Anti-Blackness and the Prevalence of Afropessimism
Previously, I have written that the power formation that prevails over our world today is a white-supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal power formation, citing the work of bell hooks. Recently, however, I have been considering the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, and I want to qualify my previous writings by marking the difference between white supremacy and anti-blackness.
To be brief, Wilderson has brought it to my attention that people do not want to realize that white supremacist power formations are only one particular species of the much more diverse genera of anti-black power formations.
White supremacist power formations are the most prevalent species of anti-black power formation and, what’s more, white supremacy could be called an ur-species of anti-blackness, given that most contemporary species of anti-blackness are descended from and homologous to white supremacy. That being said, however, one cannot make sense of how dark-skinned peoples of African descent navigate the world unless one is sensitive to the fact that the prevalence of anti-blackness is not coterminous with the prevalence of white supremacy.
White supremacist power formations, specifically, filter and channel people of differing races, especially whites and blacks, apart from one another in such a way that it becomes increasingly burdensome and unappealing for peoples of differing races to commune fluently with one another and, what’s more, so that it becomes more practical and more appealing for white peoples to dominate and eliminate peoples of all other races, especially black peoples.
Anti-black power formations, more generally, also filter and channel peoples of differing races apart from one another but pay special attention to filtering and channeling black peoples apart from all other peoples, making it practical and appealing for black peoples to be dominated and eliminated by other peoples. Anti-black power formations do not necessarily make it so that white peoples to dominate and eliminate peoples of all other races, but they do necessarily make it so that black peoples to be dominated and eliminated by others, including white peoples.
Although white supremacy prevails globally, white supremacy’s prevalence has been attenuated in many regions of the globe. That being said, and here’s the rub, anti-blackness still flourishes in many regions where white-supremacy’s prevalence has been attenuated. For instance, Euro-American white-supremacy has been attenuated in East Asia, but anti-blackness prevails in much of East Asia. Going further, all around the world today, many of the most vocal opponents of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy are, consciously or unconsciously, proponents of anti-blackness. For instance, the writings and organizing practices of Marxists and Feminists all over the Global North will call many aspects of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy into question without always calling anti-blackness into question.
This begs the question, of course, “What does it mean to call anti-blackness into question and to oppose it?”
As I see it, there is no opposing anti-blackness in an anti-black world without making sense of what it means to be black. In an earlier dispatch titled “Blackness and Primitiveness”, I turned to the work of R.A. Judy to make sense of what it means to be black. I wrote:
As R.A. Judy writes in the book Sentient Flesh, the imposed designation “Black/Negro” has two distinct senses. On the one hand, the imposed designation has a political economic sense: “the word Negro, along with all its cognates, entails an anthropological categorization, whereby those so designated belong to a physically distinct type of not fully human hominid, which is what makes them legitimately available as prospective commodity assets.” On the other hand, the imposed designation carries an ethnographic sense, “the term [Negro] connotes not only the slave formed in capitalism but also the populations of people who may be enslaved, and who remain Negro after slavery’s abolition.” Considering these two distinct senses of the term “Negro” together, Judy observes, “While it is indeed the case that in every instance of its expression, Negro connotes the formations of political economy in the Atlantic World in modernity, it also has historical usage as an ethnographic designation for a specific population of people, ‘the Negro.’ [...] Yet even though that ethnographic sense of Negro contradicts the commercial Negro by recognizing the full humanity of the designated population, it is still within the ambit of the same anthropological categorization.”
In sum, only those dark-complexioned Sub-Saharan African peoples who have been made into slaves are Black/Negro in the political economic sense, yes, but all those who are susceptible to becoming Black/Negro in the political economic sense are considered Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense. The political economic sense of the designation Black/Negro is thus the definitive sense: the ethnographic Black/Negro being nothing other than the person susceptible to becoming Black/Negro in the political economic sense. Using myself as an example here, being a child of dark-complexioned persons from Sub-Saharan Africa, I am Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense, which is to say, in other words, that I am a person susceptible to receiving the political economic designation Black/Negro under the power formation of racialized slavery. That the power formation of racialized slavery is no longer operative today does not put an end to my being Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense: I continue to be ethnographically Black/Negro because the power formation of racialized slavery did effectively operate for a period time and the remnants of its effective operation have been maintained and repurposed by the power formations that have succeeded it.
Anti-black power formations are those that take for granted “the formations of political economy in the Atlantic World in modernity.” This is to say, more precisely, that any and every power formation that leverages or simply maintains remnants of the power formation of racialized slavery under a capitalist world system dominated by Euro-Atlantic powers is an anti-black power formation.
The formations of political economy in the Atlantic World in modernity are the basis for the formations of political economy that prevail over the world today, and remnants of the power formation of racialized slavery are ubiquitous across the globe. The Atlantic slave trade killed, at the lowest estimate, 4 million Africans in the process of disappearing another 10 million out of Africa to the New World to breed a caste/class of abject racialized chattel. The event of the Atlantic slave trade effectively set the stage and the template for the exploitative extraction of resources from Africa. The entire political economy of today’s world would collapse if exploitative resource extraction from Africa ceased, and yet dark-complexioned peoples of African nationalities now suffer under a global apartheid system that effectively places more restrictions on their freedom to travel abroad than are placed on most other peoples’. It is anti-black to benefit from the exploitation of Africa and Africans today without ever drawing any connections between the exploitation of Africa and Africans today, the slave trade out of Africa that conditioned today’s exploitation, and the traumas endured by African slaves in the New World and by their descendants past and present all over the world.
Those who refuse to draw such connections today inevitably come up with rationalizations in order justify their benefiting from the exploitation of Africa and black Africans. Indeed, peoples all around the world today — in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania — can give you reasons why they are “superior” to black Africans and their descendants, sometimes citing divine dispensation, sometimes citing natural biological and ecological circumstances, sometimes citing accidents of history. What Wilderson calls “Afropessimism” is, as I understand it, an endeavor describe the sense of despair that black peoples experience when they run up against the global prevalence of anti-blackness, when they encounter rationalizations that serve to make the black peoples of the African diaspora out to be an “inferior race” of peoples who “deserve” to be dominated and exploited by others. Afropessimism, in other words, is an endeavor to describe of a phenomenon of experience; it is not, as some authors would have it, “political ideology”. It follows from this that dismissing Afropessimism means dismissing the fact that black peoples do feel despair at the global prevalence of anti-blackness, and this only deepens black peoples’ despair.
Wilderson’s work has immense salience in the United States today, given that so many people who claim to be “liberal” and “progressive” are organizing to fight white supremacy in ways that are anti-black, having failed to recognize that ending the supremacy of white peoples over other peoples does not mean ending the domination of black peoples by others. Wilderson’s Afropessimism speaks to our moment because so many black peoplesare despairing at the ruses of anti-black liberals and progressives who won’t stop making noise about their organizing to fight white supremacists and Christian fascists and won’t stop soliciting black peoples to cheer them on in their anti-black organizing efforts. Black peoples despair at the anti-blackness of white supremacists and Christian fascists, no doubt, but they also despair at the anti-blackness of liberals and progressives. Indeed, speaking from my own experience, I wrote my Four Essays on Reparations out of my own despair, as a black man caught in the crossfire between anti-black liberals and progressives, on the one side, and white supremacists and Christian fascists, on the other side.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie proposed that the abjectness of femininity oppresses us all and, as such, “We should all be feminists.” By “we” she was, of course, referring to we who would counter oppressive forces. Assuming the same “we”, might I suggest that the abjectness of blackness oppresses us all and, as such, “We should all be Afropessimists.” This is to say, in other words, that we should all endeavor to acknowledge and share in the despair that black peoples feel at the global prevalence of anti-blackness.
