In his 2017 conversations with Tiffany Lethabo King, published in the collection Otherwise Worlds as “Staying Ready for Black Study,” Frank Wilderson sets a standard for dialogue between his Afropessimist position and others looking to engage with it, implying a potential for a communication he believes has yet to occur: “When it comes down to it, we as Black peoples have the generosity to understand the grammar of suffering of others, but there’s no generosity coming back to us. It’s always what we have to be taught, and not what we can teach others” (72).

In what follows, I intend to explore what Wilderson’s reference to “generosity” would entail for a proper communication between nonblack thinkers and black pessimists. In considering this question, I turn toward the topic of intelligibility. Specifically, I consider Wilderson’s claim and general position alongside another that specifically positions black thought as the leading force for any potential liberation: namely, that of Charles Mills. Wilderson and Mills’s respective projects take shape out of their position on the prospects for blackness to enter into communicative relations with other nonwhite populations. Their positions also mark two specific interpretations of blackness and its demands for a liberatory project. For both figures, the ability to communicate the suffering and the demands of blackness will determine how nonwhite, nonblack populations are able to engage and contribute to an antiracist future, a future that they may not be able to know.

Thus, I set out to explain Mills’s and Wilderson’s respective understanding of blackness’ intelligibility—intelligibility of motives, of shared history, and of futural goals—when considering a multiracial antiracist coalition. In articulating Wilderson’s position, I will focus on his conversations with King cited above. For Mills, I will focus on “The Illumination of Blackness,” where he promotes black philosophy as a guiding standpoint for a universalizable antiracist philosophy.

Mills: Black Philosophy as Illuminating

Mills’s view in “The Illumination of Blackness” can best be understood, for these purposes, through the context of his earlier claim on classical liberalism in The Racial Contract. There, Mills explains that his concept of the “Racial Contract” “criticizes the social contract from a normative base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism themselves as necessarily problematic, but shows how they have been betrayed by white contractarians” (129). The nature of Mills’s project is thus a corrective one: it attempts to remove the accidental errors of past theorists and policymakers, such that the essence of modern contractarianism can be given its normative due while nonetheless proffering a sufficient descriptive account of blackness.

Even when defining a strictly black(ened) approach to racial justice through black experience’s unique positionality in modernity, Mills remains committed to a liberal project of Enlightenment universalism. Mills does not make an ontological claim about blackness’ uniqueness and distance from other nonwhite races, instead utilizing empirical claims about blackness’ status (such as the lack of a specifically black precolonial tradition discussed on pp. 33–34).

This context clarifies what is at stake for Mills in “The Illumination of Blackness.” There, Mills promotes “black philosophy” as the practice by which naturalized abstractions can be revealed for what they truly are. For Mills, blackness operates as the racial category through which black philosophy emerges, but the contributions this specific identity/standpoint provides are easily shared beyond itself: “The crucial criteria are not identity based but content based: philosophical engagement with a particular set of problems, a certain body of literature, a historical tradition, a distinctive outlook on the world” (24). If a nonblack theorist is a potential writer of black philosophy, then the claims, demands, and “distinctive outlook” of black populations toward liberation is necessarily intelligible to others.

Black philosophy may also exist as a leader of a predicted “rainbowed vision” of enlightened realism that can demolish the illusory distortions of white supremacy by fulfilling its position as the theory “better positioned to realize the genuine (as against bogus) universal” (36). In other words, where Eurocentric whiteness has produced bogus universals, black philosophy points to genuine universals.

In this formulation, Mills echoes himself in Blackness Visiblewhen discussing the value of alternative epistemologies placed in conversation with one another. In his assessment of Marxism in that work, Mills writes: “[I]t has become obvious that this oppression is multidimensional and that the historical forces that produced Marxism as a theory have now thrown up other perspectives, other visions, illuminating aspects of the structured darknesses of society that Marx failed to see” (39). In short, Mills’ project insists upon black philosophy as a means to reveal an objective reality against what has been covered by ideological distortions.

Wilderson: Blackness as Unintelligible

In contrast to Mills, Wilderson takes the position that blackness is the unthought and unthinkable violence of slavery’s continuation. This violence constructs the black/slave’s status as socially dead. Within this framework, representable blackness is the analogization of a nonrelational figure that also acts as the fulcrum on which modernity continues to turn.

Characterizing the positions taken by Wilderson and other Afropessimists in terms of truth claims is troubled from the start, given that these positions are often framed in terms of challenging the legibility of structures of truth-making altogether. Nonetheless, it is fair to state that Wilderson positions the demands and accounts of blackness as being those demands and accounts that are most revelatory of a white supremacist modernity. Returning to his conversations with King, he states, “As [Saidiya] Hartman says, no one wants to be as free as Black people will make them, because they will be free of their own cultural coordinates, not just free of their oppressive dynamics” (59).

In understanding the modern world through a position that cannot be attended to by existing concepts but nevertheless helped create them, the Afropessimist understanding of blackness purports to be able to acknowledge and define the varieties of racial conflicts with which the a priori antagonism of antiblackness is often grouped. At the very least, Wilderson advocates for an understanding of reality where a black positionality is sufficient to understand modern reality. Nevertheless, he does briefly leave space for a potential collaboration with nonblack populations, albeit with heavy caveats.

In Red, White, and Black, Wilderson intends to render a distinction across not only black and nonblack populations, but a break in the status of the Native as a position that experienced both an unthinkable genocide and a conceptualizable loss of sovereignty. In defining the positions of each of the titular figures, Wilderson uses a cartographic metaphor to define how each of these groups’ demands can or cannot speak to one another:

What the Settler and the “Savage” share is a capacity for time and space coherence. At every scale—the soul, the body, the group, the land, and the universe—they can practice cartography, and although at every scale their maps are radically incompatible, their respective “mapness” is never in question. (181)

The typical focus of decolonial revolutionary action—sovereignty—is an intelligible goal that can be argued and fought for due to the shared “mapness” of the respective positionalities of white and Indigenous populations as beings of the modern world. The Slave, the third positionality in Wilderson’s account, cannot share in these worldly prerequisites as a figure barred from the world. For Wilderson, the language of sovereignty also pushes away any potential account of genocide in Indigenous narratives that could engage in some relationship with black abolitionist goals, as this cartography also cannot function alongside a prescriptive goal that can merge with settler grammars and cartographies.

In short, Wilderson’s position raises the issue of intelligibility much more acutely than Mills’s. Wilderson questions whether current mediating structures of language and discipline can faithfully engage with black existence; blackness may simply be unintelligible to those who relate to it through such mediations. The denial of the possibility of dialogue under these structures constitutes blackness’ isolation not only from the world itself but also from potential coalition partners. The former refers to existing claims regarding blackness as a figure that, in its utilization for the production and continuity of modern society, cannot engage with said society as that which defines its limits.

The issue of intelligibility arises because the actuality of antiblack violence exceeds any of its linguistic representations. Said violence could only approach intelligibility through analogy, yet analogy fails to relate to the actuality in question. Consequently, Wilderson contends, black bodies figure within the representational schema as being no more than something to be assaulted, molded, and used strictly to satisfy another’s ends. This situation solidifies blackness as a position that lacks the ability to engage in relational valuation and communication with the world itself.

As Wilderson puts it in Afropessimism, antiracist actions designed to push against civil society “ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and legible conflicts of civil society’s junior partners (such as immigrants, White women, the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and illegible antagonisms of Blacks” (223). The functional position of blackness “in front” of any ontological account denies black populations a shared space in the world that blackness constructs and orients. Defined as an a priori nothingness, Wilderson’s blackness can neither be conceptualized nor can black populations seamlessly relate to the world and communicate with nonblack populations in their established body schemas.

Toward Generosity?

For Wilderson, blackness is illegible; it can be approached through analogy, but such analogy only further hinders its representability. For Mills, by contrast, blackness is eminently definable and transferable, as confirmed by black philosophy’s ability to travel. There exist no strict racial boundaries that prevent one from recognizing and working toward the goals of black liberation. Therefore, the question of intelligibility (in the sense of being able to grasp an account of antiblack violence) is already answered, and the question of generosity needs not to be asked.

At the same time, however, this ease of intelligibility is tied to Mills’s specific realist construction of the world and the establishment of a divide between reality and “illusion.” For example, in “White Ignorance” (published in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance), he outlines his own account of standpoint theory and its relation to objective reality when justifying his use of the term “ignorance”:

In addition, the term [ignorance] has for me the virtue of signaling my theoretical sympathies with what I know will seem to many a deplorably old-fashioned, “conservative,” realist, intellectual framework, one in which truth, falsity, facts, reality, and so forth are not enclosed with ironic scare quotes… In the same way The Racial Contract was not meant as a trashing of contractarianism, as such, but rather the demystification of a contractarianism that ignored racial subordination, so similarly, mapping an epistemology of ignorance is for me a preliminary to reformulating an epistemology that will give us genuine knowledge. (15–16)

In “The Illumination of Blackness” (the aforementioned “epistemology that will give us genuine knowledge”), intelligibility is never in doubt because all parties involved in antiracist liberation are presumably invested in revealing the same world through their unique perspectives.

In other words, Mills’s position in “The Illumination of Blackness” may rest upon presuming a commitment to (and/or an ability to have) objectivity among participants that would ensure the reciprocation of generosities in advance. Wilderson articulates compelling reasons why we might reject this conclusion.

Nonetheless, Wilderson’s approach should prompt questions about his own generosity toward other positions. As mentioned above, Red, White, and Black holds a space for the possibility of Native populations engaging with blackness in some form of coalitional dialogue. In his second conversation with King, however, Wilderson pulls back from this claim and states that there is no potential coalition partner for black populations: “And this marks a shift in my thinking since Red, White, and Black. Even Native Americans, when in coalition with Blacks, are going to crowd out discussions of our grammar of suffering” (65). For Wilderson, then, no population can share their grammar of genocidal suffering. If this is the case, then what could be required to engage properly and generously with a black pessimist perspective as a nonblack interlocutor?

What is “generosity” when directed toward those who define their claims as unintelligible to others? Wilderson creates a hypothetical scene between himself and Vine Deloria where he engages with his critique of relationality and how black people function to make any “sovereign world” appear (69), but he makes another revelatory point earlier on differential uptakes of racialized accounts of the world: “…no matter how good the argument is, folks refuse to be authorized by a Black ensemble of questions. I don’t think it’s a calculated thing. I just think that’s how Native people are like white people in the libidinal economy” (65). Black populations can then be named and defined through nonblack standpoints and analyses, but a black (pessimist) grammar of suffering will not receive the same care and consideration from nonblack populations.

This claim appears fair if nonblack theorists and activists are unwilling to engage in the grounding claims of black pessimism in the same way Wilderson does with Native liberation and the topic of sovereignty. No coalitional movement worthy of the name would bar the generous acceptance of another positionality within said coalition. However, even as Wilderson’s account of intelligibility runs through “blackness” and not “black philosophy,” one still must attend to how his grounding philosophical claims may make generosity an immediate impossibility, both toward blackness and from a black pessimist position. As stated above, Wilderson’s Afropessimism claims that the black positionality is sufficient to define the modern world and its associated race-based conflicts. Where, then, does that leave the experiences and contributions of nonblack populations? Are they rendered merely secondary forms of knowledge about the world, unnecessary for an account of modernity that is sufficient for liberatory action?

I take Kristie Dotson and Elena Ruíz’s critical remarks on Katherine MacKinnon in “On the Politics of Coalition” as demonstrating something important for answering these questions. Dotson and Ruíz read MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State as presuming the value-neutrality of the linguistic field in which dialogue occurs. They write:

Afropessimism can succeed as a project to denaturalize established political organizing, where grounding presumptions establish a “home” for a specific path (and one based on a very specific grammar). An example of such denaturalization would be Jared Sexton’s “The Vel of Slavery” (reprinted in Otherwise Worlds),which argues against the positioning of decolonization as the threshold of political action that can encompass all other forms of racist oppression. Instead of ending the search for this threshold, however, Sexton proposes a “repetition” of settler colonial critiques that would instead prioritize black grammars of suffering and proclaim abolition as “the interminable radicalization of every radical movement” (109).

The question of generosity posed by Wilderson returns one to Afropessimism’s own claims on nonblack existence. One must ask if “generosity” is ever possible when all liberatory possibilities must run through one specific home/grammar. Mills’s vision of black philosophy as illuminating may suffer from presupposing a reciprocal generosity as already defining coalitional dialogue since said dialogue is presumed to function so as to unveil reality and combat ignorance. Wilderson’s call for generosity suggests a compelling alternative wherein representational failures can be addressed through constructing novel perspectives. But if Wilderson’s Afropessimism calls only for the development of a generosity toward Afropessimism, the possible improvement on Mills’s position may be short-circuited.

Thus far, I have drawn on Tiffany Lethabo King only as an interlocutor of Wilderson through the two dialogues published in “Staying Ready for Black Studies.” To conclude, I want to center King’s work in The Black Shoals and how she speaks to an alternative approach to generosity beyond what Mills’s account implies and Wilderson prescribes. In The Black Shoals, dialogue between black and Native populations creates new knowledge and projects that could not have been considered otherwise. Mills’s realist epistemology and “rainbowed vision” make coalition irrelevant to knowledge production and solely an act of puzzle-solving (making the right piece/positionality fit the correct space) since the task is to strip away ideological obfuscations instead of building new modes of representation. Therefore, amelioration calls for a shared concern for truth but not the project of developing political relationships through which knowledge otherwise becomes possible. Wilderson’s project, by contrast, emphasizes knowledge politics to the point that the standard they demand—generosity—seems to disqualify coalition almost from the start.

What would happen, then, if we instead theorize coalitional dialogue in such a way as to center and valorize the generative friction that disparate accounts of reality can invoke? Such frictions would seem, in principle, capable of surpassing the presumed conflicts that give rise to them, introducing new perspectives. In other words, if Wilderson’s point about generosity suggests an improvement on the limitations of Mills’s project for black philosophy, what improvements upon Wilderson’s position are possible if an expansion of such generosity is fought for rather than rejected in advance?

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