a washboard…. Like Harriet Tubman staring down a gun
barrel, she looked at me. “Didn’t I tell you, boy, people have to
die? I know I told you that.”

Then she fell back into her eyes.

I went into the hallway so she wouldn’t see me cry. When I returned
to the room, she asked me who I was.

Earlier, after giving both still-very-lucid parents a full description
of Afropessimism, Wilderson recalls his mom querying him as to what
purpose something like that could have for his students, and whether
it might help them become “good citizens.”

_The mature, middle-aged Wilderson doesn’t claw back. But after you
smirk at his mother’s seeming naivete, you’re left wondering if Ma
Dukes didn’t just signify on her boy in that blithe and cunning way
Black mothers can do so well: cutting their grown and tenured
progeny’s vestigial outlaw illusions off at the neck so cleanly they
never even felt the slice of the blade._

_Greg Tate, a journalist and critic whose articles for The Village
Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications starting in the 1980s
helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same plane as jazz and
Abstract Expressionism, died on December 7, 2021 in New York City. He
was 64._

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