Abolishment the base

Here is what I mean when I say that I am an Abolitionist on racial issues:

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains".- Rosa Luxemberg 

When transracialism becomes mainstream, and I am at one with that ideology,

I will then push Afro Pessimism's idea of negating the negation  as a form of abolishment 

After the “nonevent of emancipation,”4 slavery did not simply give way to freedom. Instead, the legal disavowal of ownership reorganized domination and the former slave became the racialized Black “subject,” whose position was marked epidermally, per Frantz Fanon.5

What followed was a profound entrenchment of the concept of race, both psychically and juridically. Formally, the Black subject was no longer a slave, but the same formative relation of structural violence that maintained slavery remained—upheld explicitly by the police (former slave catchers) and white supremacy generally—hence preserving the equation that Black equals socially dead. 

Just as wanton violence was a constituent element of slavery, so it is to Blackness. Given the ongoing accumulation of Black death at the hands of the police—even despite increased visibility in recent years—it becomes apparent that a Black person on the street today faces open vulnerability to violence just as the slave did on the plantation. 

That there has recently been such an increase in media coverage and yet little decrease in murder reveals the ease with which anti-Black violence can be ignored by white society; at the same time this reveals that when one is Black one needn’t do anything to be targeted, as Blackness itself is criminalized. 

With this understanding of slavery and Blackness, Afro-pessimism makes a critical shift in focus by moving away from the Black/ white binary and reframing it as Black/non-Black, in order to deemphasize the status of whiteness and to center analysis, rather, on the anti-Black foundations of race and modern society.

In other words, “it is racial blackness as a necessary condition for enslavement that matters most, rather than whiteness as a sufficient condition for freedom.”6

As a result, it is Blackness, and more specifically anti-Blackness, that gives coherence to categories of non-Black—white, worker, gay, i.e., “human.”

Categories of non-Black must establish their boundaries for inclusion in a group (humanity) by having a recognizable self within. There must also, consequently, be an outside to each group, and, as with the concept of humanity, it is Blackness that is without; it is Blackness that is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black. 

Experientially, subjects, even Black ones, can obviously find themselves with any myriad identities, but ontologically Blackness is still violently excluded from even the meager scraps given when recognized.

The distinction that Afro-pessimism makes is important because

it problematizes any positive affirmation of identity7

—as non6. Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of

Slavery.”

7. This doesn’t altogether eliminate the possibilities for organizing

introduction

10

Black categories are defined against the Blackness they are not,

this relation of race indirectly (and directly, e.g., white teens’ racist

snapchats) sustains anti-Blackness by producing and sustaining

racialized categories. Stated otherwise, “the violence of antiblackness produces black existence; there is no prior positive blackness that could be potentially appropriated. Black existence

is simultaneously produced and negated by racial domination,
both as presupposition and consequence. 

Affirmation of blackness
proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming the
violence that structures black subjectivity itself.”8

Afro-pessimism departs with this understanding and illuminates
the limits and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power
movements, such as their reformist ideologies concerning progress
and their disastrous integration with bureaucratic machinery. 

If, as Afro-pessimism shows, it is not possible to affirm Blackness
itself without at the same time affirming anti-Black violence, then
the attempts at recognition and inclusion in society will only ever
result in further social and real death. 

Individuals can of course
achieve some status in society through “structural adjustment”9
(i.e., a kind of “whitening” effect), as has been superficially
confirmed, but Blackness as a racialized category remains the
object of gratuitous, constituent violence—as demonstrated
by police murders, mass incarceration, urban planning, and
surveillance (from cointelpro to special security codes at stores
to indicate when Black customers enter). 

As Blackness is negated
by the relations and structures of society, Afro-pessimism posits
that the only way out is to negate that negation.