Afropessimism isn’t a church to pray at, or a party to be voted in and out of office. Afropessimism is Black people at their best. ‘Mad at the world’ is Black folks at their best. Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks. The violence perpetrated against us is not a form of discrimination; it is a necessary violence; a health tonic for everyone who is not Black; an ensemble of sadistic rituals and captivity that could only happen to people who are not Black if they broke this or that ‘law.’ This kind of violence can happen to a sentient being in one of two circumstances: a person has broken the law, which is to say, cracked out of turn given the rules that govern; or the person is a slave, which is to say, no prerequisites are required for an act of brutality to be incurred. There is no antagonism like the antagonism between Black people and the world. This antagonism is the essence of what Orlando Patterson calls ‘social death,’ or ‘deathliness’ in the words of David Marriott. It is the knowledge and experience of day-to-day events in which the world tells you you are needed, needed as the destination for its aggressivity and renewal. The antagonism between the postcolonial subject and the settler (the Sand Creek massacre, or the Palestinian Nakba) cannot—and should not—be analogized with the violence of social death: that is the violence of slavery, which did not end in 1865 for the simple reason that slavery did not end in 1865. Slavery is a relational dynamic—not an event and certainly not a place in space like the South; just as colonialism is a relational dynamic—and that relational dynamic can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power. And these two relations are secured by radically different structures of violence. Afropessimism offers an analytic lens that labors as a corrective to Humanist assumptive logics. It provides a theoretical apparatus that allows Black people to not have to be burdened by the ruse of analogy— because analogy mystifies, rather than clarifies, Black suffering. Analogy mystifies Black peoples’ relationship to other people of color. Afropessimism labors to throw this mystification into relief—without fear of the faults and fissures that are revealed in the process.
Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism, pg. 40-41
