Well, well.

June 8, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     A few months back I published a post entitled, "Well," in which I outlined my pessimistic view of the plight and status of Black people in America.  At the end of the post I mentioned that I was about to read a book called Afropessimism, by Frank B. Wilderson III, and that I'd report back if any of the observations I'd made needed to be changed after having read it.  Well, I don't think I'd change anything, except to say that Wilderson has deepened and strengthened my view that for the African American there is no reason to be optimistic about the future; the past and present have made that a certainty.

     First, a few words about the book.  It's part autobiography and part socio-political treatise, I guess you could say.  The author is an academic and a strongly political person, having solidified his views, over years, into the philosophy he calls Afropessimism.  (I'm not sure he coined the term.)  He started, in the 1960s, as a radical, influenced by Marx, and then by the Marxist writings of Antonio Gramsci, an ill-fated Italian communist philosopher, and later by the writings of Frantz Fanon, a Black French colonial subject from Martinique, who became a psychiatrist and a philosopher, and eventually propounded a view of anti-colonialism that centers on the institutionalism of anti-black racism.  That's a pretty superficial view of those people and of Wilderson's own ideas, but it's a start, especially for a guy like me who hasn't, and probably won't, read any of the people on whom Wilderson has derived his world view expressed in Afropessimism.  His book is a patchwork of personal memories of key times in the author's life and a whole lot of jargon-laden political thought, filled with words you don't hear in everyday speech (unless, I suppose, you're an academic political scientist), like "hegemonic," "embrication," and "ontological."  In that regard it's definitely meant to imbue the reader with a sense of the sound structural and historical underpinnings of his ideas, but I think the book is by far at its best and most poignant when it uses simpler language, accompanied by actual moments of narrative from his life, all of which tend to illustrate his points well.  I don't require Frank Wilderson to prove to me that he's a serious, well-read, very thoughtful, and most importantly, legitimate, thinker, any more than he expects me to give him any approval.  I accept that.  But that's just me, and really, I'm pretty sure I'm not his target audience.

     Unfortunately, I don't have the book with me in California, so I can't quote from it directly.  But the thrust of the thesis of the philosophy of Afropessimism is that Black people are not and never have been regarded as human beings, much less as members of society.  They exist to serve an important purpose, however, and that is to validate, by contrast, the existence and value of those whom society does regard as human beings.  Blacks are the non-humans that prove the humanness of non-Blacks.  Those non-Blacks include not just white people, but also non-Black non-white people, such as Latins, Asians, and Native Americans, all of whom Wilderson calls the "junior partners" of the whites.  And, he says, much as it might suit the purposes of non-white non-Blacks to lump themselves in with Blacks as "persons of color," or whatever term you like, they are not the same as Blacks, and never will be.  The important reason for that is that non-Black non-whites all have, or have had, something to lose, whereas Blacks have absolutely nothing to lose and never did.  

     Here I'm straying a bit from Wilderson's political narrative, but not distorting or changing it in any material way.  Essentially, Blacks have nothing anyone wants, except maybe athletic and musical skills, and those things can be copied, and if necessary ignored, by whites.  The property of Blacks, to the extent that they own anything at all, is nothing but the shittiest leftover parts of the shittiest places, which no one wants or needs.  The jobs of Blacks are the lowest of the low, and can be done by others who come in new and are willing to work even more cheaply.  The education of Blacks is negligible.  Native Americans, by contrast, once had a great deal of property, which admittedly was taken from them, but which they now seek to take back in small bits.  Plus they're allowed to build casinos, in order to at least steal back a little something from the white man.  Latins bring with them ambition to succeed and rise out of peonage, and have economic value because they serve the need for labor at the absolute bottom of the barrel.  Asians, God knows, have a great deal going for them, and a great deal to gain and lose.  The white liberal fantasy played out by placing these non-Black non-whites together with Blacks and trying to unite them all as "persons of color," discriminated against by the white establishment in equal measure, besides being disingenuous, has profound limitations.  One is that the non-Black non-whites are all, sooner or later, going to improve their lot.  Though they may have been killed indiscriminately for political reasons, they have never been enslaved directly, never treated, en masse, as subhuman or nonhuman chattels, to be bought and sold at will by the whites.

     Wow.  No wonder he calls it Afropessimism.  There's no real way out, and no lasting hope for the future.  And that's about it.  There is no "But wait!" and no light at the end of the long dark tunnel.  We white folks who are sympathetic to the plight of Black people can try, at a personal and political level, to lend a hand, but we can't solve the problem, for the simple reason that it's unsolvable.  But that doesn't mean that we should give up the idea of being decent.  

     Meanwhile, white supremacy, alive like a virus in us all in spite of the earnest wish of some of us to be rid of it, waits patiently to erase the pitiful bit of progress that has been made in the area of race relations.  Thus it is now, just as it was after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.  Whatever good is accomplished will probably be erased.  Frank Wilderson knows this, even if the rest of us refuse to believe it, because he understands why Black people exist.