#afro-blue

The 'expanding field' of 'Afro-pessimism' (2.0) further expands anti-Black, anti-African conceptions of historical agency. There is nothing outside of, or before, or countering Wilderson’s 'slavery' for the African enslaved. There is only Wilderson’s 'Blackness,' which is curious. For what he casts as “Black” rather than 'black' is more accurately cast as 'negro' (in this specifically English usage, moreover, with no memory of the Spanish or Portuguese etymology) and not even “Negro,” quiet as it’s kept—since all of Africa is flatly foreclosed by this acutely paradoxical 'Afro-pessimism.' Both Africa and diasporas eclipsed, his 'Blackness' and 'Human Life' turn out to be the blackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism despite the past and present hegemony of white Western humanism and its 'anti-Black racism' worldwide.