My blog 2.0

“Afropessimist theory is not simply at odds with, but in fact hostile to identity and privilege politics, both Black and non-Black. Having extracted the afropessimist position from the politics of symbolic valorization or integration, this article argues that its deeper affinity is with those tendencies of anarchist, communist, and queer thought in which revolutionary practice tends to be understood as the immediate self-abolition of the existing conditions that produce our identities. It concludes with a series of preliminary practical proposals placing what has so far gone by the name “solidarity” on a different footing.”

In the late 1990s Saidiya Hartman, following on the work of cultural theorist Hortense Spillers, added to Patterson’s criteria an ontological dimension: the slave, she argues, is one who finds themselves positioned in their very existence, their being-as-such, as a non-Human – a captured, owned, and traded object for another. The ontological abjection of slave existence is not primarily defined by alienation and exploitation (a suffering due to the perceived loss of one’s humanity) but by accumulation and fungibility: the condition of being owned and traded, of having one’s being reduced to a being-for-the-captor. Far from disappearing with the 13th amendment, or even in the post-Civil Rights period, afropessimists argue that the formal traits of the slave relation were reproduced and kept alive through the perpetuation of a form of social and civil death that continues to materially and symbolically locate the Black body ‘outside Humanity’.

Privilege theory’s emphasis on liberal forms of consciousness-raising activism, often bound up in the largely-symbolic disavowal of accrued social benefits, presents a vision of anti-racist struggle that inadvertently centres the agency of benevolent white people, while tending to treat questions of racism as issuing above all from psychological sources. Too-often subscribing to idealist theories of power, these approaches prioritise practices aimed at increasing cultural hegemony or positive symbolic representation of marginal groups, rather than seeing race as reproduced through differential regimes of ballistic and carceral material violence like police and prisons and strategising on this basis. Where they do acknowledge the central role of material violence and the consequent inevitability of anti-State revolt, they are often lead into embarrassing efforts to ‘shelter’ homogeneously-understood ‘communities of colour’ from State violence, erasing the ongoing histories of Black autonomous revolt and replacing it with a vision of struggle that looks more like a voluntary disavowal of privilege by White leftists and ‘people-of-colour-allies’. Finally, in addition to its being burdened by either unstrategic and/or simply liberal ‘nonviolent’ leftist tendencies, privilege theory also grossly underestimates the depth and scale of racism in the US.”