of the modern world.
"Anti-Blackness" by con­ Referring publicly to the noose as an expres­
trast, points to the "inability " of that very
world to "recognize Black humanity."
To be sure, ross almost certainly under­
stood her op-ed as complementing or enrich­
ing those calls, from the streets and elsewhere,
to defund or abolish the police. Understood
in this way, hers was an attempt to theo ­
rize-and by theorizing to complement-what
Black folks were already putting into prac­
tice in the streets. Perhaps also she saw her­
self running interference against efforts in the
mainstream press to displace or narrow the
focus to individual police officers, or particu­
lar cities by recentering the indictment on the
United States itself. Insisting on the origins
of antiBlackness in modern chattel slavery,
moreover, might offer a shield against appro­
priative efforts by nonBlack groups who, in
good or bad faith, might seek to siphon away
the energy of the moment.
And still it is curious: against the back­
ground of worldwide protests calling for the
defunding, and in many cases, the abolition
of policing, ross has little to say about what
should be done, aside from shifting the-inter­
pretive frame. In fact, she seems to risk deflect­
ing focus from the police entirely. "Let's stop
saying racism ... or worse yet, that a racist police
officer killed George Floyd," she writes. Rather,
shifting the lens to antiBlackness gestures to a
problem that needs to be addressed, first and
foremost, by a shift in recognition. Ross is ask­
ing us to explain the cause of police violence
differently: "George Floyd was killed becaus,;1
antiBlackness is endemic to...how all of us
make sense of the social, economi� historical
and cultural dimensions of human life."
If ross intended her theorization of anti­
Blackness to complement or enhance the
demands to abolish the police, she may have
overestimated the radicality of shifting the
lens. After all, my university began explicitly
naming and condemning antiBlackness as
such while it continued its half-year campaign
of strike-breaking and counterinsurgency.
FALL2020
sion of antiBlackness, it turns out, did not
occasion an ethical reflection on the fact that
the institution had spent millions of dollars on
riot-gear-adorned police to delegitimize and
attack protesters-many of them studen work­
ers of color-at the picket line of a wildcat
strike. From the administration's perspective,
the general condemnation stood on its own as
a sufficient gesture.
My claim comes into clearer relief when
we connect ross's op-ed to a larger school of
thinking from which she borrows the laIJ.­
guage of "antiBlackness," and the work from
that school she cites when speaking of the
"gratuitous and unrelenting" character of
antiBlack violence. The school of thought goes
by. the name of Afropessimism, elaborated in
a book by the same name, released this year
by Frank B. Wilderson, III, a professor of
African American Studies and Drama at the
University of Califrnia,
o
Irvine.
Afropessimism synthesizes and extends the
analysis from Wilderson's two previous books,
his 2008 memoir, 1ncognegro, and Red,·White;
and Black (2010), a book of political theory
presented as a contribution to film studies.z.
Readers unfamiliar with Wilderson's name will
have almost certainly been touched by the col­
lateral impact of his writing. Wilderson, born
in 1956, is a baby boomer, but the impact of his
thinking has played an important role in shap­
ing the terms, parameters, and habits shared
by subsequent generations of liberal-left activ­
ists in the US and Western Europe. When I
started reading Afropessimist scholarship just
over a decade ago, antiBlackness was a term
that marked the contours of a very particu­
lar set of academic debates within the field of
Black Studies.
Today that term belongs to the everyday
vocabulary of many who know little of the
context of its inception, which began when
Wilderson was a graduate student at the
University of California, Berkeley.3 Wilderson
credits the official emergence of that
 theory to the latter half of his time at Berkeley.
Afropessimism posits, -first and foremost, that
the structure of the modern world owes.itself to
a durable and unchanging relation: the human
in the modern world is constituted by, depen­
dent on, and committed to antiBlack violence.
.But by the logic of Afropessimism, there is
no need to think that the university was oper­
ating in bad faith here, by publicly condemn­
ing antiBlackness whileI at the same time
perpetuating it through continued invest-
ment in the police. No: my point is simpler:
that the university was acting in step with
the SJ?irit of Afropessimism, at least insofar
as the production of recognition of antiBlack­
ness bad become an end in itself. For the uni­
versity, that is, the practice of Afropessimist
interpretation was complete, insofar as it took
the form of a living and viable alternative to
reckoning seriously with defunding or abol­
ishing the police.
Wilderson's Afropessimism has been
described by several of its reviewers as a hybrid
work of memoir and theory. But I would stop
short of characterizing the autobiographical
content of the book as memoir for the same
112 1 Frank Wil.derson'sA.fropessimiS?72
reason that I would hesitate to use the term to
describe, say, Augustine's Confessions. There
is a division of labor between autobiography
and theory wherein the former selects the raw
material, that, through various extractive pro­
cesses, is shaped into the latter. The autobi­
ography is organized in order to authorize the
theory.
Published on a subsidiary of W.W. Norton
& Company, Afropessimism is a commercial
trade, and not an academic, text. As such, the
way it navigates genre speaks to how the :book
anticipates its market. If what makes it mar­
ketable is its use of autobiography as a narra­
tive and aesthetic relay for reaching consumers
i� audiences who might be less inclined to
purchase and read academic theory, then
autobiography itself becomes part of the
theoretical apparatus. This also makes for
some trickiness: the same promiscuity of
genre that makes Afropessimism a compelling
and textured read makes also for a book that
presents problems to a criti�al reader. Relating
critically to a theoretical text means, among
many other things, paying careful attention
to how it uses evidence. It means assessing
SPECTRE
 the extent to which the evidence proffered is
capable of withstanding the claims that the
evidence js used to ground. But here's the
rub: doing so iIJ. this situation means that tak­
ing the book seriously as a work of theory­
a seriousness that it seems to invite-means
risking, at each turn, looking like a bit of a jerk.
Why? Because it requires relating critically
to the theoretical apparatus in its entirety­
including its autobiographical moments­
in order tQ generate space for thinking differ­
ently. This r,neans that the autobiograJ?hical
details become part of the object of critiq11e.
I will leave it to the reader to ponder what
broader purposes might be served by a genre
of theorization that seems so nicely choreo­
graphed to set a would-be critic up for the
charge of an ad hominem attack.
As a theory, Afropessirnism claims as an
objective fact that the world runs, parasiti­
cally, on the reproduction of antiBlack vio­
lence. One of the features of this arrangement
9elps to explain the durability of this violence
over time. For Afropessimists, antiBla<;k­
ness can't be reduced to White supremacy;
rather, the theory claims, the world's non Black
· oppressed imagine and enact their �i:uggles
for liberation, i..mplicit]y and/or explicitly, on
the freedom not to be Black. What is objec­
.tive, then, is that antiBlackness describes not
simply the character of the structure by which
:Black people are oppressed, but the arrange­
ment of the structure by which nonBlack peo­
ple articulate what it means to be free. 1
Thus emerges a problem for the Afc�­
pessimist with autobiographical intentions:
if the activist tradition of Black' autobiogra­
phy seeks to represent a self that can work1
with others, to change the world, how should
one proceed when the concept of the self has
been theorized as socially dead, as the result
of a world intransigently invested in that
death? Theory becomes the answer here, even
if-or precisely because-it resolves noth­
ing. "Blackness," writes Wilderson� colleague
Jared Sexton, "is theory itself."i<
FALL2020
Indeed, the idea here is that in reckon­
ing with the fact that his Blackness is akin to
slaveness, that slaveness is the experience of
being socially dead-and that in being socially
dead he has become necessary to animate
the. world that excludes him-he now has the
opportunity to see the world for what it truly
is. This is the promise of Afropessimism: that
once you stop trying to not be Black, what
you gain is nothing but the most encompass­
ing vantage point onto the world-the position
of the one excluded c�mstituti.vely from it. The
Afropessimist obtains nothing other than the
view from nowhere.
If diagnosing the intransigence of the wq rld
would prohibit the Afropessimist from penning
autobiography in the Black activist tradition,
it nevertheless offers a substitute for activ­
ist practice in the form of theoretical pr6duc­
tion. In the impossibility of objective change,
the Afropessimist vaunts, and valorizes, sub­
jective transformation. You cannot not be, a
slave1 but there is a self singular to withhold
when you recogn�7t6 just how much the world
needs you to be �me. The impossibility of Black
power becomes, involuntarily and painfully,
the condition of a panoramic Blad< knowl­
edge. What remains in the wake of the death
of the Black autobiographical subject is not the
birth of a new one. Rather, it provides a singu­
lar occasion to view the production of social
and political life from the perspective, of 'thos.e
on whom it lea1)s-in practice as in theory- ,
to prop itself UP', 1·
So, at least, the story goes. If1 as Wildersort
puts it, Afropessimism is "more of a meta­
theory than a theory," the movement between
autqbiography and theory that organizes the
composition of Wilderson'$ Afropessimism
is metanarrative. Rather tha:1,1 a ta1e of social
progress, Afropessimwm offers its reader
a meta.narrative of secular conversion, of
Frank the narrator becoming Wilderson, the
Afropessimist theorist, and what it has meant
for him to have done so. What Wilderson does
not mention, or offer as an occasion for theory,
Frank Wilderson'sAfropessimi1Jm ! 113
 is the fact that his theory is no simple practice
of thought. Ljke critical theory itself, it is rather
an institutional formation that, in order to exist
outside of the temporalities of revolutionary
politics-waxing, waning, surging, suppress­
ing-has found refuge and reproducibility, to a
ljmited but meaningful degree, in universities.
This may appear as a trivial nit to pick,
but it matters: universities are concrete loca­
tf;�s within the world that Afropessimism
cla-ims to theorize from the outside. They are
central sites, that is, in the production of the
view from nowhere. Afropessimism hints at
this centrality b11t does not theorize it, save
as background details to the interpersonal
dramas that the book casually inf lates to
world-hi_storical proportions. 5
.,
The Facts of Life
Indeed, one of the reasons that Wilderson
cannot plot his individual life as a tale of indi­
vidual or social progress has to do with the
ways in which the sociological facts of his life
have been unlike those of the overwhelming
majority of Black Americans. His life fails to
fit in this narrative structure less because of
the fact of antiBlackness, but because of bis
coming of age in a mansion in the Kenwood
neighborhood of Minnesota. Rags to riches,
as well as several other narrative conceits, are
unavailable to Wilderson from the beginning.
That he perceives the condition of
Blackness as unshifting makes sense for
someone for whom academic work is the
family business. With both of his parents
boasting doctorates, Wilderson is a sec­
ond-generation PhD. His father, a profes­
sor, practicing psychologist, and academic
administrator, chaired the committee that
developed the proposal for a Department of
Afro-American Studies at the University of
Mihnesota in 1969. Wilderson the Younger
aided in the development of, and now chairs,
the Department of African American Studies
at the University of California, Irvine.

114 ! Frank WildersonfA.fropessimum SPECTRE

 Wilderson tends either to leave the fact of
his class status unremarked upon or to treat it
as an exemplar of that which prevents him from
an encounter with the truth of his Blackness,
with what he really is. Class, in this way, gets
scaled down into a feature of individual psy­
chology, rather than a structural feature 6£ the
social world. When Brank (a name I will use to
refer to the book's autobiographical voicing, as
I
opposed to Wilderson, the theorist in reflec-
tion), recently suspended from J)artmouth,
fears that a viµdictive white neighbor is poi­
soning him and his partner Stella, he is able to
get priority access to see a medical specialist by
qropping his father's name and position within
the university. Having been initially rebuffed,
Wilderson reports, Frank and Stella "were seen
within the week."
Frank here is not rich-he is driving a cab
part-tjme and on general assistance-but he
nevertheless has a specific class relationship
to healthcare that structures this episode. His
class status enables him to leverage the web
of professional obligations that extend to him
and to Stella. That structure shortens the dis­
tance between them and the kind of life-pre­
serving care to which most others-Biack and
1;1onBljtck-have no easy access. The class­
abridged distance is access, also, to the means
of knowledge production': Frank is able to
obtain expert affirmation that his and Stella's
suspicions appear to be true.
Frank and Stella are not treated with �ind­
ness or respect py Dr. Zhoµ, the Chinese physi­
cian who examines then;i, but her objectify_i9g
approach to him and Stella is important for
the budding Afropessimist. After all, it veri­
fies two theories at once: Dr. Zhou's author­
ity affirms that Frank and Stella's symptoms
appear to have been caused by direct exposure
to radioactive materials. Dr. Zhou's deme<4nor
in delivering this diagnosis, along with her
disbelief that someone would be poisoning
them, provides verification that she does not
inhabit the same world of violence that Black
people do.
, FALL2020
1
Dr. Zhou not only appears to provide cor­
roborative authority on anti'.Blackness; she
seems to offer her.self as one of its symptoms.
But without Wilderson's class status in its
specificity, we never get to see J)r. Zhou. We
never get to see the forces that provide inde­
pendent verification that Frank and Stella are
engaged in something truer than wild specu­
lation. Without the university's organization
of Wilderson's class status, there is no scien­
tific authority to provide the institutional
pressure necessary to crystallize experience as
the stuff of theory.
But if Dr. Zhou thinks that Frank and
Stella are lying, it seems to be because she
assumes that they have been exposed to
n1,djation at work, and are protecting their
employer, whether out of loyalty or fear of
retaliation. This might seem reasonable given
the general precarity of Black workers, their
history of facing disproportionate levels of
radiation in workplaces that handle radioac­
tive materials, and given the large-scale res­
idential segregation of Minneapolis (which
would mal,<e having a vindictive white neigh­
bor less likely). But Stella takes exception
to the doctor's suggestion that she is lying,
and when Frank attempts to deescalate the
encounter, Stella accuses him of turning on
her to manage his father's reputation. "[Stella]
had put her finger on the pulse of a desire to
be special tha� beat inside my heart. In my
unconscious I wanted to latch on to an ele­
ment of Whiteness, or Humanness (since Dr.
Zhou wasn't White), that would set me apart
from other Blacks."
Were Frank a poor or working class Black
person, Dr. Zhou's rationale would make
sense. But the sense that it makes is the prob­
lem. Wilderson would likely be loath to put
it so plainly, but the logic here is clear. It is
because Wilc:;lerson belongs to the profes­
sion,1,l-managerial class that his experience
becomes available to affirm that antiBlack­
ness structures Black life regardless of class.
That it can be deployed to cruel, gratuitous,
Frank Wiuierson's4fropessimism j 115
 and potentially lethal extent by Frank and
Stella's radiation�poisoning white neighbor
Josephine as by the police is for Wilderson's
i • •
purposes a case m pomt.
'.The point? That when you're Black, your
class status doe$ nothing to undo your subjec­
tion to antiBlack violence. In fact, it is Dr. Zhou's
rationale thl).tis the problem-she assumes that
there has to be a reason beyond your Blackness
t!tat explains the violence directed at you. It
must be yotii; precarious location in the work­
place; it must be the ultimately impersonal
intersection of class and race.

Centrifugal Force
Wilderson's class status is for this reason
essential to the Afropessimist argument. It
allows nim to perceive the course of his own
life as''a test case of sorts, where his -distance
from the socioeconomic conditions that struc­
ture life for the great majority of other Black
folks allows variables other than Blackness
to be ·controlled for. For that reason, in fact,
one might argue that he perceives himself as
more representative of the objective truth of
Blackness than the Black poor and working
class, precisely because his relative economic
privilege v,is-a-vis other Black folks allows vio­
lence to be visible without the distractions
of structural socioeconomic disadvantage.
These disadvantages are conceived as distrac­
tions because, insofar a� they describe forces
that Oppress Black and nonBlack people alike,
they make it more difficult to perceive what
Wilderson believes to be singularly true-that
antiBlackness describes a historical formation
that distinguishes Black people from all oth­
ers. A,nd because of that, Wilderson's unspo­
ken gambit is that his class status operatef
as does a centrifuge: using a class-privileged
Black subject as a test case allows us to sepa­
rate out with certa�rtty what antiBlackness is
and is not.
So, while Frank's class status offered a por­
tal through which he could access objec;tive
j

116 '\ Frank WildersorfsA.fropessimi.sm SPECTRE

 verification of violence that poor and work­
ing class Black folks could not, that matter
is forgotten here. Instead, his class position
is treated as a simple and transparent psy­
chic symptom of disavowal. Class appears as
the subjective expression of his self-negating
desire to distinguish the self from other Black
people.
Your father's position or 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 unflinch­
ingly at the abyss as it stares unflinch­
ingly at you, or take it out on the Black
person near you who won't leave you to
your fantasy of being truly alive.6
Wilderson rarely suggests that Black folks
possess any agency, but the class-privileged
Black subject is endowed with an agency of a
certain kind in the ultimatum: either accept
that class difference makes no difference to
the violence that makes you Black, or else per­
petuate antiBlack violence yourself.
I'm focusing on this scene at some, length
here, I know. My reason for doing so is that
it helps to reveal what's at stake in the orga­
nization of the book itself. The movement of
concrete to abstract, and of autobiography to
theory, is organized so as to disappear any
class-related specificity from the book's over­
all understanding of Blackness, even as that
class-related specificity organizes the enti��
itinerary of the book. When Wilderson gets
suspended from college for activism, he does
not appear concerned, as first generation stu­
dents might, that he has torpedoed his and
his family's best chance at upward mobility.
When he is driving a cab and dodging the FBI,
it is on the cusp of a return to Dartmouth.
When working as a stockbroker wrecks his
health. he works at an art center for a while
before he is off to do a Masters at Columbia.
After a long political adventure with the ANO
FALL2020
in South Africa gets him branded a threat to
national security, he begins a trek that lands
him at Berkeley for a Ph.D. What manifests
as an itinerary of individualized accumula­
tion of institutional and political distinction
is offered to readers of Afropessimism as the
itinerary of a slave. Not someone wrestling
with the stubborn force of the material and
discursive legacy of slavery and its disavowal
by the modern world. A slave.
The Scale of the Self
Afropessimism trains its reader in the leaps
and bounds of faith necessary for this notion
to be entertained. Though Wilderson sheds
considerable ink critiquing nonBlacks for
analogizing their condition to Black folks,
his own understanding of his Blackness gets
established through analogy, too. Early on in
the book, a young Frank is with his grand­
mother. They are watching the rebellions in
the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr. Their conversation reads as if a dress
rehearsal for Afropessimist philosophy.
When, prompted by the billowing smoke
and the scenes of looting, young Frank asks
Grandmother Jules, "Why are we mad?" The
reader is not prompted to question the integ­
rity of the "we" that extends from the mansion
in Kenwood-the well-heeled Minneapolis
neighborhood that the Wildcrsons are inte­
grating-to the unspecified Black postindus­
trial ghetto that "could have been anywhere
and everywhere."1 Kenwood is nowhere on
that map, but it's a nowhere that extends, by
way of a gaze accompanying the presump­
tion of shared affect, to a Black anywhere and
everywhere.
The presumption of shared feeling does the
work of analogy without calling attention to
it. When young Frank's grandmother shouts
"Go ahead, son!" at a man depicted on televi­
sion as a looter, it doesn't strike the budding
Afropessimist as theoretically significant that
the looter can neither hear nor speak back.
Frank Wuderson's4.fropessimi1,m ! 117
 The gap between Frank and Grandmother
Jules on one side, and the looter on the other,
gets bridged through affective projection, not
a solidaristic expression among equals.
For Wilderson, the defining features of
the violence f�mndational to modern slav­
ery (and therefore antiBlackness) are its gra­
tuitousness, its freedom from having to serve
any rational purpose, and, above all, its per­
sonal nature. (I'll elaborate on this final point
below.) Such a theory of violence roakes for
a situatfon where a reader who is left skel;)ti­
cal about the conclusions Wilderson draws
as a narrator or theorist is encouraged to see
herself as sort of like Dr. Zhou-as someone
unwilling or unable to face that nonsensical
violence is precisely what makes Blackness.
To insist that antiBlack violence make
sense would be to impose onto it an ahistor­
ica1 rationality. It would force antiBlack vio­
lence to be recognizable within the norms of
violence that nonBlacks face. So, while there
are moments when I questioned whether there
might have been other plausible interpreta­
tions of many of the book's pivotal scenes, part
of the thrust, it would seem, is to challenge its
reader to suspend disbelief. Gratuitous vio­
lence doesn't make sense. That's the point.
lt's a hell of a rhetorical mechanism, and
one of the reasons why I advocate for reading
Afropessimism with a certain degree of care.
Any theoretical formation with a self-defense
mechanism that refashions those that dis­
agree with it into a symptom of the problem
it is diagnosing has most likely crossed the
line from theory into theology. Like Marxists
who ref lexively label any criticism as petty
bourgeois, or Lacanians anxious to read any
pushback as the outcome of unconscious
repression, there is no way to test it except on
the terms that it has itself provided.
At times it seems like Wilderson's rea9ing
of the slave relation as a personal one turns
the self into an upscaling mechanism. If sec�
ond wave feminists insisted that the personal
was political, Wilde.rson's interpretive practice
118 I Frank Wilderson'sA.fropes.�imism
suggests that the personal is always already
peculiar-institutional. rt provides a means of
refashioning one-on-one dynamics and inter­
actions such that they become immediately
available for generalization.
Wi1derson's descriptions of the concrete
seem ove.rwhelmed by an apparent demand to
represent l;)iople, in the first instance,, on the
model of archetypeS'. It is not simply that non­
tfack people are always invested in the posi­
tion of the master in some hazy or general way.
Wilderson's narrations indicate that nonBlack
people are invested in the personal character
of that relatimis�ip in such a way that makes
him their slave, in particular.
The Disappearing State
This ari'alytic practice of turning social ,rela­
tions hetween Black and nonBlack persons1
formal and informal, into one organized in the
first instance by the slave-master dualism has
sedous implications for Wilderson's ability to
assess complex relationships. In the' art cen­
ter, his co-worker Sameer, an immigrant from
Palestine who seems to share with Frank an
interest in revolutionary internationalist poli­
tics, is grieving. Sameer has just received news
of the death of his cousin who, in a tragic acci­
dent, was trying to craft a QOJllb in Ramallah.
As Sameer is relating his grief, he shares sto­
ries with Frank about life under settler occu­
pation. Yet the account hinges on Sameer's
comment that, for the Palestinian under occu­
pation confronted with Israeli ti,-oops, "shame
and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli
soldier is an Ethiopian Jew." 1
Wilderson is quick to dispense those ques­
tions of the complex and contradictory imbri­
cations of racialization, religion, and nation.
He instead makes Sameer's expression of
grief into one not only about Blackness, but
1
about a Blackness that Wilderson, in �pite of
his geopolitical location, h1ts an obvious and
transparent claim to �mroediate understand-·,
ing. That Sa,meer and Frank stand in for the
SPEOTR�
 possibility-now, more specifically, the impos­
sjbility-of Palestinian-Black solidarity sim­
ply goes without saying.
Details of actual coalition building needn't
be fussed with . These proportions, and the
idea that they can be generalized, must be
treated as obvious or unspoken in order to
offer the encounter its dramatic framing.
With Sameer's words, Wilderson explains,
"The earth gave way. The thought that my
place in the unconscious of Palestinians fight­
ing for their freedom was the same dishonor­
able place I occupied in the minds of Whites
in America and ls:rael chilled me."8
The assumed personality of the slave rela­
tion offers a hair-trigger impulse to abstrac­
tion and analogy. With stunning quickness,
it turns a state soldier into a slave and a suf­
fering comrade into a theoretical occasion. As
selves scale across space and time, they scale
up in proportion: Sameer, in his grief, appears
to offer unyielding access to a Palestinian col­
lective unconscious that is already fi�ated on
putting the slave in his place.
As it scales, the -{\.fropessimist practice
of abstraction has to erase, or ignore;' a lot of
complicating details. The reader is not invited
to consider the possibility that Sameer might
ha,e meant something quite different, that it
might not make sense to analogize the racial
organization in a different- geopolitical con­
text, or the significance of the fact that a
Blac1-- person might participate in the consol­
idation of state power as anything other than
m unwilling instrument. The Ethiopian �1-­
dier"s gua for instance, is eJ,1'.plained away i1,1 a
depend:ent clause.
But those who have embraced Afro­
pes, "mb.n will likely not be swayed by any­
� I have said above. In the final instance,
the A:fropessimist imaginary is fueled by a
c:o=...,dence toward which it gestures but rarely
s:ces explicitly. The idea is that the virtue of
_!\:fropessimism consists in the fact that it does
sornetbi:Jg important for Black people, that it
a.Dmrs Black people to speak deeply repressed
FALL201C
truths about the social wor ld, truths
make their nonBlack enemies and allies feel
1;>rofoundly unsafe.
My first response to this repressive hypo­
thesis would of course be, "which Black peo­
ple?" The $econd would be about the n�ture
of the relationship between speech and action
envisioned here. While many who embrace
Afropessimist ideas imagine that doing so will
animate a radical politics that can live beyond
a kind of collective,wo' r ld-historical recogni­
tion of antiBlackness, that is not a confidence
sha;red by its principal theorist. He is consis�
tently vague: "[Afropessimism] makes us wor­
thy of our suffering." Or "Aftopessimism is
Black people at their best .•. [It] gives us the
freedom to say out loud what we wou1d other­
wise whisper or deny; that no Blacks are in
the world, but, by the same token, there is nQ
world without Blacks."9
Or, the virtue of the theory exists in the
pleasure of scaling itself,. Speaking of the relief
of being in an all-Black group at a multiracial
conference, Wilderson writes,
I was able to see and feel how com­
forting it was for a room full of Black
people to move between the spectacle
of police violence, to the banality of
microaggressions at work and in the
classroom, to the experiences of chat­
tel slavery as if the time and intensity
of all three were the same.10
Extending the feel-good experience of this
proto-Mropessimist scene of affirmation, for
Wilderson, is the fact that no one asks any
questions, inserts any uncertainty, or demands
any specificity when g.roup members talk about
the contemporariness of chattel �lavery. "Folks
cried and laughed and hugged each other and
called out loud for the end of the world. No one
poured cold water on this by asking, What does
that mean-the end of the world?"11
But when the all-Black group's breakout ses­
sion ends, they are at an impasse, because they
Frank Wilderson'sAfropessimism i 119
'
 are supposed to talk with their nonBlack "allies"
about what happened. Eventually one member
of the grou)? suggests what will become their
ultimate course of action: �We would go back in
·and refuse to speak with them. Not a protest,
just a .silent acknowledgement of the fact that
we would not corrupt what we experienced with
their demand for articulation between their
grammar of suffering and ours."12
Wilderson offers little insight into the pro­
cess that led to this decision, partly because the
point of the scene is to teach us to read silence
in the Afropessimist register. Just as young
Frank viewed Grandmother Jules laughing and
yelling at the television, the reader is led, by
the overwhelming sense of joy ap,d relief in the
scene, to read the absence of disagreement as
the presence of assent. Silence, here, appears to
affirm the criticality of Afropessimism.
Theory-Critique-Theory
In the book's final pages, Frank tells a student
who is visiting his office that "the thing that
prevented most students from getting their
heads around Afropessimism was the fact that
it described a Structural problem but offered
no structural solution to that problem."i;J My
read is different. It is not that ,i\fJ;opessimism
offers no solution so n1uch as it substitutes
itselffor one. It offers knowledge itself as the
end, as a good t)lat r�jcles in the place that
other theories would put the exhortation to
practice-and in practice, to test the theory.
This is somethh:ig different than saying
that, wheh it comes to' Afropessimism's politi­
cal imaginary, there's no there there. My point
is that in the end, Afropessimism js a view from
somewhere, and that somewhere is, perhaps all
too obviously, the university. The place where
all roads in Afropessimism ultimately lead,
that place where theorizing is a valued mode
of practice in and of itself, and where it does
not need to be justified on any other terms.
The modern university does not oi;1ly enable
the practice of diagnosing probl�ms with hO
120 l .Frank Wilderson's A.fropessimism
solutions to hand, and to develop critiques
that do not O)?en immediately opto strategies
of redress; it enshrines the right to do so and
valorizes the subject that does. Afropessimism
claims to offer no sanctuary while its prac­
titioner is in fact modeled on the privjleged
subject of Enlightenment humanism, which
sought to liberate knowing from being judged
by the action's it did or did not enable.
f"That same subject valorized the idea that its
will to scientific reasoning was based on objec­
tive reasohing, or what the philosopher Thomas
Nagel called "the view from nowhere," charac­
teristic of the. fetishized position for producing
"objective" knowlea.ge.14 The aspiration toward
objectivity is of course useful., But so too is
attending to the politics of what it takes to pro­
duce and'claim the standpoint of objectivity.
The s"tudent in Frank's office at the end of the
book is'a young Black woman. Afropessimism
is 'a book that relies on Black w6men-from
Grandmother Jules to Stella and others-to
teach Frank the lessons that be synthesizes into
the theory of Afropessimism. They offer him the
parts that he abstracts into a whole. They then
disappear, unless they are Frank's mother-or, in
the case of SaidiyaHartman, they appear in cita­
tions-because this is a book in which the crite­
ria governing the fact and duration of a person's
appearance seems to be the probative value they
provide to the theory'.
This student, though, is being presented with
Afropessimism as a whole, and she is struggling,
to the point of tears. She has realized her white
mother is the master of her father and her, and
that the same is the case of her boyfriend, who
is Asian American. Frank comforts hei;, relaying
stories about the psychotic episode he underwent
in the course of his Afrope$simist conversion.
Frank realizes that it has been "too pain­
ful to discuss social death and Black suffering
in a multiracial classroo;m." He decides that to
take the focus off of "us," he must turh the spot­
light on "them"-nonBlacks-and focus on their
world-making :reliance on antiBlackness. But
the student is protective and concerned. "The
SPECTRE
 non-Black students will complain;' she teUs
Frank, "and the administration will fire you."
We've been told ju:st a few pages before
this that Frank is now a tenured professor.
It would be eMy for hiJJ;l to reassu,re this s�­
dent that he bas institutional protections that
make it exceedingly difficult for him to lose hi$
job, especially resulting from a student com­
plaint. But that would also reveal that there is a
,structural and hierarchical difference between
Frank and this student (as well as between
Frank and the other students in class) that is
irreducible to antiBlackness, and that is where
Wilderson wants us to focus.
Instead, he invites a speculative scenario,
one that overstates his vulnerability. "'Would
admin fire a nonBlack professor if the Black
Student Union complained?' I asked. She shook
her head. 'Then to hell with the administration.
You're risking your sanity to stay with me for two
more weeks. The least l can do is risk my job."'1r>
The certainty that A,fropessimism animates
something solidaristic between Black folks
relies on this sort of quaint story, which comes
across as sweet so long as you don't deal with
the fact that it is, to put it charitably, mislead­
ing. The lie seems gratuitous. Wouldn't it put
the student'� concerns to rest to know that in
shifting the class focus in order to accommo­
date her doesn't meaq that other sttldents in
the future might not experience these ideas,
and this professor, that she clearly values?
But thi,s is the theory in practice, so let us
take seriously what Wilderson is demonstrating
here. Afropessimism theorizes a modern world,
predicated on a structure that produces th�
slave's unceasing suffering. The acknowledge­
ment of this fact el)tails a conversion experience
in which the Black person recognizes herself as
a slave. The painful reckoning this creates in tb,e
Black subject confronting her captivity appears
to find its only reprieve in the acknowledgement
or o:.her Black people and the critique of n6n­
Bbck people in certain contexts.
"Ibe _\.fropessimist finds the theory con­
fi.,:ied in the discowfort ap.d resistance it
FALL2020
appears to produce whe.n its in1agined antag­
onists are forced to confront it. But because,
as the theol,'y acknowledges, that critique­
issued as it is from the position of the slave­
cannot undo the fact of Black suffering,
the theory finds itself affirmed. Theory­
Critique-Theory: it's the circuit th,rough which
Afropessimism renews itself. By design, this
circuit crops out any reflection on the relation
to professional-managerial class formation
that sets it into motion.
But at the t:isk of inflating a minor detail­
it takes up three pages in a book of 339-1 want
to close by returning to tbe office-hour accord
between Frank and the student. There is a
whole nonverbal grammar that Wilderson sees
fit to describe in his e�change with the stu­
dent. Sobs open onto laughs, laughs become
grins, and the exchange shifts through differ­
ent registers of intimacy that seem unbounded
from the nqrms of the stude11t-teacher relation.
Frank is confessional, warm, self-effacing, and
jokey. There's a "we" in this office. lts sense of
"we" comes from the projection of a resistant
and dangerous "they" elsewhere-in the stu­
dent's family as in the classroom.
But when the student acts in a comradely
way toward the professor, extending solidarity
in the form of concern about his econon1ic well­
being, Frank makes a decision that he does not
explicitly narrate as one. He can tell the student
what he's already told his reader-that his job
is protected by tenure. Or he can lie, by omis­
sion and by misdirect�on, which will preserve
the sense that theh:s is a soHdarity among slaves.
The problem with telling the truth here is that
�here is no easy way to reconcile it with the sol­
idarity that be is buil4ihg With the student. Not
only would it complicate the sense of certainty
that he is planning to direct at the nonl31ack stu­
dents-based on the presumption that they are
his masters-but it would reveal that between
the ,5tudent and Prank, there js a hierarchy that
the book has offe,red no way of analyzing.
The student "understood critical the­
ory at levels exemplary of the most advanced
Frank Wflderson'sAjropeBsim'i.sm j 121
 graduate student, and she was still a senior in
college."16 The student, presented as a budding
Afropessimist who, in her suffering, occasions
a change in his approach to teaching, also
represents the institutional reproduction of
Afropessimism. Compliments notwithstand­
ing, Frank seems more interested in keep­
ing her around than taking her seriously as a
thinker, or as a potential comrade. He doesn't
seem to feel an obligation to inform her that
the structural mechanism that enables him to
critique oonBlacks in a way that makes them
uncomfortable is the same one that has also
protected men like him from the consequences
of harming women like her. He relates to her as
if he:r consent is valued-"So I made her a deal,"
he says-even as he misinforms her.
There is no need to scale up here, at least
not synecdochally, as is Wilderson's ten­
dency- throughout the book. I am not dain1-
ing that this scene represents some ineffable
essence of what Afropessimism real(y is. My
point is that it contains one example among
several that illustrates what needs to disap­
pear, to be forgotten, assumed, overlooked, or
silenced, in order for its sense of Black solidar­
ity to appear. It's a scene where an analogy­
that the student's relation to Blackness is the
same as Frank's-is molded into concretion as
critique and intimacy. It is on this manner of
concretion that the Afropessimist abstract is
predicated. It is a fashioning of the "we.''
That "we," read for its disappearing acts, eli­
sions, and silences, helps us to speculate around
why it seems so difficult for kihana miraya ross
to connect the Afropessimist intervention she
makes into any concrete demands of the cur­
rent moment. The Afropessimist disavowal of
the impact of class in the production of racism
means that it has to ignore or de-emphasize
the way.s that the structural interplay between
race and class shapes the overall geographies
of policing. George Floyd did not grow up in
the same section of Minneapolis that Frank
Wilderson did, and that fact makes neither of
,.
....
them less Black.
The Afropessimist injunction would be to
scale up. Doing so would generalize the func­
tion of policing such that it effectively turns all
nonBlack people into police and refashion the
distinction as one tliat obtains �ehveen all of
them and all of us." Us against the world. Doing
so might make for stunning and compelling
critiqu� of the kind we find in Ajropessimism,
which, gorgeously written as it is, makes it an
enjoyable text with which to disagree. But the
flattening-out effect that comes from the theo­
rization of a generalized antiBlack everywhere
also shows us the real limits of the view from
nowhere. Implicitly, the call to abolish polic­
ing acknowledges that if it is to be effective, it
must be radical, self-critical, solidaristic, and
accountable. To do so, Black politics has to
start somewhere. X
Nick Mitchell writes and teaches about gender,
race, capital, and knowledge. Mitchell is paid to
do so as tenured faculty in the Feminist Studies
Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic
Studies Program at the University of California,
Santa Cruz.

l
kihana miraya r0."1, "Call It What It Is:
Anti-RJaclmess; New York Time.t, June 4,
2020.
2 Frank B. Wilderson, TU, lnoogneg,YJ: A
.Memoir ofE:rile andApatiheid (Boston:
South End Press, 2008); Frank B.
Wilderson, 111, Red, White, and Bl,ack:
CinemaandtheStrtlctureoJUS.
A11tagoni8'111.,(Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010).
3 l-'rank B. Wilderson, III, "Gramsci's Black
Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?"
Soctalldcntitia 9, no. 2 (2003): 225-4-0;
Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank .B. 8 Tbid., 11-12.
Wilderson, tl1. "The Position of the
Qnthought." Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2-003):
18:l-201.
4 Jared Sexton, "Ante-Anti-Blackness:
Afterthoughts; Laural 1 (2012).
5 Somewhat richer analytic accounts of the
unh·ersity, l should note, can be found in
Wilderson's previous memoir, I11.c,:,gn.egro.
6 Frank 13. Wilderson III,Afrope.:wi,num.
(New York: Liveright, 2020), 100.
7 Wilderson,,1fi'l)pt,1,1i,n.i,m, 39.

122 I Frank Wilderson'sAfropessimism SPECTRE