589The insulation is institutional---drones, the volunteer force, debt-financed war.
Krebs 24 — Ronald R. Krebs and Robert Ralston. September 27. Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and political scientist at the University of Minnesota. Political scientist at the University of Birmingham. Constitutional Political Economy, “The national security state and the uses of militarism,” https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-024-09448-x Clopus
Militarism is only one of several factors that have, in recent decades, insulated democratic decision-makers from the political costs of using force and thereby loosened the constraints on force. By employing drones and other off-shore means of bombardment, rather than soldiers, democratic leaders have shifted the costs of force onto the adversary and civilians. By investing heavily in capital-intensive forces, they have replaced men with machines. By abandoning conscription in favor of a volunteer, professional force, they have ensured that the costs of military operations are concentrated in sub-populations. By paying for wars by floating debt, rather than raising taxes, they have made war seem financially painless to present citizens, by displacing the costs of war onto future citizens. They have invested heavily in medical technologies and organizations that have made war seem less bloody, and they have focused on battlefields where they can achieve air superiority and rapid medical transport, further reducing
Based on a binary operation support variable and the variables in Appendix 1, Table 7, Models 1, 3, 5, and 7.
44 fatalities. How much militarism matters compared to these other forces is not clear and requires further research.
590Their premise is a performative contradiction---an antiblack world was attempted, never achieved.
Gordon 18 — Lewis R. Gordon. Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro pessimism,” vol. 17, no. 1, p. 105-137, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0165-4 Clopus cut from the author’s own reprint of his contribution to the forum
I begin with this tale of philosophical abstraction to contextualize Afropessimism. Its main exemplars, such as Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III, emerged from academic literary theory, an area dominated by poststructuralism even in many cases that avow “Marxism.” Sexton (2010) and Wilderson (2007) divert from a reductive poststructuralism, however, through examining important existential moves inaugurated, as Daniel McNeil (2011, 2012) observed, by Fanon and his intellectual heirs. The critical question that Afropessimism addresses in this fusion is the viability of posed strategies of Black liberation. (I’m using the capital “B” here to point not only to the racial designation “black” but also to the nationalist one “Black.” Afropessimists often mean both, since blacks and Blacks have a central and centered role in their thought.) The world that produced blacks and in consequence Blacks is, for Afropessimists, a crushing, historical one whose Manichaean divide is sustained contraries best kept segregated. Worse, any effort of mediation leads to confirmed black subordination. Overcoming this requires purging the world of antiblackness. Where cleansing the world is unachievable, an alternative is to disarm the force of antiblack racism. Where whites lack power over blacks, they lose relevance – at least politically and at levels of cultural and racial capital or hegemony. Wilderson (2008), for instance, explores my concept of “an antiblack world” to build similar arguments. Sexton (2011) makes similar moves in his discussions of “social death.” As this forum doesn’t afford space for a long critique, I’ll offer several, non-exhaustive criticisms.
The first is that “an antiblack world” is not identical with “the world is antiblack.” My argument is that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It is not the historical achievement. Its limitations emerge from a basic fact: Black people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and many others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument about social death. Such an achievement would have rendered even these reflections stillborn. The basic premises of the Afropessimistic argument are, then, locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums (such as this one) devoted to it.
In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under the guise of love, though I was writing about whites who exoticize blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black value. Analyzed in terms of bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee displeasing truths for pleasing falsehoods, exoticists romanticize blacks while affirming white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic, performative contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be human.
Antiblack racism offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in a “zone of nonbeing” below them. There is asymmetry where whites stand as others who look downward to those who are not their others or their analogues. Antiblack racism is thus not a problem of blacks being “others.” It’s a problem of their not-being-analogical-selves-and-not-even being-others. Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), reminds us that Blacks among each other live in a world of selves and others. It is in attempted relations with whites that these problems occur. Reason in such contexts has a bad habit of walking out when Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As reason cannot be forced, because that would be “violence,” they must ironically reason reasonably with forms of unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom. Racism is, given these arguments, a project of imposing non-relations as the model of dealing with people designated “black.”
591The equation of Black and Slave collapses in Nigeria---slave descent there is lineage, not race.
Okoth 20 — Kevin Ochieng Okoth. January 16. Writer and researcher on imperialism, anti-colonialism and Black radical thought; author of Red Africa. Salvage, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ Clopus
There are also several surprising omissions in the AP™ account of slavery that point towards its entrenched African-American exceptionalism, most notably that of the slave trade in the Americas more broadly. Although the African-American experience of chattel slavery is overrepresented in the AP™ narrative, only about 4 per cent of all enslaved Africans, out of over 10 million that were taken to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, were carried to North America. Close to five million enslaved Africans were taken to Portuguese America (Brazil) alone between 1501 and 1866, and whose labour became the driving force for the sugar economy in the early 1600s, and gold and diamond mining from about 1690 onwards. While the AP™ continue to structure their analysis of Blackness and slaveness around the official abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, they seem to forget that slavery wasn’t abolished in Brazil until 1888. But in the AP™’s ‘afterlife of slavery’, these histories don’t play any role. The legacy of US chattel slavery consumes all Black experience, both historical and contemporary.
If the AP™ were to pay attention to the peculiarities of Brazilian slavery, it would have to adapt its concept of Blackness to develop an account of how race has structured a social formation with the second largest Black population in the world. In Nigeria, the country with the world’s largest Black population, the ‘afterlife of slavery’ takes on a completely different meaning than in the US. While slavery had existed in Igbo society before colonisation, it accelerated with the increasing demand for slaves on the other side of the Atlantic. When slavery was officially abolished in many parts of the West, Adiele Afigbo writes in The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950 , Igbo slave markets were flooded with ohu and osu slaves, whose descendants to this day retain the stigma of their ancestors – they cannot intermarry with freeborn and are excluded from important community organisations. In a recent New Yorker article Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani argues that:
Igbo discrimination is not based on race, and there are no visual markers to differentiate slave descendants from freeborn. Instead, it trades on cultural beliefs about lineage and spirituality.
Discrimination of slave descendants is thus based on their role as outsiders, since the ohu have never really lost their outsider status in a society where community ties are extremely important. Afigbo’s periodisation also points to another important aspect of slavery in Nigeria: it was only officially abolished by the British in the early 1900s but continued informally for at least another forty to fifty years. What this means is that we cannot understand slavery in Nigeria within the Igbo system with reference to an African-American concept of race, conditioned entirely by the experiences of US chattel slavery. For the descendants of ohu slaves, the afterlife of slavery is not characterised by the condition of the Black/Slave but rather by something quite different. In this case, the equation of the Black/Slave with the African does not hold.
So what can we learn from these different histories of slavery and racialisation? Brazilian academic Denise Ferreira da Silva draws the following conclusion in ‘Facts of Blackness’, her comparative study of race in the US and Brazil,
I was convinced that our shared blackness has been traversed by the particular effects of specific nation, gender and class conditions. Slavery and colonialism composed the historical ground upon which race, gender and nationess have written the various versions of black subjectivity […] That instrinsically multiple quality of black subjectivity demands attention to the specific historical and discursive developments informing a society’s strategies of racial subordination.
In her more recent book Toward a Global Idea of Race , Silva further contends that we cannot comprehend the ‘present global configuration’ unless we ‘unpack how the racial, the cultural and the nation institute the modern subject’ and analyse the context in which the modern subject emerged and was produced. For Silva, racial difference is not an ideological or cultural construction but rather a real category and is responsible for structuring the contemporary global configuration. And precisely because race supplies the discursive basis for the subordination of non-white people, even specific studies of Blackness must be placed in the global historical context in which racialised subjects emerged. In this way, we can avoid US-centric ontological (supposedly universal) conceptions of Blackness while simultaneously emphasising the histories of interconnection between Black populations across the world. In short, the object of analysis is not the afterlife of slavery but the multiplicity of afterlives of slavery and colonisation; the aim is to study how these exist within a global system structured by imperialism.
592Pessimism is inverted optimism---both refuse responsibility, and only commitment is politics.
Gordon 18 — Lewis R. Gordon. Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro pessimism,” vol. 17, no. 1, p. 105-137, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0165-4 Clopus cut from the author’s own reprint of his contribution to the forum
We come, then, to the crux of the matter. If the goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism, its achievement would be attitudinal and, in the language of old, stoic – in short, a symptom of antiblack society. At this point, there are several observations that follow. The first is a diagnosis of the implications of Afropessimism as symptom. The second examines the epistemological implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition counts as a political act and, if so, is it sufficient for its avowed aims. There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply focus on these.
An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough, both are connected to nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche (1968) showed, a decline of values during periods of social decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be responsible for their actions. Optimists expect intervention from beyond. Pessimists declare relief is not forthcoming. Neither takes responsibility for what is valued. The valuing, however, is what leads to the second, epistemic point. The presumption that what is at stake is what can be known to determine what can be done is the problem. If such knowledge were possible, the debate would be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such judgment would be a priori – that is, prior to events actually unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental conditions such as language, signs, and reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the future, the question isn’t what will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a supervening alternative: political commitment.
The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what French existentialists call l’intellectuel engagé (committed intellectual) but also reaches back through the history and existential situation of enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in truth, an existential paradox: commitment to action without guarantees. The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of resistance, escapes, and returns help others do the same; the cultivated instability of plantations and other forms of enslavement, and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces designed to eliminate any hope of success. The claim of colonialists and enslavers was that the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous. A result of more than 500 years of conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in which African and First Nations’ agency was, at least at the level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there was resistance even in that realm, as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest. Such actions set the course for different kinds of struggle today.
Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure. Afropessimism, the existential critique suggests, suffers from a failure to understand failure. Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive failure, where what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new to emerge. To understand this argument, one must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it means to be human. Atomistic and individual substance- based, this model, articulated by Hobbes, Locke, and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts, and moves along a course in which continued movement depends on not colliding with others. Under that model, the human being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement. An alternative model, shared by many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of the human being as part of a larger system of meaning. Actions, from that perspective, are not about whether “I” succeed but instead about “our” story across time. As relational, it means that each human being is a constant negotiation of ongoing efforts to build relationships with others, which means no one actually enters a situation without establishing new situations of action and meaning. Instead of entering a game, their participation requires a different kind of project – especially where the “game” was premised on their exclusion. Thus, where the system or game repels initial participation, such repulsion is a shift in the grammar of how the system functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects. Shifted energy affords emergence of alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that birthed them.
Abstract as this sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study Historic Firsts, examines the new set of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. There could be no Barack Obama without such important predecessors affecting the demographics of voter participation. Simien intentionally focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s “success” emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many others’) so-called “failure.” Beyond presidential electoral politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical so-called “failures” transformed relationships that facilitated other kinds of outcome. The trail goes back to the Haitian Revolution and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the USA, Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curaçao and so many other efforts for social transformation to come.
In existential terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an existential paradox. All the evidence around them suggested failure and the futility of hope. They first had to make a movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their situation. Yet they must simultaneously act against that situation. Kierkegaard called this seemingly contradictory phenomenon “faith,” but that concept relates more to a relationship with a transcendent, absolute being, which could only be established by a “leap,” as there are no mediations or bridge. Ironically, if Afropessimism appeals to transcendent intervention, it would collapse into faith. If, however, the argument rejects transcendent intervention and focuses on committed political action, of taking responsibility for a future that offers no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes existential political action.
593The alt is an academic product---it requires nothing of anyone and that is why it gets promoted.
Okoth 20 — Kevin Ochieng Okoth. January 16. Writer and researcher on imperialism, anti-colonialism and Black radical thought; author of Red Africa. Salvage, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ Clopus
For both Afro-pessimists and Black Optimists, the afterlife of slavery is characterised by the social death of the Black/Slave and a heavily distorted version of Fanon’s concept of the ‘fact of blackness’. This assumption, however, precludes the participation of Black Ops in radical politics and confines resistance to spaces of Black performance art.
By confining Black resistance to spaces outside of the anti-Black structures of civil society, and by undercutting the possibility for anti-imperialist solidarity between racialised people across the world, the AP™ theories have opened up a space for the corporate capture of Blackness. We need only recall last year’s Nike campaign, prominently featuring the face of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been blackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthem. Since the incident, he has taken on the role of radical Black activist, complete with Panther-esque leather jackets, an afro and Afrocentric jewellery. While Kaepernick’s struggle against the racist and exploitative NFL owners and executives is, of course, legitimate and necessary, the co-optation of his struggle by a large corporation is certainly a cause for concern. Nike is notorious for its use of sweatshop labour (including both forced and child labour), and its history of exploitative labour practices has been well-documented throughout the years. By detaching the struggles of African-Americans from those of racialised workers in the Global South, Nike can present itself as a progressive vehicle for Black emancipatory politics, while completely sidelining the plight of non-white workers outside of the US. Here we might recall a powerful statement by Fred Hampton to illustrate just how far from revolutionary Black politics we find ourselves:
We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism […] We’re going to fight […] with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.
Wilderson and Sexton have been captured by corporate interests in much the same way. In their case, however, it is not a large corporation that co-opts Blackness, but rather the neoliberal university. Is it at all surprising that two professors working within the prestigious University of California system promote a theoretical framework that requires no political action from Black writers and activists other than simply being Black? Not only is AP™ a product of the neoliberal university, it also promotes its authors survival and flourishing within the corporate structures of higher education. When asked about his framework for psychological and physical resistance by the hosts of iMiXWHATiLiKE , Wilderson neatly dodges any commitment to radical politics with the excuse that it could cost him his academic job.
This is so much a part of what it means to be a professor. I feel like cussing people out all the time. But if I do, I violate University of California’s civility laws, tenure or not I’m out the door, right? And that tempers my speech. So, I think that what I have to offer is not a way out. What I have to offer is an analysis of the problem. And I don’t trust me as much as I trust Black people on the ground.
Wilderson is aware that the AP™ rely on their activist supporters and social media following to maintain their privileged position within the university – without the activists and organisers on the ground, the AP™ could not prove the market value of its work to the neoliberal institution. By creating a framework for the analysis of race that lends itself to co-optation by corporate interests, the AP™ has certainly demonstrated that it can convert Blackness into profit. All the while, these theorists delude themselves that they are spearheading a truly radical Black movement. In the introduction to a collection of essays on AP™, the editors (who presumably include Sexton and Wilderson) even have the audacity to claim that they are ‘motivated by a desire to contribute to […] bringing these writings out of the ivory towers of the academy’ and that they wish to ‘remove the materials from this sitting place and see them proliferate among those in the streets and prisons’. True, they have succeeded in disseminating a watered-down version of their musings to activists and organisers; but what they have passed on is nothing short of anti-Black, in the sense that it works against the true liberation of Black people of all classes.
Today, such Blackness (and the pseudo-politics that is attached to it) is more useful for academic promotions, Instagram hashtags, and Nike adverts than for any revolutionary or emancipatory politics worthy of the name. The people who truly benefit – or rather profit – from the AP™ brand are the academics and the various university presses and journals who jump at every opportunity to unleash a plethora of AP™ books and articles onto the academic book market. While the AP™ may seem like a niche theoretical discourse, its influence extends far beyond the university: as Olaloku-Teriba argues, the AP™’s theoretical framework provides ‘the structuring logic of various political formations in the era of #BlackLivesMatter’. What is at stake in the debate, therefore, is nothing less than the possibility of a revolutionary Black politics. Maybe African-Americans on the streets or in prison would do well to reach for George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and steer clear of the AP™ and Black Ops.
III. The Afterlives of Slavery
The retreat of the AP™ and Black Ops from politics poses a problem for activists and scholars looking to engage in struggles that take seriously the political economy of race and the need for cross-racial solidarity. But how have these key themes of radical Black movements from the 1960s and 70s – from the Black Panthers to African anti-colonial struggles – disappeared in the AP™’s theories? The erasure of radical Black and anti-colonial struggles rests almost entirely on misreading – or in some cases not reading – Marxist contributions to the study of race, colonialism and slavery. And this unfounded dismissal of the entire Marxist tradition allows the AP™ to kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, it can position itself as a radical critique of Eurocentric left discourses. On the other hand, it allows the AP™ to disregard a vast body of Marxist scholarship that has ‘raced’ the history of capitalism and developed a nuanced analysis of the relationship between New World Slavery and capitalist accumulation on a global scale. Thus, the AP™ can ignore the specificities of how different Black populations are racialised and displace the study of political economy (and particularly of imperialism) in favour of ontological questions.
594...or it bars political action---but anti-politics is the thing the antiblack society needs from you.
Gordon 18 — Lewis R. Gordon. Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro pessimism,” vol. 17, no. 1, p. 105-137, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0165-4 Clopus cut from the author’s own reprint of his contribution to the forum
The discussion points, however, to a demand for political commitment. Politics itself emerges under different names throughout the history of our species, but the one occasioning the word “politics” is from the Greek pólis, which refers to ancient Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted inside the city-state, where order necessitated the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation of which could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of relations appropriate for “outsiders.” Returning to the Fanonian observation of selves and others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups amounts to impeding or blocking the option of politics. Yet, as a problem occurring within the polity, the problem short of war becomes a political one.
Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the question becomes this: If the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political, where antiblack institutions of power have, as their project, the impeding of Black power, which in effect requires barring Black access to political institutions, then antiblack societies are ultimately threats also to politics defined as the human negotiation of the expansion of human capabilities or more to the point: freedom.
Anti-politics is one of the reasons why societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also those in which racial moralizing dominates: moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of addressing institutions the transformation of which would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political problem, it demands a political solution. It is not accidental that Blacks continue to be the continued exemplars of unrealized freedom. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Davis (2003) and Michelle Alexander (2010) have shown, the expansion of privatization and incarceration is squarely placed in a structure of states and civil societies premised on the limitations of freedom (Blacks) – ironically, as seen in countries such as South Africa and the United States, in the name of freedom.
595Cabral is the perm---the battle of ideas and the fight for material conditions are one struggle.
Okoth 20 — Kevin Ochieng Okoth. January 16. Writer and researcher on imperialism, anti-colonialism and Black radical thought; author of Red Africa. Salvage, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ Clopus
The appropriation of Fanon by some African-American scholars and activists – who reduce his thought to a hashtag, and make proclamations that Fanon himself would have fundamentally disagreed with – also begs the question of why only Fanon, singled out and isolated from all other anti-colonial thought, has been granted a cushy place in the Ivory Tower. Why is there still very little scholarship on Black revolutionaries such as Amílcar Cabral, one of the foremost anti-colonial theorists and revolutionaries of the twentieth century?
Academia’s aversion to Cabral stems from its lack of interest in the crucial everyday work of revolutionary struggle and its fetishisation of revolution in the abstract. Cabral insisted that we must not only fight the battle of ideas, but struggle for material benefits and improved conditions of life. The revolution can never be separated from the daily needs of the people. Given the elitist and corporate nature of higher education, particularly in the Anglo-American world, it is thus no surprise that the academy has chosen Fanon (‘the prophet of revolution’) over the tireless anti-colonial strategist Cabral. This is, of course, not to dismiss Fanon’s crucial contributions to the study of psychiatry and anti-colonial movements. It is only to say that the perspective of one anti-colonial intellectual does not suffice; instead of decontextualizing Fanon, we must read him in conjunction with other anti-colonial intellectuals who offer valuable insights into fields – such as revolutionary strategy – that Fanon rarely engaged with.
596Postcolonies break the model---antiblackness isn’t exclusively white, and the theory bars Black agency.
Gordon 18 — Lewis R. Gordon. Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro pessimism,” vol. 17, no. 1, p. 105-137, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0165-4 Clopus cut from the author’s own reprint of his contribution to the forum
An immediate observation of many postcolonies is that antiblack attitudes, practices, and institutions aren’t exclusively white. Black antiblack dispositions make this clear. Black antiblackness entails Black exoticism. Where this exists, Blacks simultaneously receive Black love alongside Black rejection of agency. Many problems follow. The absence of agency bars maturation, which would reinforce the racial logic of Blacks as in effect wards of whites. Without agency, ethics, liberation, maturation, politics, and responsibility could not be possible.
Afropessimism faces the problem of a hidden premise of white agency versus Black incapacity. Proponents of Afropessimism would no doubt respond that the theory itself is a form of agency reminiscent of Fanon’s famous remark that though whites created le Nègre it was les Nègres who created Négritude. Whites clearly did not create Afropessimism, which Black liberationists should celebrate. We should avoid the fallacy, however, of confusing source with outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from good people. If intrinsically good, however, each person of African descent would become ethically and epistemologically a switching of the Manichean contraries, which means only changing players instead of the game.
597It opened the door to corporate capture---detaching Black struggle from Southern workers is the product.
Okoth 20 — Kevin Ochieng Okoth. January 16. Writer and researcher on imperialism, anti-colonialism and Black radical thought; author of Red Africa. Salvage, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ Clopus
By confining Black resistance to spaces outside of the anti-Black structures of civil society, and by undercutting the possibility for anti-imperialist solidarity between racialised people across the world, the AP™ theories have opened up a space for the corporate capture of Blackness. We need only recall last year’s Nike campaign, prominently featuring the face of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been blackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthem. Since the incident, he has taken on the role of radical Black activist, complete with Panther-esque leather jackets, an afro and Afrocentric jewellery. While Kaepernick’s struggle against the racist and exploitative NFL owners and executives is, of course, legitimate and necessary, the co-optation of his struggle by a large corporation is certainly a cause for concern. Nike is notorious for its use of sweatshop labour (including both forced and child labour), and its history of exploitative labour practices has been well-documented throughout the years. By detaching the struggles of African-Americans from those of racialised workers in the Global South, Nike can present itself as a progressive vehicle for Black emancipatory politics, while completely sidelining the plight of non-white workers outside of the US. Here we might recall a powerful statement by Fred Hampton to illustrate just how far from revolutionary Black politics we find ourselves:
We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism […] We’re going to fight […] with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.
598Retreat from politics disarms activists---it displaces imperialism with ontology.
Okoth 20 — Kevin Ochieng Okoth. January 16. Writer and researcher on imperialism, anti-colonialism and Black radical thought; author of Red Africa. Salvage, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ Clopus
The retreat of the AP™ and Black Ops from politics poses a problem for activists and scholars looking to engage in struggles that take seriously the political economy of race and the need for cross-racial solidarity. But how have these key themes of radical Black movements from the 1960s and 70s – from the Black Panthers to African anti-colonial struggles – disappeared in the AP™’s theories? The erasure of radical Black and anti-colonial struggles rests almost entirely on misreading – or in some cases not reading – Marxist contributions to the study of race, colonialism and slavery. And this unfounded dismissal of the entire Marxist tradition allows the AP™ to kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, it can position itself as a radical critique of Eurocentric left discourses. On the other hand, it allows the AP™ to disregard a vast body of Marxist scholarship that has ‘raced’ the history of capitalism and developed a nuanced analysis of the relationship between New World Slavery and capitalist accumulation on a global scale. Thus, the AP™ can ignore the specificities of how different Black populations are racialised and displace the study of political economy (and particularly of imperialism) in favour of ontological questions.
In the interview ‘We’re trying to destroy the world: Anti-Blackness & Police Violence after Ferguson’ Wilderson makes the bizarre claim that ‘slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness’. If this assumption sounds familiar, look no further than the Afro-pessimism of old, with its conflation of Africanness and Blackness and its disregard for the African continent and its inhabitants. But how has an approach that attempts to grapple with the complexities of Black being ended up rehashing the same assumptions and prejudices of Eurocentric discourse designed to dehumanise Black people on the African continent in the first place? The AP™’s theoretical position is riddled with contradictions: how can Blackness be separated from white supremacy, neocolonialism or imperialism and women’s reproductive labour, when these are the mechanisms that structure the quotidien experience of most people racialised as Black on a global scale? Moreover, if the Black/Slave exists in a state of powerlessness and natal alienation – characterised by the loss of ties of birth in ascending and descending generations – how do we theorise the Blackness of those whose ancestors remained in Africa throughout the translatlantic slave trade?
599Turning away is not political---purity collapses into moralism instead of responsibility.
Gordon 18 — Lewis R. Gordon. Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Contemporary Political Theory, “Afro pessimism,” vol. 17, no. 1, p. 105-137, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-017-0165-4 Clopus cut from the author’s own reprint of his contribution to the forum
At this point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An attitude of infinite resignation to the world without the leap of committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying failure of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the goal, then the “act” of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would be a successful failing of failure. For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing elements in inward pessimistic resignation.
The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the expanding options of a social world. Turning away from the social world, though a statement about politics, is not, however, in and of itself political. The ancients from whom much western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals who resigned themselves from political life: idiōtēs, a private person, one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I mention western political theory because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism. We don’t, however, have to end our etymological journey in ancient Greek. Extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we could examine the Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in terms of audio speech. The contemporary inward resignation of seeking a form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of racial oppression, in this reading, collapses ultimately into a form of moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of public responsibility born of and borne by action.
600Fungibility doesn’t divide the slave from the worker---Fanon reads the slave as the limit case of labour.
Olaloku-Teriba 18 — Annie Olaloku-Teriba. Writer and researcher on race, political blackness and anti-racist organising. Historical Materialism, “Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness,” vol. 26, no. 2, p. 96-122, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/afro-pessimism-and-the-unlogic-of-anti-blackness/ Clopus
I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore, he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.[39]
What does Fanon mean when he says that what the master ‘wants from the slave is not recognition but work’? Against Hegel’s ‘absolute reciprocity’, Fanon advances a conception of the negro slave as the alienated epitome of exploitation; which is to say that the master and the slave in Fanon’s account are not produced by a relation of anti-blackness (in the new life that this term has taken on) but by exploitation. This harkens back to Wilderson’s earlier misunderstanding of the base in Marxist theory. Fanon, in contrast to Wilderson, gives ontological priority to the exploitative relation of production between master and slave. This priority is reiterated elsewhere, when Fanon takes aim at attempts to assert a global blackness: ‘“Negroes” are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy.’[40]
Fanon is less concerned with the slave as an opposing pole from which ‘Man’ has built community – he has no such illusions about the material existence of white fraternity.[41] Culture, he argues, is first and foremost national in nature.[42] Instead, Fanon is concerned with how the profits from her labour finance society. We might then think of the position of the slave as the capitalist aspiration for all workers – stripped of all that which renders her recognisable, the worker as ‘a mere mechanism’, but possible only through the mystification of race.[43] In contrast to Wilderson’s assertion that ‘an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering’ exclusively marking the black as outside of ‘[a humanist] discourse that has as its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering’, the master–slave relation which Fanon proposes upsets this binary.[44]
Fanon’s elucidation exposes the slave as contingently black, not ‘paradigmatically black’. What is the difference? The Afro-pessimist sees the world as structured by a non-black solidarity in preventing the ontological possibility of black life. Were ‘black’ meant as a metaphor for the condition of total alienation from self, this might make sense.[45] However, because the Afro-pessimist imaginary ties itself to a morphological account of blackness, this leads us to a theoretical dead end. In this world-view, it therefore becomes necessary to begin by treating ‘race’ as a problem fundamentally rooted in the formation of sociality – in which the Black precedes the historical order and the processes, both violent and mundane, which create her. By contrast, to think through the implications of contingency is to confront the reality that these racial categories – categories that Wilderson and Sexton treat as absolute – are actually unstable as evidence that something else is afoot. It is to see ‘race’ not as an anchor, but as a mystification conjured to weather crises of legitimacy.
For example, we can examine how Sexton links the condition of the Afro-American slave, the free black and the African thus: ‘because blackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture, it permanently destabilises the position of any nominally free black population’.[46] The presumption of a shared (presumably global) legal and political culture within which the assertion that blackness was a basis of enslavement might be made is quite mistaken. Even in the US, the centralisation of the legal and political status of blacks only emerged at the moment of formal abolition following the American Civil War. Prior to this, the internal border system of the US produced divergent rationales and attendant juridical technology for enslavement.
601Silva is the answer---racial subordination is nation-specific, so a US ontology can’t be universal.
Okoth 20 — Kevin Ochieng Okoth. January 16. Writer and researcher on imperialism, anti-colonialism and Black radical thought; author of Red Africa. Salvage, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ Clopus
So what can we learn from these different histories of slavery and racialisation? Brazilian academic Denise Ferreira da Silva draws the following conclusion in ‘Facts of Blackness’, her comparative study of race in the US and Brazil,
I was convinced that our shared blackness has been traversed by the particular effects of specific nation, gender and class conditions. Slavery and colonialism composed the historical ground upon which race, gender and nationess have written the various versions of black subjectivity […] That instrinsically multiple quality of black subjectivity demands attention to the specific historical and discursive developments informing a society’s strategies of racial subordination.
In her more recent book Toward a Global Idea of Race , Silva further contends that we cannot comprehend the ‘present global configuration’ unless we ‘unpack how the racial, the cultural and the nation institute the modern subject’ and analyse the context in which the modern subject emerged and was produced. For Silva, racial difference is not an ideological or cultural construction but rather a real category and is responsible for structuring the contemporary global configuration. And precisely because race supplies the discursive basis for the subordination of non-white people, even specific studies of Blackness must be placed in the global historical context in which racialised subjects emerged. In this way, we can avoid US-centric ontological (supposedly universal) conceptions of Blackness while simultaneously emphasising the histories of interconnection between Black populations across the world. In short, the object of analysis is not the afterlife of slavery but the multiplicity of afterlives of slavery and colonisation; the aim is to study how these exist within a global system structured by imperialism.
602The frame erases everything before the ship---which is where Nigerian history actually is.
Olaloku-Teriba 18 — Annie Olaloku-Teriba. Writer and researcher on race, political blackness and anti-racist organising. Historical Materialism, “Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-Blackness,” vol. 26, no. 2, p. 96-122, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/afro-pessimism-and-the-unlogic-of-anti-blackness/ Clopus
In Badagry, Nigeria – a slave town built by a former slave turned slaver – between the barracoon on the mainland and the Point of No Return beyond a small body of water, where slaves became cargo on ships, lies the ‘spirit attenuation’ well which provided the final source of water for hundreds of thousands of slaves who were destined for the Americas. Following reports of slave rebellions on the earliest ships which killed several European slavers, Yoruba slavers responded by charming the water. Today, local legend still holds that to drink from the well will result in memory loss, a complete dislocation one’s history. It is believed that this powerful charm left slaves ready to be remade as the slaver desired because it took from them the memory of freedom. In many ways, the slave in this carefully-kept local history resembles the remaking of blackness itself in Afro-pessimist literature.
Here, we find blackness unmoored from time and space by a ruthless disregard for material historical processes; when read with Fanon, the ‘psycho-affective’ quagmire from which the colonised intellectual must wrench himself: ‘individuals without anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless, a body of angels’.[10] At the heart of this blackness, which both preceded the transatlantic slave trade and is created by it, there is no memory before the slave ship. Those various socio-political formations on the African continent, documented locally, which both predated and gave life to the transfer of people across the Atlantic Ocean on an industrial scale cannot and do not exist. In other words, to be racialised as black and to be a slave are treated as one and the same.