A review by dillarhonda
Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III

If someone came up to you and insisted that Black people were not human, you’d have a visceral negative reaction (at least I dearly hope you would). And that’s exactly what makes Frank Wilderson III’s Afropessimism such a painfully necessary read. The theory of Afropessimism posits that Black people are sentient but non-Human beings continually othered by Human (non-Black) peoples and that this subjugation and suffering is necessary for the continuation of humanity itself. Go read that last sentence again. If you’re a white person and you’ve recently been spending some time examining things like privilege/bias/structural racism, Wilderson’s book will shake those principles to their core. Interweaving episodes from his life with more theoretical passages, he gathers evidence to support his allegation that all Blacks are always already enslaved and that all Whites are their masters – yes even your neighbor, yes even your friend, yes even your partner. We are, all of us, implicated and we are, all of us, responsible.