Title: Afropessimism

Author: Frank B. Wilderson III

Year of Publication:

2020

Thesis:

Black people as 'vectors of violence.'

"Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous the- oretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta- aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true.

If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hob- bled by a meta-aporia: a contradiction that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action— Black people are the wrench in the works.

Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers’ agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left—think Bernie Sanders—because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of social, political, or national redemption. This crisis, no, this catastrophe, this realization that I am a sentient being who can’t use words like “being” or “person” to describe myself without the scare quotes and the threat of raised eyebrows from anyone within earshot, was crippling." (14-15)

Time:
Geography:
Organization:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER ONE - For Halloween I Washed My Face

- Even while experiencing a mental breakdown, he is considering how to stay alive by having to figure out how to 'make white people feel safe.'

"Make them feel safe, I had thought to myself, even though I had never felt more at risk. I would think it again when the nurse and the doctor first came into this white sepulchre where I lay. Make them feel safe, the cardinal rule of Negro diplomacy." (6)

- Has a twitch and an ulcer

- Quits his job at a brokerage firm - later sees colleagues while waitering at exclusive club

- The concept of statelessness as he develops into an afropessimist (not analogous experiences to his friends (10)

- Anti-Blackness even present as he attempts to identify with Palestinian freedom (12)

CHAPTER TWO - Juice from a Neck Bone

- Makes reference to DuBois's double consciousness

"She was learning something valuable about White upper-crust Northerners, something that she would not have imagined possible before she moved to Kenwood: how one can fight a war by proxy through someone else’s child. She knew now how it must feel to be killed by a guided missile. What kind of woman would hurt you through your child? " (29)

- Not feeling remorse when he cracks his friend's fontanel

- Vietnam & waiting for news about his uncle

- post-King murder riots

- Slavery & blackness - p41 - important

- Parents' activism & particular involvment in fair housing

- Relates the similarities of anti-Blackness in white suburban homes & Native American communities

"I took pleasure in his pain, because his ruin made me a part of a community. By jeering this "n*" I was one with the "we." (45)

CHAPTER THREE - Hattie McDaniel is Dead

- Difficult to understand cause of anti-Black violence on the individual level

- The world functions on anti-Blackness

- "It has taken me forty years to understand how neither he nor Josephine had violated anyone’s space. The cabin where they slept belonged to him as much as their flesh belonged to him. The regime of violence that made them his property and prosthetics of his desire made it impossible to see what he did as a violation. This is to say that I was wrong to think Jose- phine did something wrong. " (72)

-"she carried with her the ensemble of dilemmas that seems to afflict mixed-race children into adulthood—a fear of slipping into the darkness of their Black side and without ever having ascended to the light of White redemption." (74)

- It's interesting that he compares Josephine to the film representation; I wonder how he sees this connected to Northup's work. Nevermind - he gets to it beautifully.

- "Josephine raised her voice so that they could all hear and said, Are you threatening me? First you assault me, now you’re threatening me." (84) Josephine is today's Karen.

- "What went down between Stella and Josephine can’t be reduced to a fight between neighbors. The antagonism between them was pre- figured before they even met. In other words, the die was cast hun- dreds of years ago on the plantation. The fact that Josephine was, on a conscious level, oblivious to this antagonism doesn’t diminish it. In fact, when driven by the force of one’s unconscious one often plays out one’s role with a deeper sense of commitment to maintaining the paradigm of despotic violence into which one has been stitched and stamped from the beginning. Stella, however, was a student of racial antagonisms. Her seeming obliviousness to the irreconcilability between her position in the world and Josephine’s was not so much the labor of unconscious disavowal as, I would say, a tactical maneu- ver of the mind—one she’d designed for years in order to postpone, if not avoid altogether, the very moment at which she and Josephine had arrived: the moment in which the antagonism insisted upon a stage on which it could be played out in the open." (86)

- "You can live a lifetime as a White woman’s mirror, Stella once told me. She was the implement of Josephine’s renewal and sense of herself. What happens when a tool talks back; when the mirror breaks itself?" (87)

- "Yet, in some strange way, every single scene in America is played out on an antebellum stage. It’s just that in the North it can take the actors some time to learn their lines and play their roles." (89)

- Excellent parallels with Northup on pp90-92 - pleasure as a basis for violence (vs. cover of jealousy or whatever)

- Getting radioactive poisoning from Josephine, who works in a lab. (98)

- "When you intuit for the first time in your life that you live in a soup of violence that is prelogical, a kind of vio- lence that is as legitimate if it’s wielded by “ordinary” citizens, such as Josephine, as it is if wielded by sanctioned enforcers of the law, and that your father’s position and prestige are no more the keys to a sanctuary than the position and prestige of someone who is Black and orphaned, you are faced with two choices: stare unflinchingly at the abyss as it stares unflinchingly at you, or take it out on the Black person near you who won’t leave you to your fantasy of being truly alive. Anything to not have to face the fact that your sense of pres- ence is no more than “borrowed institutionality.”* (100)

- "But their transformative capacity stems not from their positive attri- butes but from the fact that they are not Black, they are not slaves.

These fully vested citizens and not-so-fully vested citizens live through intra-communal narrative arcs of transformation; but where the Black is concerned, their collective unconscious calls upon Blacks as props, which they harness as necessary implements to help bring about their psychic and social transformation, and to vouchsafe the coherence of their own Human subjectivity." (102)

CHAPTER FOUR - Punishment Park

- Analysis of this film: (172) Punishment Park - YouTube

"In other words, even though Nancy Jane Smith is a revolutionary insurgent, hell-bent on the overthrow of the U.S. government, and the tribunal members are exemplary of Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” at a deep unconscious level they are equally invested in the status and integrity of the White family." (157)

- Repeats again through the analysis of this film that Black people are considered non-human and therefore iredeemable. (158)

- Authority of the white family (159)

"...violence without sanctuary is the sine qua non of Blackness." (161)

- Black revolutionaries told they have no mandate

- The section on his conference in Denmark

- Rape as not requiring penetration (& possible by a white woman to a Black man - 169)

"Solidarity means not crowding out discussions of Black social death just because there is no coherent form of redress on the horizon. I think that’s what we’ve done today. Your participation in this workshop with the Black people in Marronage is an act of solidarity.” (171)

- Reference to Baldwin & Mailer

- "This structural injunction was what characterized the conference—and this characterization is exemplary of what happens to Black voices when those voices make arguments that are predicated on a theory of violence that (a) does not apply to all suffering peo- ple and (b) suggests that even people who suffer from the scourge of White supremacy, capitalism, and gender oppression are, simultane- ously, agents and beneficiaries of anti-Black violence." (180)

- How people feel as opposed to listening & also addressing what the speaker didn't address vs. what they did address. (181)

- Argues this is not oppression olympics (185)

- "One never really knows which is more severe, the blithe disregard one suffers at the hands of White people or the pious remorse with which they purify themselves." (188)

CHAPTER FIVE - The Trouble with Humans

- Slave breeding and voting explained

- In the ANC - he sees non-Black POC trying to de-identify as POC

- Slavery as universal and timeless in Black caucus

- White people AS the police

CHAPTER SIX - Mind the Closing Doors

CHAPTER SEVEN - MARIO'S

EPILOGUE: THE NEW CENTURY

NOTES

Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Read acknowledgments for intellectual
Keywords:
historical redemption (12)
aporia (unresolvable contradiction) (13)
meta-aporia (14)
social death
Junior partners
Rape (169)
Solidarity (171, 187)

Themes:
Critiques:
Curious why he chose such conservative numbers for Tulsa...

"We would not have been the first Black family to be run out of town. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Wall Street was burned to the ground, thirty-five people were massacred, eight hundred were hospitalized, Black businesses were bombed from the air. And picnic-lynching is not an oxymoron, but a blending of pleasures and psychic renewal." (88)

Questions:

"If critical theory and radical politics are to rid themselves of the parasitism that they heretofore have had in common with radical and progressive movements on the Left, that is, if we are to engage, rather than disavow, the difference between Humans who suffer through an “economy of disposability” and Blacks who suffer by way of “social death,” then we must come to grips with how the redemption of the subaltern (a narrative, for example, of Palestinian plenitude, loss, and restoration) is made possible by the (re)instantiation of a regime of violence that bars Black people from the narrative of redemption. This requires (a) an understanding of the difference between loss and absence, and (b) an understanding of how the narrative of subaltern loss stands on the rubble of Black absence." (16)

"They are ideas and personas that a young middle-class Black man like me had consciously fought against to the point of being kicked out of college, while deep in my unconscious I was a loyal supplicant who cared more about not simply the master’s feelings, but the stability of the master’s world, than I did about my own suffering and the suffering of Stella. It is hard to be a slave and feel that you are worthy, truly worthy, of your suffering as a slave." (101)

Curious how Bourdieu would fit in here.

"Ian Bryce led the charge. The way his chin thrust out when he spoke, and the small, involuntary cannonballs of breath that burst between his words bore a resemblance to Reg in Seattle as he steered young Luke to the parking lot; a man I had seldom conjured in more than fifty years." (177)

Would Wilderson argue for whiteness as a type of ethnicity?

- Voting - 196

- Making white people feel safe. (211) Not sure how my question is formulating, but how do non-Black people build/break down forms of solidarity or reinforce anti-Blackness by "making sure people are comfortable?" Is it simply defending whiteness?

Quotes:

"“Last night,” he informed me, “a friend of mine from Palestine and I met these two gorgeous women. White, of course,” he added under his breath, and I didn’t bother to question the “of course,” because I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t wrong. That “White” means beauty goes without saying is the message one is fed all of one’s life. To protest to the contrary is like saying, It’s not about money, after you’ve been shortchanged." (9)

"How was it that the people who stole his land and slaughtered his relatives were somehow less of a threat in his imagina- tion than Black Jews, often implements of Israeli madness, who some- times do their dirty work?" (12)

"Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metathe- ory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of inter- pretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous the- oretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction than the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing and exposing the meta- aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true.

"for Halloween I washed my face and wore my
school clothes went door to door as a nightmare." (17) - I'm understanding now - no costume needed because this is how Black people are seen.

"White people and their junior partners need anti-Black violence to know they’re alive" * "Junior partners are people who are Human but not White hetero males. For exam- ple, people of color and White women who are targets of White supremacy and patri- archy, respectively, and, simultaneously, the agents and beneficiaries of anti-Blackness. This category also includes LGBT people who are not Black and Indigenous commu- nities. They are “partners” because, as with White hetero males, anti-Blackness is the genome of their paradigmatic positions and because they suffer at the hands of contin- gent violence rather than the gratuitous or naked violence of social death." (94)

"The Black is held captive in the joy and terror of the master as it whiplashes between Negrophilia (as, for example, in the vapid consumption of hard-core rap by White youth in the sub- urbs) and Negrophobia (as in the interrogation, void of meaningful dialogue, of Robbins by the tribunal)." (162)

On anti-Black violence:

"...anti-Black violence murders, destroys, subjectivity (eviscerates the capacity for relational- ity), whereas misogynistic and anti-Semitic violence, along with the genocide of indigenous people, exploits and alienates subjectivity with-out obliterating relational capacity...the difference between someone dying and something dying cannot be analogized." (163)

"But if Blacks were completely genocided, Humanity would find itself in the same quandary that would occur if Black people were rec- ognized and incorporated as Human beings. Humanity would cease to exist; because it would lose its conceptual coherence, having lost its baseline other. Humanity would find itself standing in the abyss of an epistemological void. The Black is needed to mark the border of Human subjectivity." (164)

"In short, the conscious mind of a radical says, “I don’t see color,” whereas the unconscious mind is “saying” (in ways that are rarely legible) “I live in fear of a Black planet.” (167)

Notes:

(170) Frank Wilderson: Afro-pessimism And Modern Slavery (podcast) | Town Hall Seattle - YouTube

- Hartman - Scenes of Subjection

- Common referent in Black experience is violence without context/can't refer to a time prior to violence.

- Afropessimissm allows us to think through our suffering

- 90s - Marxism, gender analysis

- -> these tools of analysis are inadequate for explaining the suffering of Black people

- Pessimism is geared toward these inadequate forms of analysis for any type of liberation. Critical of "emancipatory claims."

- "already guilty and you cannot be injured."

- 'when things get better OR worse, you are still a slave'

- Problem - we work from empiricism vs. "relationality"

- How did Black people go from folks who had status as citizens & then BAM in the 18th century? Afropessimism explains this.

(170) Frank B. Wilderson III | Afropessimism - YouTube

[Afropessimism] | C-SPAN.org

- Black suffering 'can't be reconciled with other forms of suffering'

- Not a new intervention (it's been in the folklore, but it's been theorized now)

- Explains footnotes - this is a way of making the trade book useful as a way of finding one's way through the vocabulary

- Quotes Patterson - necessity of repeating process of transforming free person to slave.

- Continues - only want the violence to rise again in Capitalism when there is resistance. However, for enslaved people - they live with the violence constantly (there is no shift to hegemony).

- Absolutely fascinating how he can make Afropessimism account for his own life and as a useful tool of analysis in fictional and nonfictional spaces.