After Dartmouth and a surprising stretch as a stockbroker in Minneapolisan experience that goes mostly undescribed in Afropessimism but which Wilderson has elsewhere characterized as a kind of double lifeWilderson enrolls in the creative-writing program at Columbia. At night, he attends classes at the New School, where stream of consciousness is in vogue. That downtown influence still shows: Wilderson skids from one glint of perception to the next without much regard for grounding details or fluid transitions; in the middle of an anecdote, he tosses you down a chute and you find yourself stumbling through a thick tangle of theoretical jargon. He thinks vertically, in terms of hierarchies and structures; the horizontal time line is beside the point. He writes from historys humid basement, or from its even less accessible underground bunker, and the plants that bloom in his writing are less floral than fungalhis arguments and remembrances grow in tight groups, close to the ground and propped atop rotting anecdotal logs, all of them adding to the shroomy funk of the room.

Though Afropessimism may veer from the Black autobiographical tradition, the book doesnt escape genre altogether. It falls into a category sometimes called auto-theory, an attempt to arrive at a philosophy by way of the self. The most pertinent example is Black Skin, White Masks, by the French-Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, who worked up his theory of epidermalizationthe process by which the societal inferiority of Black people is grafted onto the skinby recounting his own experiences, along with a series of psychiatric case studies. Wilderson takes from Fanonand then exaggerates, literally to deatha critique of humanism as it has been practiced (or, more often, not practiced) in the Western world. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe, Fanon wrote. And yet, for Fanon, the process of decolonizationby way of inevitably bloody revolutionwas also a process of humanization. Decolonization, he wrote, in The Wretched of the Earth, is the veritable creation of new men.

For Wilderson, Fanons cup is too full. Other previously colonized peoples are indeed human, but not Black people. One of the bleakest aspects of Afropessimist thought is its denial that there is any meaningful analogy between Blacks and other nonwhites. When Frank and Stella try to explain their poison-induced injuries to a Chinese-American doctor, she turns them away, and Wilderson muses that Dr. Zhou is as much a master as Edwin and Mary Epps, the antagonists in 12 Years a Slave. In Wildersons view, people of colora term he uses for those who are neither white nor Blackare junior partners to whites in the enslavement of Blacks. One of the memories that recur in Afropessimism involves a Palestinian friend named Sameer, who, detailing life under Israeli occupation, describes the shameful and humiliating way the soldiers run their hands up and down your body, then admits that the shame and humiliation runs even deeper if the Israeli soldier is an Ethiopian Jew. This expression of anti-Black racism from a Palestinian is a cataclysm for Wilderson. Now he understands that, in the collective unconscious, Palestinian insurgents have more in common with the Israeli state and civil society than they do with Black people.

In the same vein, Wilderson describes a meeting that his father attended, as an emissary of the University of Minnesota, with several Native American leaders, hoping to resolve a conflict about reservation lands. Young Frank was in the audience, and someone sitting near him cried out, We dont want you, a nigger man, telling us what to do! The lesson that Wilderson takes from the episode is that the Native Americansraped and slaughtered on these lands, subjected to a genocide that enabled the Americas as we know them to existare sovereigns, and therefore human, while his dad, middle class, American, and Black, is not. In a previous book, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.Antagonisms, which grew out of his dissertation, Wilderson describes the Red, Indigenous, or Savage position as existing liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black). In Afropessimism, even that gradation is gone. Wilderson overwrites history with the darkest, most permanent marker.

Every society has a murderous hierarchy: someones always knocking at the basement door, trying to get free. But life is prismaticits possible to be Black and degraded in America while also profiting from wanton extraction of resources overseas, oppressing millions of non-Black others, and living on land stolen from indigenous people. We are always joined in our sufferings, often by somebody we cant see through the darkness. We speak of solidarity precisely because the empathetic act of analogy is a way of acknowledging this complexity, and of training our ethical senses, again and again, to widen the circle of our concern. Any system of thought that has refined itself beyond the ability to imagine kinship with the stranded Guatemalan kid detained at the U.S. border, or with the functionally enslaved Uyghur in China, or, againI cant get over itwith the Native American on whose stolen ancestral ground you live and do your business, is lost in its own fog.

Black thought at its best has been a vehicle for and a product of analogy. Black Christians saw the liberatory potential in the story of the Hebrews rescued by God from beneath Pharaohs thumb and, still more, in the life of the Jewish Palestinian preacher Jesus, put to death by the colonizers of his homeland. Some of them looked to Latin America, where liberation theology blossomed; they created Black liberation theology, and forever transformed the flavor of American religion. A feeling of kinship with the colonized people of India, and with Gandhi in particular, helped make nonviolence a core practice of the civil-rights movement. A study of the revolutionary struggles in Algeria, Fanons great subject, helped to make the caseargued most famously by the Black Liberation Army, an influence on Wildersonfor the occasional necessity of violence. None of this is incidental: the impulse toward freedom is always seeking friends.

While he was studying at Columbia, Wilderson was in a long-distance relationship with a woman he had met on a trip to South Africa. After completing his M.F.A., he moved to Johannesburg. It was the early nineties, the end of the apartheid era. He became involved with the African National Congress, Nelson Mandelas party. He participated in political education and worked for a time as what sounds like a minor spy; eventually, he became an elected official in the A.N.C. Later, he broke with Mandela, siding with the partys more radical members. These adventures are the subject of his first book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. The South African section of Afropessimism mostly concerns Wildersons brief employment as a waiter at an Italian restaurant.

He takes the job after getting fired from a teaching gig, essentially because of his political commitments. The restaurant, Marios, is owned by a white immigrant, and Wilderson works there alongside several Black Africans: an older waiter who tries to school him in the intricacies of racial manners under apartheid; two cooks who, he learns too late, are supporters of the reactionary party that opposes the A.N.C.; and a young woman named Doreen, who is casually harassed by the owner and eventually framed for theft by his wife, Riana. Everybody tiptoes around the whites except for Wilderson, who, by his telling, is a charismatic, bombastic presence. He meets, flatters, and befriends the Nobel-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, a regular at the restaurant. He goads his Black peers into taking ever more brazen liberties with the whites. Why should they sit in the kitchen eating porridge during their breaks when the whites are out in the dining room, feasting on Italian? Owing to his obvious erudition and, above all, his Americanness, hes invited to join the whites one night. He drags the other Blacks along with him, largely against their will. He chows down while everyone else falls silent. Of course, he understands the situation. He sort of glories in it.

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The Argument of Afropessimism - The New Yorker