On Afropessimism

by JESSE MCCARTHY

The memoirs of Black revolutionaries have been, almost by definition, exceptional in their narratives, exemplary in their aspirations, and dispirited in their conclusions. Traditionally, the disappointment of unfinished and unrealized ambitions is mitigated by a rhetorical appeal to continued struggle and hope for a future Black liberation that the memoirists themselves will not live to see. They look to the future to say: One day. In time we will find our way to freedom, equality, self-loving, and self-respecting — to fully enjoying whatever the best of the human condition ought to entail. But what if the condition of being human is so thoroughly racialized that even appealing to it only further distances them from the possibility of its realization? What if, moreover, the destruction of Black people is not a contingent difficulty that can be corrected, but a necessary fate because the very category of “the human” is premised on their negation? As Frank Wilderson puts it, what if “Human life is dependent on Black death for its existence and for its conceptual coherence”?

Understanding how Wilderson has come to such a conclusion requires a glance at his own exceptionally restless and revolutionary life. Frank Wilderson III was born in New Orleans but grew up primarily in Minneapolis, where his father was a professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota and his mother worked as a school administrator. The family was part of the generation of Black middle-class folk that strived to integrate the world of their white counterparts, making upwardly mobile incursions across the color line in the workplace and in housing. The Wildersons were the first Black family to move into the exclusive neighborhood of Kenwood. One senses in his writings the painful alienation and racial isolation of a Black boyhood in a white suburban world. Wilderson’s parents hoped their son would take advantage of their social gains, but it was the revolutionary turbulence of the 1960s that impressed the young man who, even as a teenager, had already thrown himself into the whirlwind of the standoffs in Berkeley, the militancy of the Black Panther Party, the world of SDS, Kent State, the murder of Fred Hampton, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Afropessimism, Wilderson’s philosophical memoir published this year by Liveright, is full of extraordinary portrait miniatures, fragmented scenes of the American leftist underground recollected from the point of view of one of its survivors, the souvenirs of an elder revolutionist for whom the battle scars of yesteryear are still fresh as yesterday.

For Wilderson, the energies of the revolution never fully dissipated. He enrolled at Dartmouth in 1974, took up and then abandoned the idea of being a football player, and quickly gravitated back to politics, involving himself in organizing immigrant workers on campus, activities that eventually got him expelled for two years, during which time he led an itinerant life before returning to finish his degree in 1980. Fellow students recall visions of a handsome and charismatic man striding across the campus wearing a military-style vest and sporting a beret. During the 1980s, Wilderson spent a period he dismisses as “eight ethically bankrupt years” working as a stockbroker for a string of prominent firms that included Merrill Lynch and Drexel Burnham Lambert, the latter made infamous for its junk-bonds business. In 1989, he got out of finance by going to Columbia University to get an MFA in fiction writing. He used a summer research grant from the Jerome Foundation to go to South Africa, a voyage that would prove a decisive turning point.

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