"Because you don't understand that you, for me, are my prison. You are my warden. I am battling you."

Source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSdE55BFf-D/

#afropessimism

"Whiteness, then, and by extension civil society, cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an a signifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets.

In short, white people are not simply “protected” by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police."

-- Frank Wilderson, "The Prison Slave As Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal." p. 9
https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/Wilderson-Prison-slave-READ.pdf

#afropessimism

"Palestinians despise the courts. We hate the sight of a judge, knowing all too well that they are no different from the interrogator. We loathe the law and all it stands for in our context—a tool for oppression cloaked in legality. Even the lawyers, perhaps universally disliked, evoke our mistrust. But for us, the courts represent more than frustration; they are the place where our oppressive conditions are translated into legal language, where the weight of colonial domination is formalized with a veneer of legitimacy."
by Abdaljawad Omar, in “The ICC warrants: Palestinian skepticism and the glimpse of justice,” 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/11/the-icc-warrants-palestinian-skepticism-and-the-glimpse-of-justice/

cited in https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/

@palestine 🧶

#othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #antiBlackness #slavery #BlackMastodon #AfroPessimism #beliefs #institutionsDeceive #justice #judicialBias #legality #legitimacy #IHL #internationalLaw #law #OPT #WestBank #JewishSupremacy #Mondoweiss

"Abstract: This essay addresses the tenets of Afro-Pessimism in relation to the condition of slavery, Blackness, and Black nonexistence. It is contended that the condition of Blackness is unique, is coterminous with Slaveness, and is synonymous with social death, and that for slaves there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, a moment of equilibrium, or a moment of social life. The lack of narrative and historicity are discussed as related to Slaveness and social death as well as to the organizational calculus of the Humanities writ large. At the heart of this essay is the assertion that Black emplotment is a catastrophe for narrative at a meta-level rather than a crisis or aporia within a particular narrative. Social death is aporetic with respect to narrative writ large (and, by extension, to redemption, writ large)."

#afropessimism

"Now, what's really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only explain how the positionality of black women and white women differs, but you also suggest how blackness disarticulates the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You write: "[B]eing forced to submit to the will of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery". In other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say that she is ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured laborer, be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case, sex] is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option ....Consent is unseemly in a context in which the very notion of subjectivity is predicated upon the negation of will".

— Frank Wilderson interviewing Saidiya Hartman, "The Position of the Unthought", p. 186
https://ctanarchiststudygroup.noblogs.org/files/2016/11/saidiya-hartman-the-position-of-the-unthought-an-interview-with-saidiya-v-hartman-conducted-by-frank-b-wilderson-iii.pdf

#afropessimism #gendertheory

Chatting with @jalcine reminded me about this, one of my favorite interviews that Frank Wilderson has ever done, also a good introduction to #afropessimism imo

https://imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/

"There is something organic to the black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the black body.

Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.

In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the prison abolition movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting.

In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness."

— Frank Wilderson, "The Prison Slave As Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal"

#afropessimism