Orlando Hawkins (University of Oregon), "Afropessimism and the Specter of Black Nihilism"
Forthcoming, Philosophy and Social Criticism
When I was a graduate student at the New School, I remember coming across a copy of Race Matters, written by Cornel West. The first chapter, titled “Nihilism in Black America” focused on the existential turmoil of Black youth and the accompanying rise Black youth suicides during 80’s and early 90’s. Nihilism for West is defined as living a life with a lack of meaning, hope, and love.
Although West did not present statistical data to support the notion that Black youth suicides were on the rise during that period, West’s insights were/are valuable, nonetheless. This is because historically speaking, Black suicides have been and continue to be an understudied topic in both philosophy and science with part of the reason being that Black people were deemed to lack the psychological makeup to ever contemplate suicide in the first place.
While continuing to develop my interest in what I later came to understand as Black existential philosophy, it wasn’t until I came across a report from the Congressional Black Caucus sometime around 2021 called the “Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health” (2019). While this is not the space to detail a full analysis of the report, the primary takeaway is that Black youth suicide (including attempts and ideation) is increasing faster than youth from other racial and ethnic groups.
Around the same time, I came across the Afropessimist philosophy of Frank Wilderson which seemed to become more popular in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the publication of his book Afropessimsm (2020). To state succinctly, Wilderson argues that anti-Black racism is so foundational to the creation and continual existence of the modern world (e.g., since the advent of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonial expansion) that any form of redemption or liberation of Black people from this anti-Black condition is impossible save for the “End of the World” as we know it. This “End of the World” in Wilderson’s own words would result in the creation of new categories of identification, new epistemes, and new ways of being/living in the world.
Although I am not one to dismiss the philosophical importance of Afropessimist philosophy as well as its importance to everyday individuals and activist alike, I get the impression that questions related to Black pessimism, nihilism, and suicide will get filtered solely through an Afropessimist lens. In my view, this is somewhat problematic because I believe there is an element of Wilderson’s Afropessimist philosophy that only enhances the problem of nihilism as I articulate above with Cornel West.
This brings us to my article, titled “Afropessimism and the Specter of Black Nihilism” recently published in the journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism.
In my paper, I argue that Afropessimism’s turn to nihilism (by way of Wilderson’s “End of the World”), though illuminating of the problem of anti-Blackness, must be balanced with a life-affirming philosophy and revolutionary commitment that equips one to avoid resignation, despair, or suicide. For the sake of brevity, I’ll briefly explain one core feature of Wilderson’s Afropessimist philosophy in addition to explaining why I believe there’s a nihilistic turn in his philosophy.
Central to Wilderson’s Afropessimist philosophy is the notion that Black people in the contemporary world are socially dead sentient beings. Now it’s important to note that Wilderson gets the idea of social death from the sociologist Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death (1982). Patterson argues that enslaved people throughout human history shared one core feature—social death. Social death has 3 additional constituent features: (1) repeated and gratuitous violence through the exercise of total power and domination on the enslaved; (2) natal alienation (e.g., being severed from one’s family and cultural history); and (3) general dishonor. For Patterson, contemporary Black people are not socially dead because they have access to civil society. For Wilderson, however, Black people are still socially dead because all the core features of social death are still present in contemporary Black life in addition to fact that Blackness has always been linked with slavery. This reveals that Blackness for the Afropessimst is an ontological condition (e.g., Black people are socially dead) instead of being a form of racial identification. By being socially dead, Wilderson is saying that Black people are not (and can never be) human beings. Part of the reason is that the category of “human” is synonymous with whiteness. Therefore, since Blackness and slaveness are conterminous features of Black life, the only way to alleviate Black people from the condition of social death is the “End of the World”.
As noted above, the “End of the World” would result in new ways of being/living, new identities, etc. This would mean that racial categories like “Black” and “White” would cease to exist. Such a future would have important implications for Black people because it limits the future of Black people to two distinct possibilities: either Black people are condemned to a life of permanent social death or Blackness would cease to exist because the world as we know it will cease to exist.
As I argue in my paper, this is nihilistic for several reasons: (1) there’s a positing of the world-to-come where Black suffering ends; (2) there’s an assumption that new categories and epistemes wouldn’t result in a similar type of oppression for people who were formally Black; (3) As Nietzsche argues, world-weariness can lead to nihilism and the negation of this life; (4) Blackness is seen as something that can be (or should be) overcome.
I end my paper by proposing a third way between Wilderson’s “End of the World” and Fanon’s universal humanism (and we can add Devon R. Johnson’s “Strong Black Nihilism”) by drawing upon the philosopher Jacqueline Scott’s essay, “Racial Nihilism as Racial Courage: The Case for Healthier Racial Identities”. In her essay, Scott (following the civil rights lawyer Derrick Bell) considers the prospects of racism being a permanent feature in U.S. society. The question that follow is what can be done if despair, resignation, and suicide aren’t suitable response to the possible permanence of racism. For Scott (and myself) the goal is to affirm our lives as racialized subjects in the face of racial nihilism in the way that Nietzsche urged his readers to affirm their lives in the face of European nihilism.