University of Illinois Press American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism
Author(s): William David Hart

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Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness,
Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism
William David Hart / Macalester College
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslave-

ment and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the begin-
ning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Af-
rica into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised
the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.1
—Karl Marx
“In the antiblack world there is but one race, and that race is black.
Thus, to be racialized is to be pushed ‘down,’ toward blackness, and to
be deracialized is to be pushed ‘up’ toward whiteness.” This does not
mean, of course, that there are only blacks and whites in some anthro-
pological sense. It does not mean that political reality with regard to
race simply reduces to two positions, two histories, or two struggles.
Rather, it says that the vectors of the international racial hierarchy)—
with its black and white extremities—can and should be brought to bear
on every discussion.2
—Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland
There are two principles that emerge in an antiblack society. They are
“be white!” and avoid blackness!3
—Lewis Gordon
I. Introduction
T
his article purses a set of complex questions about the nature of anti-
black racism. The scope of these questions is much broader than the
intellectual traditions that define the Institute for American Religious
1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Edward Bibbens Aveling,
Samuel Moore, and Ernest Untermann (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 823.
2. Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland, “Raw Life: An Introduction,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2
(2003): 57.
3. Louis Gordon, “Writing through the Zone of Nonbeing,” in What Fanon Said: A Philo-
sophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015),
location 976, “Please Be My Mirror,” Kindle.
American Journal of Theology & Philosophy . Vol. 39, No. 1, January 2018
© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 5 2/12/18 11:06 AM

6 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy
and Philosophical Thought (IARPT). But the relevance of those traditions

to the problem of antiblackness partly motivates this article. Do the radical
empiricist, pragmatist, and process traditions of IARPT have the resources to
address the deeply American (and global) problem of antiblackness? Though
my construction of the question has implications for how it might be answered,
I will not provide a direct answer. Rather, I present this question as a challenge
that members of IARPT should endeavor to meet. My own effort to illumi-
nate this challenge takes me outside the traditions that define the intellectual
history of IARPT.
Specifically, I will engage a distinctive trajectory in the theoretical discourse
of black studies. Along the way, I explore a constellation of overlapping and
discrepant issues: the debate around the relationship between racism and capi-
talism and the dueling concepts of afro-pessimism and black optimism. The
questions I pose are the following: What is the causal relation between race and
racism? Is racism a capitalist or precapitalist formation? How do we account for
the perdurance of antiblack racism; is antiblackness an artifact of capitalism
or a feature of Western metaphysis? Is antiblack racism a consequent or an
antecedent reality, a historical artifact or a product of a white “transcendental
imagination?” Whether consequent or antecedent reality, doesn’t antiblack
racism represent the social, political, and ethical ontology of contemporary
American life? This inquiry grows from the conviction that racism is the par-
ent of race; that racist behaviors and ideas produce race as an enduring set of
habits—habits of perception, evaluation, and comportment. This approach
inverts the commonsense view that racism distorts or otherwise grows from a
preexisting, normatively neutral, and nonhierarchical reality called race. On
this view, the question of race, ubiquitous in our discourse, displaces the real
question of racism. This inquiry further specifies its subject as antiblack racism:
or, antiblackness, for short. This specific focus makes evasion of the questions
I pose more difficult. Our focus is the specificity of the black/white binary. My
hope is that we will look at it and not look away. False universalities, cowardly
generalities, dubious analogies, and multiculturalism are ways of looking away.
Recourse to the category, “people of color,” is a way of averting our gaze, of
denying the specificity of antiblackness.4 Functionally speaking, these evasive
concepts are part of the language of diversity that is ubiquitous on college
campuses and in the corporate world. In both venues, diversity becomes the
privileged tool for homogenizing difference and evading the specificity of an-
tiblackness.
4. Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text

28, no. 2 103 (2010): 31–56.
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Volume 39, No. 1, January 2018 7
II. Slavery and Capitalism

Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition, describes black studies as the critique of Western Civilization. W. E.
B. Du Bois, the great scholar of American history, founder of American sociol-
ogy, and the godfather of black studies used basic notions of historical mate-
rialism in his monumental study Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880.
The first two chapters are titled, respectively, “The Black Worker” and “The
White Worker.” Du Bois concludes the first chapter with this remark: “Here is
the real modern labor problem. Here is the Kernel of the problem of Religion
and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of
the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from
human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power
veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and
the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that majority of workers who are
yellow, brown, and black.”5
With the publication of Black Reconstruction in 1935, DuBois pioneered
a tradition of historical materialism among scholars in black studies. Three
years later, the Trinidadian scholar C. L. R. James published Black Jacobins,
an account of the Haitian Revolution. James’s protégé, Eric Williams, a pro-
fessor of political and social science at Howard University and prime minister
of Trinidad and Tobago, published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. This title
explicitly named an important tradition of inquiry in black studies. Against
those analysts who placed the trans-Atlantic enslavement of African people
outside the development of capitalism proper, he explicitly argued for the con-
stitutive relationship between slavery and capitalism. Since the publication of
this text, several scholars have continued to explore the relation between slavery,
capitalism, and antiblackness.
Without a doubt, the most important study of slavery and capitalism is Edward
E. Baptist’sThe Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism. As the title states explicitly, the story of slavery has been whitewashed,
its centrality to the very nature of America denied. Baptist provides a much need
correction to this influential strain of historiography, especially the standard
narrative regarding the nonconstitutive relation between Atlantic slavery and
capitalism. As the example of Du Bois, Williams, and others show, Baptist did
not invent this countertradition. But his intervention is the most powerful yet.
Baptist “connects all the dots.” His account reveals in concrete detail the rela-
tion between slavery and capitalism. If Williams provides a macrolevel analysis,
5. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Antheneum,

1935), 16.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 7 2/12/18 11:06 AM

then Baptist connects the macro- to the microlevel and provides an illuminating
account of the consequences of slave-driving and slave-driven capitalism both
for United States and the Atlantic world. He connects the systematic to the quo-
tidian, specific labor extraction technologies, such as the “whipping machine,”6
to soaring rates of profit, anonymous processes of capital formation and class
rule to the names and lives of specific enslaved people. His creative social history
leaves little doubt about the constitutive role of slavery in making American
capitalism.
Baptist narrates American slavery by analogizing it to the anatomy of the hu-
man body: feet, heads, right hand, left hand, tongues, breath, seed, blood, backs,
and arms tell the story of slavery from birth to death, from the living body to
the corpse. Along the way, he retrieves from virtual anonymity the voices and
voiceless lives of individual enslaved black women and men who were consumed
by the ravenous jaws of American chattel slavery. He captures the life of the
enslaved black person by tracking the career of the black body: from capture
and coffle-driven forced migration to torture and forced labor. This trajectory
reveals the being-toward death of the enslaved black person, the black body as
a corpse in the making. Baptist uses the metaphors of the right hand and left
hand (derived from Martin Luther’s doctrine of two kingdoms) to describe po-
lar forms of power and agency that were available to slaveholders and enslaved
people. The left hand is indirect, furtive, fugitive, creative, and cunning. Enslaved
people typically resort of necessity to the left hand. In contrast, the right hand
is direct and brutal. While using both the left and the right hand, slave-making
prototypically expresses the power and agency of the right hand: the power of
domination and the socially dominant; the power of “kings, weapons, and the
letter of the law.” By the early nineteenth century, the West had consolidated an
unprecedented level of right-handed strength. Their ability to force their will on
others through war, treaty, and contract was unrivaled. “They dominated other
peoples to a degree unprecedented in human history, and within victorious new
modernized nations, right-handed power was increasingly distributed in a lop-
sided fashion.” The dispossession of the native people and chattel slavery were
the preeminent expression of such lop-sided and right-handed power in America.7
6. The “whipping machine” is Baptist’s term for the so-called “pushing system,” that is, the
calculated and systematic use of violence, torture, and terror to exact ever move efficient
cotton-picking labor from the enslaved. In note 52 of chapter four, Baptist writes: “But if
the whippings on the Southwestern plantations were torture, then in the United States, white
people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 448n52.
7. Ibid., 90 (both quotes).
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 8 2/12/18 11:06 AM

Among other practices, the coffle exemplified the right-handed power of en-
slavers. The coffle is technology for securely moving the enslaved. It consists of
heavy iron shackles and chains that link enslaved males by the neck and wrist.
Enslaved females and children were similarly constrained by rope. The coffle
renders resistance or escape virtually impossible. “The coffle chains enabled
Georgia-men to turn feet against hearts, to make enslaved people work directly
against their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and
hope.”8 “Georgia men” refers to entrepreneurs who facilitated the expansion
of slavery by transporting enslaved people from the Chesapeake and the Caro-
linas into territories recently stolen from native peoples through war, deceit,
and other forms of dispossession. Through this “low-tech” but highly effec-
tive tool, a million enslaved people were forced to migrate to the Southeastern
frontier as a domestic slave trade emerged in response to the suppression of
the international trade. Between the 1780s and 1865, according to Baptist, the
enslaved were forced to march, sometimes as far as 700 miles, into the interior
of North America. This march mimicked, in reverse, the coffle-driven trek from
the interior of Africa to the coastal slave forts that they or their ancestors had
endured. Baptist remarks that when the enslaved marched from the East Coast
to the Southwest territories, they walked into a new form of slavery.9
We are accustomed to thinking of American slavery as a single phenomenon,
as a regime that remained more or less the same from the late seventeenth century
until its effective termination during the Civil War. Baptist undermines this com-
mon view by distinguishing among a series of slave regimes, including a highly
efficient system of labor extraction that emerged around 1790 and that presaged
subsequent innovations in cotton production. Enslaved black people were the
guinea pigs for techniques of labor extraction that would eventually migrate to
the nonenslaved sectors of the American economy. These techniques “radically
changed the experience of enslaved people.” According to Baptist, “The amount
of cotton the South grew increased almost every single year from 1800, when
enslaved African Americans made 1.4 million pounds of cotton, to 1860, when
they harvested almost 2 billion pounds.”10 The market relations between slave-
cultivated cotton and the emerging world economy, especially the nexus between
the United States and Great Britain, could not have been more direct. Eighty
percent of the cotton that enslaved people picked was exported to Europe, almost
all to Britain. As the single most important raw material driving the industrial
revolution, slave-cultivated cotton created the capitalist world economy.
8. Ibid., 23.
9. Ibid., 2, 22.
10. Ibid., 113 (both quotes).
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 9 2/12/18 11:06 AM

As Baptist’s analysis shows, American enslavers, the CEOs of slave-labor

camps, were phenomenally successful in extracting efficient labor from the
enslaved. So how did they do it? The simple answer: torture. Enslaved black
people were subject to the full range of modern techniques of torture: “sexual
humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in ‘stress posi-
tions,’ burning, even waterboarding.” Noting that torture was the “central
technology” of slave-labor discipline in the slave-labor camps of the slave-
holding states, Baptist remarks: “Every single day, calibrated pain, regular as
a tuning gear, challenged enslaved people to exceed the previous day’s gain in
production.”11 From coffle to forced migration, family separation, and torture,
slavery was an immense scene of subjection.
Among the modalities of subjection was the thorough commodification of
enslaved people: their market flexibility and liquidity. Baptist describes in detail
how enslaved people were the solution to the slaveholder’s financial problems.
If the environment (weather or bollworms) turned against the cotton planter,
then he could sell slaves. If the enslaver was a bad mathematician, borrowed
too much money or overestimated the likely yield of his cotton crop, then he
could make things good by selling slaves. For whatever seen or unforeseen
economic contingency the enslaver encountered, the enslaved could be sliced
and diced and repackaged as the solution. This solution often required the
forced migration of the enslaved. They were moved around like checkers. Every
capacity and commitment of enslaved people, including kinship ties, created
and cultivated under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, was exploited
for the profit, economic wellbeing, and comfort of enslavers. “Human property,
generated by enslaved people’s commitment to raising and protecting children,
often represented for the enslavers who remained in the Southeast their only
real wealth. Only markets in Georgia or Louisiana could render those slaves
as liquid value. And by 1829, a new set of entrepreneurs was building on the
earlier developments of market institutions in New Orleans to create a powerful
and efficient trade that unlocked the monetary value stored in the family bonds
that enslaved people had built so richly in the Chesapeake and Carolinas.”12
Enslaved people were observers and commentators on their own experiences.
They understood the difference between law and justice. Even within the con-
text of a legal system that made their enslavement lawful, they recognized and
judged their captivity as unjust. They described the family-destroying forced
migrations they endured as theft. Their lives were stolen from them as they
11. Ibid., 141–42 (all quotes).

12. Ibid., 178–79.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 10 2/12/18 11:06 AM

or their kin were sold down the river or sold to enslavers on the Southwestern
frontier where native people were being dispossessed. They were a twice-stolen
people now inhabiting a stolen land.13
Enslaved people recognized that the slavery they were experiencing was
shaped by the ability of whites to move African Americans’ bodies wherever
they wanted. Forced migration created markets that allowed whites to extract
profit from human beings. It brought about a kind of isolation that permitted
enslavers to use torture to extract new kinds of labor. It led to disease, hunger,
and other kinds of deadly privations. So as these vernacular historians tried
to make sense of their own battered lives, the word “stole” became the core of
a story that explained.14
Enslavers and investors financed the sell and purchase of enslaved people
using a financial instrument known as the “faith bond.” Baptist compares
the slave-based financial model that emerged in the 1830s to the practice of
bundling and securitizing home mortgages that began in the 1980s and cul-
minated in the global financial crisis of 2007–2008: “The faith bonds of the
1830s generated revenue for investors from enslavers repayments of mortgages
on enslaved people. This meant that investors around the world would share
in revenues made by hands in the field. Thus, in effect, even as Britain was
liberating the slaves of its empire, a British bank could now sell an investor a
completely commodified slave: not a particular individual who could die or run
away, but a bond that was the right to a one-slave-sized slice of a pie made from
the income of thousands of slaves.”15 I take Baptist to be making the following
point. Long before the emergence of finance capitalism proper—that is, before
financing displaced production as a site of profit (for example, General Mo-
tors Acceptance Corporation versus General Motors the car producer)—the
enslaved were transformed from commodities into derivatives. More accurately,
the value of the enslaved as asset-backed securities (derivatives) exceeded their
underlying value as a commodity. Enslaved people were mortgaged by the
enslavers who purchased them and the investors who financed their purchase.
These transactions were a playground for greedy speculators and other mem-
bers of the get-rich crowd. Like speculators in the housing mortgage financial
bubble of the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries, enslavers and
speculators “leveraged” enslaved people, using them like ATMs, by borrowing
13. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994), 9.
14. Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told, 188.
15. Ibid., 248.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 11 2/12/18 11:06 AM

massive amounts of money against the soaring levels of equity of their sentient
property. Drawing again on the housing model, before the existence of the
practice, we might call this type of credit slave equity withdrawals. Enslavers
and speculators also securitized enslaved people in a manner that spread the
vast wealth generated by enslaved labor well beyond the South and the smaller
circle of those who had a direct relationship to enslavement to beneficiaries
throughout the North Atlantic. Enslaved black labor powered the global capi-
talist economy.
Planter capitalism fed antiblackness, which in turn fed an emerging indus-
trial capitalism. Referring to the hostile and hardscrabble world of ex-slave
Eliza Dupree in the post-Civil War South, Baptist remarks: “Slavery and its
expansion had built enduring patterns of poverty and exploitation. This legacy
was certainly crystal clear in Liza’s early twentieth-century South. African-
American households had virtually no wealth, for instance, while a substantial
portion of the wealth held by white households, even after emancipation, could
be traced to revenue generated by enslaved labor and financing leveraged out
of their bodies before 1861.”16
Arguing against the specious notion that slavery was inefficient and would
have ended without the Civil War, Baptist argues that the evidence supports
the opposite conclusion.17 “Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in
contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the
free labor that succeeded it.18 Slavery was the golden goose that enslavers were
loath to let go. Responding to various contingencies they encountered from the
1780s to 1861, enslavers had reinvented slavery, creating new ways of extracting
profit from their sentient property. These multiple regimes of slavery, within
what appears as a singular phenomenon, were driven by the determination
to increase the profit margin. The proof was in the historical pudding: the
exploitation of enslaved labor was the most important factor in the making
of American capitalism.
16. Ibid., 411.

17. Writing seventy years before Baptist with a primary focus on the Caribbean and Brit-
ish capitalism, Eric Williams concludes that “the commercial capitalism of the eighteenth
century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in doing
it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round
and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all of its works” (Capitalism
and Slavery, 210). In contrast, Baptist discerns no such thing in nineteenth-century America.
On the contrary, the slave labor camps, especial those dedicated to cotton production, were
already industrial. They were “factories” that employed industrial techniques and were fully
integrated with British industries. There was no indication that other processes of industri-
alization threaten to bring slavery to an end. Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told, 113, 429.
18. Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told, 414.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 12 2/12/18 11:06 AM

III. The Marxist-Inflected Debate on Slavery

and Antiblackness: Capitalism or Metaphysics?
Baptist’s magisterial analysis of slavery and capitalism helps contextualize and
illuminate a long debate within black studies regarding the nature of antiblack-
ness. Table 1 below is a left/right spectrum that represents various positions
on the question of whether capitalism is a sufficient explanation of racism
and race or whether that explanation requires a metaphysical supplement.
The left end represents the more strongly held view that capitalism provides
a sufficient explanation; the right end, a less strongly held view. I should add
parenthetically that this left/right distinction bears no resemblance to and in
no way intends to invoke the conventional ideological notion of left and right.
Rather, it is a provisional attempt to get a handle on how influential analysts
of various orientations understand the explanatory power of capitalism where
racism, race, and antiblackness are concerned.
On my reading, the figures in the left column tend toward the more conven-
tional view that racism, race, and antiblackness are, in the last analysis, capitalist
ideologies and practices. They are tools of labor exploitation and management:
capitalists undermine working-class solidarity by splitting workers along racial
lines; they convince white workers that whiteness rather than class solidarity is
the true guardian of their interests. Employing the tool of a racially stratified
labor market, capitalists convince white workers, including the petit bourgeoisie19
(shopkeepers, police officers, firefighters, lower-level clerical workers, and others
striving to become members of the upper middle class, that is, the very people
who constitute the bedrock of President Trump’s support20), that any economic
and status gains black workers make comes at their expense. In a competitive
Table 1. Capitalism and/or Metaphysics

Left Position Median Position Right Position
Angela Davis W. E. B. DuBois Frantz Fanon
Adolph Reed C. L. R. James Cedric Robinson
Barbara Fields Oliver C. Cox Cornel West
Theodore Allen David Roediger Fred Moten
Gregory Meyerson Hortense Spillers Frank B. Wilderson III
Eric Williams Neil Irving Painter
Robin G. Kelly
19. Worker here refers to anyone who does not have the power to hire and fire. On this more
anarchist rather than Marxist view of class, many members of the petit bourgeoisie and the
professional managerial class are also members of the working class.
20. This is not to deny the fact that Trump received strong support from every economic
class among the white voting population.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 13 2/12/18 11:06 AM

labor market, which reduces workers across racial lines to the same status, the
metaphysics of whiteness is the only thing that stands between white workers and
black workers in a society where honor and dishonor are racially coded. DuBois
called this ideology of honor and dishonor, this zero-sum racial logic, the “wages
of whiteness.” These wages are compensatory and psychological; the wages that
white workers receive by identifying their interests in terms of racial membership
rather than class solidarity. Their bosses may exploit them through low wages
and meager benefits. But at least they are not black. White elites in Hollywood
and the culture industries may trash their image. But at least they are not black.
Upper and middle class whites may call them “white trash.” But at least they are
not black (this affirmation or denial notwithstanding, the fear of “falling” into
blackness, of racialization, which the slur “white trash” signals, is intense).
There is no binary relation between the figures in the left and the right columns.
Their differences are more a matter of tendency, degree, and interpretation. I
could image some individuals contesting their location within this simple typol-
ogy or arguing that their views are not static. These objections would be valid.
However, this typology is primarily a heuristic that helps us to think about the
range of responses to the question of capitalism and antiblackness. Thus those
in the right column share DuBois’s diagnosis of the ideological work that rac-
ism does in splitting the working class and thereby shoring up the alienating and
exploitive practices of capitalism. But they do not think that this analysis cuts
deeply enough. The ideological needs of capitalism do not explain the perdurance
of antiblack racism, its virtually limitless scope, its metastatic reproduction, and
the depths of its pathological animosity. To properly comprehend antiblackness,
we need an account of greater depth, generality, and trans-temporality. We need
an ontological account of antiblackness, an account that properly poses the
question of the being of black people; an account that helps us understand the
paraontological difference between black people and the being of black people,
between black people and a multifarious blackness. The question regarding the
being of black people, the blackness of black people, is fundamentality an in-
quiry about the whiteness of white people. The writer James Baldwin posed this
question in a particularly provocative manner when he remarked, “What white
people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to
have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you
think I’m a nigger, it means you need it. And you’ve got to find out why. And
the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it’s able to ask that
question.”21 Again, with the caveat that the differences are contestable and not
21. James Baldwin, I’m Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck (New York: Magnolia
Pictures, 2016), film.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 14 2/12/18 11:06 AM

categorical, the centrality of the ontological question—that is, the “whiteness

of blackness”— distinguishes those in the right column from those on the left
with those in the middle reflecting a bit of ambivalence.
Cedric Robinson may be the first person to explicitly construe the relation-
ship between capitalism and antiblackness as an ontological question. Robinson
argues that capitalism is infected and inflected by antiblackness in a manner
that conventional Marxist theory fails to comprehend. Antiblackness is extraor-
dinarily nasty. The effort to comprehend this gratuitous nastiness, through a
critical dialectic with Marxism, characterizes what Robinson calls the black
radical tradition. This tradition, which includes DuBois, C. L. R. James, Richard
Wright, and many others, is a Marxist-inspired tradition that knows what the
dominant tradition does not: that antiblackness is excessive; it exceeds the logic
of capital and labor. Robinson is skeptical of the traditional Marxist view of
racism that reduces it to a capitalist ideology, a historically contingent strategy
of labor management and social control. The nastiness of antiblackness exceeds
the theoretical needs capitalism. It works at a level much deeper than ideology.
Antiblackness, in short, is not merely a historical contingency. It is about more
than capital accumulation and class rule. Antiblackness is ontological: a struc-
turing reality, part of Western metaphysics. Thus, traditional Marxist categories
cannot comprehend the tenacity of this antiblack nastiness. This constitutive lack
makes a non-Marxist supplement necessary. Robinson argues that metaphysics
supplies that lack. However much capitalism may have leveraged antiblackness,
it emerged within a historical context that was already shot through with racism.
Racism was already an intra-European phenomenon before the widespread en-
counter with non-European others during the age of exploration and conquest.
The Irish, Jews, Roma, and Slavs, among others, were racialized, dispossessed,
and colonized first.22 They were European races before they were reconstructed
as white ethnics in early twenty century America. Capitalism was racialized from
the very beginning. Though it liberated capital and labor from feudal constraints,
capitalism did not leave racism behind. On the contrary, racism is a constitutive,
structuring feature of capitalism, not a feudalistic atavism—thus Robinson’s
notion of racial capitalism.
Below are six theses on capital and race. Though some afro-pessimists may
be outliers, and while thesis six is anachronistic with respect to some of the
analysts in Table 1, I suspect that most agree, more or less, with the following:
22. Eric Williams make a similar point in Capitalism and Slavery (19): “White servitude was
the historic base upon which Negro slavery was constructed.” Theodore W. Allen also makes
this point in The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1, Racial Oppression and Social Control
(New York: Verso, 1993).
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 15 2/12/18 11:06 AM

1. Capitalism is the international division of labor, income, wealth, power,

and status.
2. There is no black liberation without a social movement against capital.
3. Capital-based oppression (subjugation) cuts between and within races,
genders, nations, and religions.
4. Black liberation without a social movement against capital reproduces
class-based oppressions—of wealth, income, power, and status—among
black people. It reproduces a status quo of “black haves and have nots.”
5. Black liberation without a social movement against capital is a strategy
of status mobility by black elites, including the black professional mana-
gerial class. To put it bluntly, this class exploits a legitimate interest in
black solidarity for their own interests and to the detriment of the black
working class and other precarious classes.
6. Any genuine and comprehensive form of black liberation must nest
within a larger multiracial struggle against capital. Radicals should vig-
orously pursue struggles against authoritarian religion and nationalism,
gender oppression, and white supremacy, while accenting a working-
class politics of anticapitalism. This consensus, I would add, spans the
differences between the Fordist mass-production form of capitalism that
lasted until the early1970s and the wave of marketization23 that charac-
terizes the contemporary postindustrial, digitized, and finance-driven
capitalism widely described as neoliberalism.
IV. Afro-Pessimism
Two perspectives: afro-pessimism and black optimism. The conceptual roots
are the same, the flowers different. Though they depend on and are ensconced
in the same traditions of thought and share interrelated understandings of
the relationship between capitalism and racism and white supremacy and
race, afro-pessimism and black optimism represent competing responses to
antiblackness. They have a common patrimony. A genealogy of the concep-
tual kinship of afro-pessimists and black optimists might look something
like this: Frantz Fanon’s concept of “Negro phobogenesis” or the “lived
experience of the black person” (1952); Orlando Patterson’s concept of “so-
cial death” (1982); Cedric Robinson’s concept of “racial capitalism” (1983);
Hortense Spillers’s concept of “flesh” (1987); Saidiya Hartman’s concept of
“the afterlife of slavery” (1997; 2009); and Nahum Chandler’s concept of
“paraontological blackness” (2008).
23. See Michael Burawoy, “Facing an Unequal World,” Current Sociology 63, no. 1 (2015):
18, 22–25.
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To simplify the debate between afro-pessimists24 and black optimists, I focus

on a representative of each perspective: Frank B. Wilderson III and Fred Moten,
respectively. Wilderson III is a professor of drama and African American studies
at the University of California–Irvine. Moten is a professor of English at the
University of California–Riverside. Wilderson won an American Book Award in
2008 for his memoir Incognegro about his work in South Africa, where he taught
at the Vista University in Soweto, was elected to the African National Congress,
and worked clandestinely in anti-Apartheid activities. Moten is a National Book
Award–nominated poet. His ongoing work creates a complex relationship be-
tween radical black performativity and progressive forms of Marxism. Wilderson
III and Moten work in that eccentric philosophical space called theory.
Black Op signifies on the military and intelligence term for a covert operation.
Black Op combines both this sense of a covert operation and a notion of opti-
mism. As covert operation and optimism, Black Op is an optimistic will born of
a pessimistic intellect. Black Op is a fugitive optimism and operation that roots
in the slave experience and its contemporary afterlife as antiblack surveillance,
discipline, and incarceration—in short, the antiblack carceral state. As detailed,
black optimism and afro-pessimism have a common ancestry in debates about
slavery and capitalism: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of blackness; Orlando
Patterson’s notion of slavery as social death; Hortense Spiller’s ontological dis-
tinction between body and flesh rooted in the experience of the Middle Passage
and slavery; Saidiya Hartman’s meditations on “world” destruction within the
hold of the slave ship, the afterlife of slavery, and naïve celebrations of agency;
and, finally, Nahum Chandler’s concept of blackness as a “double movement,”
both ontic and ontological, that is, blackness as paraontological.
Afro-pessimists see the present order of things as radically antiblack, as con-
stitutively incapable of apprehending the humanity of black people. On this view,
blackness is isomorphic with abjection. Blackness is what whiteness throws out;
treats as aboriginal trash; the normative trashiness against which that abnormal-
ity called white trash is imagined. Within this white supremacist order, black
people are socially dead. Trapped in recursive “scenes of subjection,” they are
locked into the objecthood that Frantz Fanon describes in “The Fact of Black-
ness.”25 They are reduced to the level of flesh, that is, to a sub-bodily, degendered
zone of violently induced indistinction that Hortense Spillers describes in her
24. When using afro-pessimism as a generic term, I use the lower case “a.” When referring to
Wilderson III, for whom Afro-pessimism, is a proper name, I capitalize “A.”
25. Some interpreters argue that “the Fact of blackness” is better translated as “the lived
experience of the black man.”
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canonical article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Affectively and normatively,

black people are not/cannot be citizens of this humanist order. On this view,
humanism was born in the hold of a trans-Atlantic slave ship, in the disavowal
of that reality, in flesh-making practices that found the modern category of the
human. “The black” is the constitutive other of “the human.” Blacks are outside
the world of moral concern. They have no world. Or, as Wilderson III puts it:
“The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage.”26
As an ontological matter, empirical similarities notwithstanding, there is no
analogy between the suffering of nonblack others and the world-destroying and
flesh-making violence that founds blackness. “That is why it makes little sense to
attempt analogy: the Jews have the dead (the Muselmann) among them; the dead
have the blacks among them.”27 Blackness is a space of metaphysical oblivion,
a space-time of living death, a zone of nonbeing.
The humanist order is predicated on the radical abjection of blackness.28
“Look, a Negro.” With this short phrase, Fanon captures the lived experience
of the black person, which he describes as a kind of ontological uncertainty or
vertigo whereby they experience their being through the visual perceptions of
white people. This is a being for others without reciprocity. Thus black people
are subject to the constitutive power of the white gaze. This gaze produces a
third-person consciousness in black people. It disorders their body schema; the
way that they relate to their body parts as they move through space. What one
normally experiences as unconscious becomes hyperconscious. The white gaze
captures and fixes the black person in its visual field. Under the gaze, black
people expend massive amounts energy to do consciously what one ordinarily
experiences as automatic and unconscious movement. In a sense, black people
experience their body as an amputated, phantom body. Regarding the dissolu-
tion of the black subject within this racial epidermal schema, Fanon remarks,
“I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.
I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my
26. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black, 11, also see 41.
27. Ibid., 38. Wilderson III is aware of the fact that some might say that he is in danger of
staging an “oppression Olympics” in which the most oppressed—Jews, Indians, or blacks—
win. This temptation notwithstanding, comparative judgments can and will be made, and
one must tell the truth. One must also note that the charge of “oppression Olympics” almost
always arises when we are asked to attend to the specificity of black suffering. The hold of
the slave ship and the slave estate remain unthinkable within a European modernity that
thinks and speaks the Holocaust as ontological horizon even as it claims that it is unthink-
able and unspeakable. This reaction underscores Wilderson III’s point. Wilderson III extends
this assessment regarding “theoretical aphasia” to “cinema, political action, and cultural
studies” (Ibid., 56).
28. Ibid., 54–57.
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ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism,

intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else,
above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’.’”
This account of crushing objecthood and nonbeing, where black people have
“no ontological resistance in the eyes of ” white people, is crucial to the afro-
pessimist view. In addition to his University of California–Irvine colleague Jared
Sexton, Wilderson III identifies the following individuals as afro-pessimists:
Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, Ron-
ald Judy, Orlando Patterson, Lewis Gordon, Kara Feeling, George Yancy, and
Frantz Fanon. Wilderson III imports the term Afro-pessimism from the world
of development theory. It captures the view of many Africanists in economics,
area studies, and elsewhere during the 1980s who expressed skepticism about the
prospects of the African continent. They saw black Africa as politically corrupt:
a developmental basket case. On this pessimistic view, black Africa had failed
to adopt the political reforms and follow the market-centric strategies (pushed
by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other institutions of
global capitalist management) of their more prosperous Asian counterparts.29
Wilderson III reappropriated the term afro-pessimism. Under his resignification,
Afro-pessimism is an ontological account of white supremacy and the tenacity,
perdurance, and radicality of antiblackness.
To establish the ontological uniqueness of antiblackness, Wilderson III ex-
plores the ways that dispossession is imagined within four discourses: film the-
ory, commonsense political theory, political economy, and libidinal economy.
The latter two discourses refer, specifically, to Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri’s postindustrial Marxism and to Kaja Silverman’s Lacanian feminism.
They are especially important, as Wilderson III develops his own analytical
framework through a dialectical engagement of the two. Though he regards the
work of Hardt/Negri and Silverman as the most unflinching metacommentar-
ies on dispossession, they are ultimately inadequate to the task of accounting
for the dispossession of the socially dead. Hardt and Negri’s sophisticated
engagement with Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and civil society serve as a
foil for the analytic work of antiblackness and Afro-pessimism. Afro-pessimism
provides a critique of the limits of the categories of hegemony and civil society
and the kind of coalition politics they underwrite. On Wilderson III’s view,
the subject of alienation and exploitation, whether Marxist or Lacanian, does
not comprehend the objecthood of the Black, the civic position of the socially
29. As an example, see Sivuyile Mangxamba, “Africa Urged to Think Like India; ‘Afro-
pessimism Is One of the Key Stumbling Blocks for the Continent,’” Cape Argus, el Edition,
September 21, 2007.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 19 2/12/18 11:06 AM

dead. Indeed, civil society or “the commons” feeds on black death. Wilderson
III uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic triad, the Imaginary, the Symbolic,
and the Real, to illuminate the ontological positionality of blackness.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its
magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous
violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for
which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute
dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates
no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories
of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a past
without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of
the Imaginary, for “whoever says ‘rape’ says Black” (Fanon), whoever says
“prison” says Black, and whoever says “AIDS” says Black (Sexton)—the
“Negro is a phobogenic object” (Fanon).30
For Wilderson III, antiblackness (slavery, the afterlife of slavery, and social
death) describes the relationship between the collective subject that he vari-
ously calls Human, Settler, and Master, that is, white people, and the collective
object that he calls Slave, that is, black people.31 According to Wilderson III,
the categories of alienation and exploitation define the grammar of suffering
among Masters. These categories make suffering legible. Whether framed in
psychoanalytic or Marxist terms, alienation and exploitation are intra-Human
phenomena that fail to plumb the depths of the Human/Nonhuman, Master/
Slave relation.32 As dead objects blacks are haunted by a form of dispossession
that places them outside the semiotic systems of Humans. They are separated
from Marxist and psychoanalytic subjectivity by the hold of the slave ship, the
slave estate, and the afterlife of slavery. Here we encounter the accumulated and
fungible object—that sentient entity subject to “being owned and traded”—
versus the alienated and exploited subject of Marxism and psychoanalysis.33
Whether class or gender-based, alienation and exploitation are merely ontic
forms of dispossession in relation to the ontological character of antiblackness.
The Human/Object, Master/Slave, White/Black distinction is the basic antago-
nism defining American society. Blackness is the underside of humanism, the
consequence of humanism, the condition for the very possibility of human-
30. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social
Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 25.
31. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black, 25.
32. Ibid., 30.
33. Ibid., 10, 14, 18–19.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 20 2/12/18 11:06 AM

ism. Blackness is humanism’s abject: the disavowed ground of the conflicts

between labor and capital, citizen and subject, and among male, female, and
transgendered subjects.34 This antagonism between humanism and blackness is
structural with regard to the conflicts around political economy and libidinal
economy.35 Wilderson III contravenes the conventional Marxist construction
of antiblackness as a nonstructural, noncausal identity formation in relation
to the deep structure and causality of class. His notion of antagonism sweeps
dialectics aside. Unlike conflicts, there is no intrasystemic or dialectical resolu-
tion to an antagonism—neither Hegel nor Marx will do. Here we encounter
the Aristotelian logic of contraries, Kierkegaard’s either/or. Under this logic,
there is only the annihilation of one side or the other:36 thus, the pessimism of
Afro-pessimism. Wilderson III remarks, “Give Turtle Island back to the ‘Sav-
age.’ Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sentences, fourteen simple
words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be
dismantled.”37
Reference to the return of native people’s land shows that Wilderson III’s
position is actually broader than my initial account. It is also more pessimis-
tic. In his fuller account, we see a triangular set of relations between Red,
White, and Black, between “Savage,” Settler/Master, and Slave. Wilderson
III intentionally uses the pejorative term “Savage” so as to capture without
evasion or romanticism the actual status of indigenous people within the
American imagination and social order. He positions the “Savage” in an
ambiguous and vacillating space between Master and Slave. A film theorist
and critic, Wilderson III developed his critical apparatus in analyzing U.S.
films that illustrate the “structure of U.S. antagonisms,” that is, the social
relations on which the United States stands or falls. These two structural
antagonisms are genocide and slavery. In Democracy in America, Alexis De
Tocqueville adumbrates what Wilderson III calls “the structure of U.S an-
tagonisms.” Under the heading “The Three Races that Inhabit the United
States,” de Tocqueville remarks:
From whatever angle one regards the destinies of the North American na-
tives, one sees nothing but irremediable ills: if they remain savages, they are
driven along before the march of progress; if they try to become civilized,
contact with more-civilized people delivers them over to oppression and
34. Ibid., 3, 11,13, 18, 20. Humanism is not merely raced as non-black but as antiblack.
35. Ibid., 44.
36. Ibid, 5.
37. Ibid., 2–3.
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misery. If they go on wandering in the wilderness, they perish; if they at-

tempt to settle, they perish just the same.38
The Indians die as they have lived, in isolation; but the fate of the Ne-
groes is in a sense linked with that of the Europeans. The two races are
bound one to the other without mingling; it is equally difficult for them to
separate completely or to unite. The most formidable evil threatening the
future of the United States is the presence of the blacks on their soil. From
whatever angle one sets out to inquire into the present embarrassments or
future dangers facing the United States, one is almost always brought up
against this basic fact (emphasis added).39
What de Tocqueville describes as a basic fact in 1842, Wilderson calls the

structure of U.S. antagonisms. But where the White/Black encounter can only
be understood as a structural, that is, ontological antagonism, the Red/White
encounter can be understood as either antagonism or conflict, as a question of
genocide or loss sovereignty. Sovereignty is a common ethical-political gram-
mar through which Red and White can communicate and come to some kind
of modus vivendi. The notion that Indians loss their sovereignty through their
encounter with Europeans is a form of suffering that Whites can understand,
which fits into their “grammar of suffering,” namely, alienation and exploita-
tion.40 While acknowledging that they do good and necessary work, Wilderson
III reconstructs Marxism and psychoanalysis as regional disciplines, as critiques
of conflicts that fail to engage the positionality of Slave and “Savage,” the onto-
logical antagonisms of slavery and genocide. Like slavery, genocide breaks that
grammar apart and exceeds its capacity to confer structure, order, and mean-
ing. Genocide and slavery stand in the position of the unthought. But when
the encounter between Red and White is understood through the grammar of
loss sovereignty, the antagonism—the ontological, life and death positioning of
Red and White—is evaded. This evasion is what we see, Wilderson III argues,
in most “Native American film, political texts, and ontological meditations.”41
38. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), 338–39.
39. Ibid., 340.
40. Ibid., 28, also see 46–49, 150. Wilderson III remarks: “The thesis [of Red, White and
Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms] seeks to mark film studies, feminism,
psychoanalysis, and Marxism as White, and to de-essentialize the suffering which animates
them, humiliating them I the face of the Slave and that part of the ‘Savage’ positioned,
ontologically, by genocide as opposed to sovereignty” (ibid., 247). This is at once the most
concise and comprehensive statement of Wilderson III’s aim.
41. Wilderson III (ibid., 28, 162–64) refers in particular to Chris Eyre’s 2002 film Skins; Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; and the work of Vine Deloria Jr. and Ward Churchill.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 22 2/12/18 11:06 AM

He captures this positional ambiguity by saying that within the ontology of

life and death, where Whites are living and Blacks are dead, Indigenous People
are half dead.42 They vacillate between the grammars of loss sovereignty and
genocide, between the ontologies of life and death.
Ontologically speaking, blacks are unambiguously dead. Their contemporary
status is stereotyped by their historical status as accumulated and fungible
objects, that is to say, by the fact that they were enslaved and traded.43 Both
historically and ontologically, the enslaved African is the unthought. Blacks are
in a position of imaginative and narrative impossibility. They are outside the
normative American grammar of suffering. The suffering of black people is
unthinkable. Indeed, black people are a problem for thought. Black people are a
philosophical problem.44 As the gravitational black hole around which American
identity revolves, black people as a problem for thought, as the position of the
unthought, the unthinkable provide the narrative coherence of the national
order and the subject position of white people. To put it bluntly, the object-
hood of blacks underwrites the subjecthood of whites.45 Fundamentally, white
people are not black. Abject blackness founds whiteness. This positionality is
endlessly reproduced in recurrent scenes of subjection. “Scenes of subjection”
is Saidiya Hartman’s term for the abject performances that blacks are made to
endure: from entertaining slaveholders through forced acts of merriment, to
the requirement that black suffering be made legible to white people through
the ostentatious performance of pristine innocence and docility, to the deadly
protocols that define the encounter between black people and the police. These
scenes of subjection and many more are part of an endless loop.
V. Black Optimism/Operation
As far as I can tell, Fred Moten first developed the idea of black optimism/
black operation in a talk he gave in 2007. The next year he published a short
article simply titled “Black Op.” Black op is a shortened version of the black
optimism/black operation couplet. He further developed the idea in “The Fact
42. Ibid., 25, also see 48–50, 153, 197.

43. Ibid., 14.
44. See Nahum Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013).
45. Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,”
Qui Parle, 13, no. 2 (2003): 184–85, 187–88. Wilderson III claims that antiblack solidarity
is foundational to the Settler/Master (humans or white people), to their nonblack junior
partners, and to the coherence of civil society and the global semantic field (Red, White
and Black, 28, 58).
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 23 2/12/18 11:06 AM

of Blackness.” The difference between black op and afro-pessimism, as Moten

understands it, pivots on divergent interpretations of Frantz Fanon’s phenom-
enology of blackness, his account of the lived experience of black people.
Unlike the view that he ascribes to afro-pessimists, Moten rejects the notion
that black people, as the historical subjects of slavery and colonialism, are pure
absence; the artifact of imposition and negation; a socially dead, nonhuman,
pathological entity without remainder. While Fanon’s analysis invites this in-
terpretation, it ignores a fugitive movement of escape within his own account.
Though Fanon disavows his own insights about the fugitive movement within
pathology against pathology, within social death against social death, there is
no good reason to do so. When we disregard Fanon’s disavowal, what we see in
black social life is a capacity to imagine things otherwise and a fugitive practice
of freedom: a black operation against the capture, enclosure, and pathologies of
social death. In short, black social life is stolen life; a “criminal” operation, by
those designated as criminal, against the social death of slavery and antiblack-
ness. It is a theft of being: a form of ontological resistance to antiblackness. This
fugitive resistance is black op: black optimism that manifests as an operation,
a performance against a perdurant antiblackness. This optimism recognizes
the paraontological difference between black people and blackness, between
blackness as fugitive social life and antiblackness as social death. Like the jug
in Heidegger’s “The Thing,” blackness is not merely absence. Blackness in its
multifariousness gathers the fourfold of earth, sky, divinity, and mortals. In
this fourfold, the fugitive social life of black people appears.46
Moten takes his own social location as an academic intellectual as the starting
place for reflecting on black optimism. This is not an act of navel gazing but
an effort to root his analysis in the concrete realities of his lived experience as a
critic. Moten develops the idea of black op most extensively in a work that he
coauthored with Stefano Harney who is a professor of strategic management
education. Their text is titled The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study. This text shows Moten’s ambition and creativity. For Moten and his
coauthor, paraontological blackness, the difference between black people and
the being of black people, provides a prism through which to better understand
the contemporary operations of capital and the modern university. After all,
from their status as cargo in the hold of slave ships, which launched the “sci-
ence” of logistics, to the academic discipline of criminology, black people have
been an “underprivileged” object of both.
Moten and Harney use three conceptual metaphors—logistics, policy, and
governance—for the depredations of capitalism in its contemporary, post-
46. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 182–85, 187, 215.
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 24 2/12/18 11:06 AM

Fordist, hyperflexible, highly marketized (neoliberal) form. Where logistics

roots, historically, in the management needs of the slave shipping industry,
policy is an orientation toward post-Fordism and neoliberalism that sells risk,
contingency, and precarity in the guise of hope.47 The policy metaphor also
captures concerted efforts by the post-Fordist state and its deputies to extend
the reach of markets, to convert everything into a market, to commodify the
reproduction of social life itself. Moten and Harney argue that policy manifests,
chiefly, as “governance,” which they distinguish from both the political science
notion of government and Foucault’s concept of governmentality. “Governance
is most importantly a new form of expropriation. It is the provocation of a
certain kind of display, a display of interests as disinterestedness, a display
of convertibility, a display of legibility . . . where the public and the private
submit themselves to post-Fordist production.”48 Indeed, governance, policy,
and logistics are three names for the same thing, that is, marketization, profit
extraction, labor management, and social control—what Moten and Harney
call “conquest” and “command.” These processes of capture, extraction, and
administration are on full display in the modern university.
The undercommons is Moten and Harney’s term for a utopian space (a
good place, a nonplace and practice) within the university where “study,” as
they define it, is radically subversive. Understood as being with and doing with
others in a nonteleological, nonadministered, nonentrepreneurial, and market-
centered way, study radically subverts the atomizing and privatizing orientation
of the university. Study is social, collaborative, and political work; the act of
determining what and how to study; it is collective self-development, a form
of intellectual free play outside systems of credit and accreditation, outside
instrumentalism of any kind. The market logic of the university makes study
in this radical sense extremely difficult. Mimicking the behavior of the state
and the corporation, the university seeks to recruit its student constituent into
circuits of credit and debit. Like the black radical tradition, which Moten and
Harney describe as unconsolidated debt, the undercommons celebrates “bad
debit”; debit, separated from credit; debt that should not be paid, that cannot
be repaid. On this view, student debt must be disconnected from credit and thus
become bad debt.49 In summary, the undercommons is that neglected and/or
“illegitimate,” insurrectionary, and fugitive nonplace within the university but
47. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 76–77. In effect, Moten and Harney argue that
“policy” has reoccupied (Hans Blumenberg) and resignified (Judith Butler) “hope talk” as
exemplified variously by Jessie Jackson and Cornel West.
48. Ibid., 80.
49. Ibid., 65, 66–67.
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outside as well where people gather together and do what they are not supposed
to do.50 According to Moten and Harney, what subversives do in this fugitive
public of study, this place of refuge and bad debt,”51 is plan: “We plan. We
plan to stay, to stick and move. We plan to be communist about communism,
to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition,
here, in that other, undercommon place, as that other, undercommon thing,
that we preserve by inhabiting. Policy can’t see it, policy can’t read it, but it’s
intelligible if you got a plan.”52
The undercommons and its constitutive concepts are poetic performance
and theoretical provocation. They say more than they mean and mean more
than they say. While Moten and Harney provide the reader with some clues
as to how their words should be read, the reader has to overread or underread
these terms, as the case may be, and run where the theory, play of metaphors,
and poetic inspiration takes them. My attribution to them of specific views
comes with the caveat that this kind of written performance, that is, poeticize/
theory, invites strong misreadings and divergent appropriations.
If the university institutionalizes the Enlightenment in the contemporary West,
then the undercommons is that utopian space in which the subversive intellectual
operates, where, as Moten and Harney put it, “the work gets done, the work
gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.”53 While bearing
the undeniable trace of afro-pessimism, which ontologizes antiblackness, the
notion of the undercommons expresses a revolutionary, afro-tragic optimism.
The undercommons refers to runagate, maroon, and fugitive sites within the
university, which has been captured by the state and the corporation and, in
turn, strives to capture and discipline noninstrumental and nonproductive ener-
gies. Moten and Harney claim that the university is a site of professionalization,
even when we encounter it in the form of the oppositional or critical intellectual.
Professionalization and its putative opponent, the critical intellectual, are two
sides of the university’s state and corporate-serving ethos. As a practical matter,
intentions notwithstanding, the critical academic is a performative contradiction.
This intellectual criticizes the professional ethos of the university, its atomizing
and privatizing functions, while ignoring the way that this same indifference to
the social determinants of life characterizes his being in the academy.54 I use the
50. Stefano Harney, interview by Tim Edkins, part 5: “On Study,” July 2011, https://www.you
tube.com/watch?v=7wIoBdY72do.
51. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 61.
52. Ibid., 82.
53. Ibid., 26.
54. Ibid., 32, 39.
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pronoun “he,” but the critical academic may also be “she” or “they.” Whatever
the pronoun, this disavowal of relationality, and all of the theoretical and prac-
tical consequences entailed, is the very definition of professionalization. The
university and its oppositional critic engage in an elaborate act of performance
art that leaves the professionalizing status quo in place.
“If the labor upon labor, the labor among labor of the unprofessionals in the
university sparks revolt, retreat, release, does the labor of the critical academic
not involve a mockery of this first labor, a performance that is finally in its lack
of concern for what it parodies, negligent?”55 Here Moten and Harney criticize
the academic critic for ignoring the labor problem right under their noses, their
complicity with multiple forms of academic labor exploitation, and their effort
to distance themselves from responsibility through professionalization critique.
This critique, they emphasize, reproduces the very object of the critique. Both
the professions and their codependent academic critics accomplish this distanc-
ing by denying the social nature of academic labor and production. Under these
circumstances, the only real option for the subversive intellectual is academic
criminality. Criminality is the opposite of professionalization. Criminality is
also one of the dominant tropes of blackness.56 Indeed, as I note elsewhere,
the escaped slave is the prototypical criminal in the American imagination.57 (In
this inverted imaginary, black freedom is the heart of darkness, the site of a
primal crime.) Like an escaped slave, the subversive intellectual steals her life
from the university, from capture, enclosure, and administration. She steals
enlightenment for others from the university the way that Prometheus stole
fire from the gods.58 On this view, the university reproduces knowledge of how
to neglect the social determinates of life.59
Engaging, perhaps, in a bit of hyperbole, Moten and Harney claim that
universities are not the opposite of jails. On the contrary, the professionalizing
ethos of universities, the attempt to commodify everything, to turn everyone—
faculty, students, and staff—into entrepreneurs, profit centers, makes them
complicit with the commercial and industrial logic of mass incarceration.60
55. Ibid., 39.

56. Of course, the very category of criminality is political. In the broadest sense, all criminals
are political criminals. Crime is a manifestation of the prevailing social relations.
57. See William D. Hart, “Dead Black Man, Just Walking,” in Pursing Trayvon Martin:
Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, ed. George Yancy and
Janine Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 95.
59. Ibid., 40.
60. Ibid., 41.
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But maybe there is no hyperbole at all. Where the logic of mass incarceration
manifests on the elementary and secondary level as the school to prison pipe-
line, its phenomenology within the college and university is different. While
mass incarceration is not solely a “black thing,” it might very well be the pri-
mary manifestation of antiblackness (and class warfare). In contrast to the
university commons with its multiple ties to the carceral state, the logic of the
undercommons is abolition; the abolition of slavery, prisons, and wage labor.61
It is an open question as to whether this logic extends in a more anarchist
direction that includes the abolition of the police and their replacement with
a community defense model of providing for our common security.
Moten and Harney argue that the distinction between the American uni-
versity and professionalization has collapsed. The state and corporation have
the university fully in their grasp: abstract individualism, privatization, and
neglect of the social reign supreme. They refer, of course, to the corporate
university, but their analysis goes far beyond the typical account. On their
view, a professional education and a critical education are the same thing,
two sides of the same reality.62 “Critical thinking” has been colonized by the
professions. “Critical thinking is now an auxiliary form of professionalization.
The modern university, which operates increasingly as the tool of the state and
the corporation, is at war with the requirements of social life; hence the need
for subversive study and planning. Such study and planning must confront the
role of the university in its work of conquest-denial.
Conquest is Moten and Harney’s term for the war against society by the
state and corporation and increasingly by the university. Conquest refers to
multiples layers of historical subjection: from the conquest of America—the
dispossession and genocide of the indigenous people and the trans-Atlantic
enslavement of African people—to the conquest of labor by capital and its
ramification in racialized, nationalized, and gendered stratifications. The con-
quest is shot through with blackness. Lest we forget, blackness is a complex
idea that encompasses the paraontological difference between black people and
blackness, that is, black people and the being of black people. Black people
have a unique but not an exclusive relationship to blackness. Thus the sub-
versive intellectual is always in the position of the runaway slave. As fugitive
sites within the university, the undercommons is contaminated and ambigu-
ous. The undercommons both reproduces university-style governance—such
as the credit/debt bondage into which millions of students are enrolled—and
the means of escape. The undercommons is a nonplace of study and fugi-
61. Ibid., 41–43.

62. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 37–39.
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tive planning, where we dream dreams and plot strategies of escape. As the
radical historian Robin Kelly interprets Moten and Harney, the task of the
subversive intellectual is to expose and resist the university’s “labor exploita-
tion, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege
often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and
security.”63 The subversive intellectual does not have to look elsewhere, as if
the real struggle is somewhere else, outside the academy, in the so-called “real
world.” In concert with the state and the corporation, the university produces
the real world. From the undercommons, with its intersecting forms of differ-
ence, the subversive intellectual, the maroon, the guerilla, the counterinsurgent
makes class war. She does so because the university is an institution of labor
exploitation that reproduces the domestic and international division of labor,
power, and prestige. Like every other major American institution, the university
is rooted in the economy and society of plantation slavery. It is rooted in the
world that racial capitalism made and that antiblackness continues to remake.
To quote Robin Kelly: “The undercommons is a fugitive network where a
commitment to abolition and collectivity prevails over a university culture
bent on creating socially isolated individuals whose academic skepticism and
claims of objectivity leave the world-as-it-is intact.”64 The undercommons
incorporates the enslaved, fugitive, and maroon experiences of black people
but is not exclusively a black thing: to reiterate, “blackness must be under-
stood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless
(under-)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.”65 This
underprivilege represents both proximity and disadvantage simultaneously.
Potentially, anyone can be subjected to paraontological blackness, to the anti-
blackness that characterizes the being of black folks. Toni Morrison captured
this potential when she described Bill Clinton as the first black president. The
vilification of Clinton during the Whitewater investigation, the policing of his
sexuality, his body metaphorically seized and searched, stopped and frisked
was oddly familiar as it channeled many of the tropes of black being, the be-
ing of blackness.66 But Bill Clinton is the exceptional case. In contrast, black
people are the “usual suspects,” the underprivileged subjects of antiblackness.
As Moten and Harney use the term, paraontological blackness encompasses
63. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, forum post, March 7,
2016, http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle.
64. Ibid.
66. Toni Morrison, comment in The Talk of the Town, New Yorker Magazine, October 5,
1998, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543.
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the difference between black people and the being of black people, blackness
and antiblackness, and blackness as a racial designation versus blackness as a
social ontology where—under the right circumstances—anyone can be treated
like a black person, a nigger, a slave.
Moten and Harney’s eccentric use of paraontological blackness, which moves
on a tangent from Nahum Chandler’s original use, provides the prism through
which they understand contemporary capitalism. Capitalism was and is a ra-
cialized phenomenon. Black people entered the emerging capitalist economy
as commodities. They were a kind of commodity that Marx never properly
understood. Black people were both use value and exchange value. They were
sentient commodities who screamed;67 commodities who talked and learned
to read; commodities who dreamed of freedom, planned and executed their
escape, and established maroon communities in the fugitive commons of the
swamp, the bush, the hills. It should not surprise us then that resistance to
capitalism is a black thing, the work of black study. Blackness and black studies
has a dialogical and dialectical relationship with racial capitalism, from chattel
slavery to its afterlife as the antiblack carceral state.
VI. Conclusion: Pessimism and Optimism as Di-polar Reality

In the introduction, I posed five interrelated questions: What is the causal rela-
tion between race and racism? Is racism a capitalist or precapitalist formation?
How do we account for the perdurance of antiblack racism, is antiblackness
an artifact of capitalism or a feature of Western metaphysis? Is antiblack rac-
ism a consequent or an antecedent reality, a historical artifact or a product
of a white “transcendental imagination?” Whether consequent or antecedent
reality, doesn’t antiblack racism represent the social, political, and ethical on-
tology of contemporary American life? I concluded that racism is the parent
of race. Further, I endorsed Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism,
that is, the claim that capitalism has always been a racial formation even if its
earliest articulations were not antiblack. Even though it has become deeply
imbricated with the formation and maintenance of capitalism, antiblackness is
an antecedent reality. Further, we should never forget that racism and race are
always already structured by white supremacy. Regarding the metaphysical and
transcendental character of antiblackness, I embrace, more or less, Wilderson
III’s and Moten’s convergent but discrepant arguments for the ontological/
paraontological status of antiblackness.
67. See Fred Moten, “Visible Music,” in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), location 3661, “Tonality of
Totality,” Kindle.
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This brings us to afro-pessimism and black optimism as responses to anti-

blackness. Antiblackness presupposes blackness. What is the status of black-
ness? Is blackness an artifact of whiteness or an antecedent reality, what Jared
Sexton calls an ante-antiblackness? A blackness, so to speak, that is nonreactive
and nonoppositional to whiteness, which is something other than an artifact of
whiteness, racism, and race. Does blackness have a positive content, something
regarding which black people have a proprietary interest? As I read Nahum
Chandler, blackness encompasses both black people and the being of black
people. Blackness is ambiguous. As such, blackness has both positive and nega-
tive content, which necessarily produces an ambivalent subject. The person
subject to blackness is alienated, an exile. Blackness does not allow the subject
to make up her mind about its normative status. Here I analogize from Charles
Hartshorne’s “dipolar” conception of God68 to antiblackness and the relations
between afro-pessimism and black optimism. Hartshorne famously argued that
God’s characteristics contain contraries such as one/many, simple/complex, im-
manent/transcendent, perfect/imperfect, and so on. God is internally related to
everything not God. God is relative to these relations. This divine relativity is
constitutive. What I suggest, in short, is that afro-pessimism and black optimism
are co-constitutive. This is a family affair. Given their shared sensibility and
vocabulary, there is something of the “narcissism of small differences” at work
between afro-pessimists and black optimists. They are dipolar expressions of
a common ontological and ethical-political formation. The ambiguity of the
constitutive relations of blackness creates an irremediable ambivalence. Chan-
neling this ambiguity, the differences between the pessimists and optimists is
more a matter of accent than deep grammar.
These commonalities notwithstanding, I conclude with a final consideration
of the differences. In the last analysis, optimism is a matter of imagination, the
ability to craft a narrative that sustains hope, the capacity to imagine things oth-
erwise. Wilderson III uses the term “the structure of U.S. antagonisms”—that
is, slavery and its antiblack afterlife, civil society and humanism as antiblack
solidarity—to describe the either/or, world-making and world-destroying re-
lationship between black and white. Given the violently produced ontology of
Humans and Nonhumans and Masters and Slaves that Wilderson III describes,
Afro-pessimism represents a powerful challenge to any notion of optimism.
Any version of optimism worthy of serious attention must run the gauntlet of
afro-pessimism and its foundational concepts of Negro phobogenesis and social
death. Black optimism attempts to meet the challenge. Though it travels the
68. See Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven,
CT: Yale University, 1948).
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same conceptual paths as afro-pessimism, black optimism finds lines of escape

in the fugitive and maroon experience of the runagate slave. The slave may be
socially dead, but she can imagine things otherwise; she can run, hide, and
engage in fugitive and insurgent actions against antiblackness. Black optimism
is not a bad utopianism: a movie that provides two hours of drama, suspense,
and catharsis while reassuring the white viewer (or black viewer for that mat-
ter) that everything is alright. There is no Hollywood ending. This optimism
is anticathartic. This is optimism in the face of a perdurant antiblackness that
engages but exceeds the logic of capital. There is no saccharine in this drink,
no averting of one’s gaze in this vision, no attempt to make things appear bet-
ter than they are. On the contrary, this is an optimism ripped from the hands
of afro-pessimism without disavowing the strength and deep wisdom in their
grasp. This kind of optimism stands in the shadow of afro-pessimism but never
loses sight of the light, the prospect of freedom, the dream of dancing in the
moonlight. Black optimism is an impossible performance made necessary by
its very impossibility. Or, as Moten puts it, “there is cause for optimism as long
as there is a need for optimism. Cause and need converge in the bent school
or marginal church in which we gather together to be in the name of being
otherwise.”69 On the ground of groundless hope, the slave escapes captivity
and retrieves her body from flesh-making violence and social death.
A foundational figure among the so-called afro-pessimists, Jared Sexton has
reservations about the signifying power of the term. His wariness in no small
part has to do with the unsympathetic attributions of critics. He claims that
Moten’s account of the relations between afro-pessimism and black optimism
rests on a basic misinterpretation. Moten’s oppositional dualism of social death
versus social life encodes a misunderstanding of the actual relations of these
constituent realities and, in turn, mischaracterizes the aims of afro-pessimism.
On Sexton’s view, “black life is lived in social death.” Contra Moten, there is
nothing in the concept of afro-pessimism that denies fugitive movements of
escape. Black optimism is always already a constitutive element of black social
life lived in social death. However, the difference between the pessimists and
optimists is not merely verbal. There is a substantive disagreement about the
world, the relationship between black people and the world, whether black
people, under the conditions of social death, have a world at all. Under the
conditions of social death, are black people more akin to humans or to Hei-
degger’s worldless lizard, soaking up sun on a rock? Is worldhood an existential
structure of blacks, are blacks Dasein? This is the kind of question at stake
between pessimists and optimists.
69. Moten, “Black Op,” 1747.
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This question of world cannot be separated from the world-destroying reality

of slavery and social death. Chronic violence and dishonor shadow and haunt
the being of black people. On this view, fugitivity, maroonage, and stolen life
do not address the prior question of the worldhood of blacks. Where black
optimism construes fugitive movement as an escape from social death, afro-
pessimists see these movements as among the myriad ways that social death is
lived. Whether the black radical tradition, as adumbrated by Cedric Robinson,
or the radical tradition of black artistic expression, as Moten characterizes
it, there is no performative escape from social death. Regarding such perfor-
mances—including the bent school and marginal church performances, the
black operations that Moten references in the article “Black Op”—Sexton
responds by quoting Wilderson III: “Such gatherings are always haunted by
a sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every
gesture. This is where performance meets ontology.” In “The Social Life of
Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” Sexton remarks,
Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism,
just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it
and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing
in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black
life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil
society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place,
of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in com-
mon with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the
modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world
lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space.70
In conclusion, antiblackness must be understood in it radical singularity. Ac-

cording to Wilderson III, antiblackness is ontological, a structural antagonism.
According to Moten and Harney, the “general antagonism”71 of difference
produces an awareness of the paraontological nature of blackness; blackness
that is anterior to antiblackness, an ante-antiblackness. As the black radical
tradition, this ante-antiblackness represents a dialectical, “yes” and “no” dia-
logue with the Marxist tradition. For both afro-pessimists and black optimists,
antiblackness has an ontological or paraontological status that the dominant
explanatory logics, including capital, cannot fully comprehend. This excess
dimension of antiblackness is anterior to, outside of, and beneath all dialectics,
whether Socratic, Hegelian, or Marxist.
70. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death,” Intensions 5 (2011): 28.
71. Moten and Harney describe the “general antagonism” as “the sense of dispossession
and possession by the dispossessed” (Undercommons, 109).
AJTP 39_1 text.indd 33 2/12/18 11:06 AM

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Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism

Author(s): William David Hart

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslave-

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and Philosophical Thought (IARPT). But the relevance of those traditions

4. Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text

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II. Slavery and Capitalism

5. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Antheneum,

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As Baptist’s analysis shows, American enslavers, the CEOs of slave-labor

11. Ibid., 141–42 (all quotes).

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16. Ibid., 411.

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III. The Marxist-Inflected Debate on Slavery

Table 1. Capitalism and/or Metaphysics

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categorical, the centrality of the ontological question—that is, the “whiteness

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1. Capitalism is the international division of labor, income, wealth, power,

AJTP 39_1 text.indd 16 2/12/18 11:06 AM

To simplify the debate between afro-pessimists24 and black optimists, I focus

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canonical article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Affectively and normatively,

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ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism,

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ism. Blackness is humanism’s abject: the disavowed ground of the conflicts

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misery. If they go on wandering in the wilderness, they perish; if they at-

What de Tocqueville describes as a basic fact in 1842, Wilderson calls the

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He captures this positional ambiguity by saying that within the ontology of

42. Ibid., 25, also see 48–50, 153, 197.

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of Blackness.” The difference between black op and afro-pessimism, as Moten

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Fordist, hyperflexible, highly marketized (neoliberal) form. Where logistics

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55. Ibid., 39.

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61. Ibid., 41–43.

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VI. Conclusion: Pessimism and Optimism as Di-polar Reality

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This brings us to afro-pessimism and black optimism as responses to anti-

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same conceptual paths as afro-pessimism, black optimism finds lines of escape

69. Moten, “Black Op,” 1747.

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This question of world cannot be separated from the world-destroying reality

In conclusion, antiblackness must be understood in it radical singularity. Ac-

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