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 https://groundings.simplecast.com/episodes/the-unlogic-of-afro-pessimism-and-anti 

If one can imagine why, in strength, the hand of solidarity is easily extended, this raises pertinent questions about the contemporary political arena. The 1980s neoliberal backlash against the increasing political power of the Third World and its diasporas in the West has resulted in a chronically weak Left and a restructuring of the economic and social relations upon which communities were conceived. It is in this context that the #BlackLivesMatter movement and more academically-directed decolonisation movements such as Rhodes Must Fall have emerged and spread across the globe. Both movements, and their eponymous slogans, intervene in a historically unprecedented moment, where identity-based social justice politics have largely replaced class politics. While Union density in Europe and North America is waning and the language of class is increasingly scarce, a new brand of identity politics is on the ascendancy in many arenas, not least university campuses.

Though Afro-pessimism could well do without contemporary identity politics, and intersectionality, its most recognisable watchword – and in many ways is trying to – it is a gap left by intersectionality, in accounting for the existence (rather than nature) of oppression that has brought it into political spaces. Thus, in order to understand the zeitgeist of anti-racist organising today, we must be allowed to fearlessly interrogate the two as integrative, with an implicit social theory which is profoundly limited in what it conceives of as politically possible. Without the transformative and clarifying power of struggle, the theoretical tension between individual and structure with which Afro-pessimism is confronted, just like in Crenshaw’s juridical theory, is resolved through a particular concept of identity as the manner in which structure manifests in individuals. This leaves us with a social theory that treats structures of domination as pathogenic, creating multiple oppressor and oppressed binaries. Against the pathologisation of the oppressed, this politics pathologises ‘privilege’. It results in a logic which dictates that not to share in the experiences which are generalised among a given group is to be implicated in the oppression of that group. In other words, it means the impossibility of genuine solidarity.

Afro-pessimism meets this charge by positing an ‘anti-black’ solidarity among ‘non-black’ people. Thus, it is concerning that the framework acts as a mechanism of determining social power (the right to speak on or organise around issues) in political spaces with three key premises: Firstly, collapsing the distinction between ‘blackness’ as a project of mystification – along with its social, political and economic processes of non-consensual ethnicisation – and ‘Africanness’ as a historical fact. Secondly, the essentialisation of blackness, as a coherent and stable category that was invested with a set of stigmatising values by imperial encounters, rather than being de facto created by the imperial encounters themselves. Third, the collectivisation of ‘black’ trauma within an imaginary, which is reminiscent of Black Nationalism, and sees the transatlantic slave trade as simultaneously an origin-story and an (albeit crucial) event in the longer trajectory of a coherent people