AFROPESSIMISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
For those in academia, the reading public and even African diasporic folk, Afropessimism is a difficult concept to understand. The essence of Afropessimism is the idea that anti-Black racism is pervasive, permanent and life-affirming to those committed to inflicting the inhumanity of anti-Blackness onto Blacks in the United States and around the globe. Afropessimism’s adherents refuse to propose solutions precisely because for those committed to antiBlackness, denial of humanity to those who are Black is their ultimate solution.
This appears to be the case for Frank B. Wilderson III, professor and chair of African American studies at University of California, Irvine. Mr. Wilderson’s “Afropessimism” is not a light read. His book is a philosophical treatise on the inhumanity of “Humans” and the purer humanity of “Blacks” he categorizes as “Slaves,” all sandwiched inside an autobiography. Mr. Wilderson takes readers on a long and winding road through his six decades of life in the process. He bookends his path to Afropessimism enlightenment with his hospitalization at 42 after having a mental breakdown while completing his doctorate.
This experience somehow led Mr. Wilderson to an Afropessimistic understanding of himself as a Black man. For Mr. Wilderson, his “Blacks” are a contradiction of what it is to be “Human,” especially “whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings.”
Throughout “Afropessimism,” Mr. Wilderson attempts time and again to relate his life story to his conception of Afropessimism. It is one in which he drifts from his own brand of contrarian anti-Blackness in his teens to the role of a wannabe revolutionary who is kicked out of Dartmouth in 1978 and who spends two years with an older Black girlfriend avoiding the FBI. It is one where Mr. Wilderson regales readers with his responses to biracial Germans refusing to sit in solidarity with Black Germans at a conference in Berlin for fear that the allegedly enlightened white Germans attending will not see their whiteness. Afropessismism is where Mr. Wilderson recounts his time working in a restaurant while South Africa transitioned from apartheid to post-apartheid with Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s.
But Mr. Wilderson’s first truly formative experience with Afropessimism in its universal anti-Blackness was in 1968. This was when he as a 12-year-old joined in with a group of Native Americans at a meeting in South Minneapolis to shout down his father’s attempts to implement a University of Minnesota-led project on a nearby reservation. According to Mr. Wilderson, the turning point of this meeting occurred when “a Native man ... lurched forward” and yelled, “‘We don’t want you, a [n-word] man, telling us what to do!’”
Mr. Wilderson wrote: “In the collective unconscious of Indigenous imagination, the specter of Blackness was a greater threat than the settler institution that had dispatched a Black professor to do its dirty work.”
At this point and several others in “Afropessimism,” Mr. Wilderson overstates his case. Anti-Blackness in and of itself does not equal Afropessimism. Especially as Mr. Wilderson acknowledges that his father was acting as a representative for the University of Minnesota. This fact alone put Mr. Wilderson’s father in an impossible position as a Black man within a settler-colonial institution that attempted to dictate how indigenous Americans should use what was supposed to be a collaborative project. The intersection between institutional racism, individual racism, anti-Blackness, and a difficult relationship between a preteen son and a college professor father are at work here, but not Afropessimism per se.
Black masculinity within the larger context of Whiteness and patriarchy, though, are at play throughout Mr. Wilderson’s rendition of Afropessimism. He unconsciously says as much in his epilogue about the futility of attempting to overcome anti -Blackness. “You marry white. It doesn’t change. You change your slave name. You turn your white Jesus to the wall. It doesn’t change. You marry Black. It still doesn’t change . ... What do you do with an unconscious that appears to hate you?,” Mr. Wilderson writes.
It is a curious thing when Mr. Wilderson writes about anti-Blackness by providing a breakdown of what it means to not be “Human” with “marry[ing] white.” Especially since Mr. Wilderson did “marry white” later in his life. This likely revealed more about Mr. Wilderson himself than he wanted to expose. As a reader, I strongly suspect that no Black woman or woman of color writing on this topic would have even conceived of marrying their way into whiteness as a method of breaking free from anti-Blackness. Mr. Wilderson’s analysis centers a white male gaze into Black life, and not a broader analysis of Blackness and antiBlackness from an intentionally intersectional and Black perspective.
Mr. Wilderson’s “Epilogue: The New Century” is where he is by far the most clear in what he means by Afropessimism. The rest of Afropessimism, despite having some solid bones of stories and analysis, is like playing ping-pong with a little kid’s bouncy rubber ball. It is at its core stuck between autobiography and deep theory. To partially quote Madeleine Stowe’s character Cora Munro from “The Last of the Mohicans,” Mr. Wilderson’s “Afropessimism” is a book “with a few admirable qualities, but taken as a whole,” it would be wrong for any reader to think so highly of it.