Scan barcode
A review by shoshin
Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III
I spent a while being confused about the timeline and strange repetitions. I thought my audiobook copy may have had some of its tracks out of order. But then I started paying attention to the section numbers and discovered that, no, it really was that disjointed.
I was seeing so many problems that I decided to see if I was missing something by reading some reviews of the book. I found two very good reviews:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/
These reviewers go into a great deal of depth about the conversation among academics that this book is part of and how strangely the philosophy of Afropessimism fits (or fails to fit) into it. But to me, the flaws in the philosophy are at its base, well outside the academic discussion.
It has been well established by scholars and historians like Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman and Jennifer L. Morgan that the racist ideas that served the institution of enslavement in the United States were developed over the course of roughly the 1500s and 1600s. The story that turned Black people into slaves was a human-made story. It asserted that God had built Black people inferior, to serve white people.
In order to buy into Afropessimism, you have to accept that it is impossible for humans to break down a story and an institution that were built by humans. This seems incredible. We've moved on from a lot of stories that we've told, and we've broken a lot of institutions that we built. It seems implausible that this one story and this one institution would be immune, and this book didn't really make a convincing case that they are.
As Octavia Butler said, "The only lasting truth is change."
I was seeing so many problems that I decided to see if I was missing something by reading some reviews of the book. I found two very good reviews:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/
These reviewers go into a great deal of depth about the conversation among academics that this book is part of and how strangely the philosophy of Afropessimism fits (or fails to fit) into it. But to me, the flaws in the philosophy are at its base, well outside the academic discussion.
It has been well established by scholars and historians like Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman and Jennifer L. Morgan that the racist ideas that served the institution of enslavement in the United States were developed over the course of roughly the 1500s and 1600s. The story that turned Black people into slaves was a human-made story. It asserted that God had built Black people inferior, to serve white people.
In order to buy into Afropessimism, you have to accept that it is impossible for humans to break down a story and an institution that were built by humans. This seems incredible. We've moved on from a lot of stories that we've told, and we've broken a lot of institutions that we built. It seems implausible that this one story and this one institution would be immune, and this book didn't really make a convincing case that they are.
As Octavia Butler said, "The only lasting truth is change."