Response to Weddington: More Lessons from Afro-pessimism

Response to Weddington’s Critiques

A major weakness in Weddington’s response to our article is that it ignores our engagement with CRT, leading to a misrepresentation of our position. We understand Afro-pessimism and CRT as related (but sometimes conflicting) groups of theory that are underused in sociology. Although CRT is making important mainstream inroads in the study of the state (Bracey 2015), the production of racial ignorance (Mueller 2018), and more recently globalization (Christian forthcoming), Afro-pessimism remains largely unacknowledged, even though these bodies of thought can trace a shared intellectual lineage through the likes of sociologists such as Du Bois (1935) and Patterson (1982).

Ignoring our discussion of CRT has a substantive impact on Weddington’s own argument because he misinterprets our comments on Western and Pettit’s (2005) work on labor markets and mass incarceration. Our discussion of Western and Pettit was under the heading “CRT and Racial Progress,” not in the section on Afro-pessimism and racial progress. It is a misrepresentation of our work to claim that we were attempting to reconcile Western and Pettit (2005) with Afro-pessimism. Western and Pettit’s work was explicitly discussed in relation to CRT and progress narratives in mainstream sociology. We highlighted Western and Pettit as an example of mainstream research that provides strong evidence of the continuity of racial structures that disadvantage black populations.

Weddington correctly notes that Afro-pessimism provides a more radical critique of sociology than what we offered in our essay. Our goal was to bring humanities-heavy Afro-pessimism into the mainstream of the sociology of race by showing how familiar sociological figures (e.g., Orlando Patterson) were incorporated into that burgeoning intellectual field. Our article mined the similarity and differences between Afro-pessimist and sociological treatments of blackness, using the centrality of Patterson’s (1982) concept of “social death” to both intellectual traditions as a point of departure. We moved from social death to Hartman’s (1997) notion of the afterlife of slavery, which may be less familiar to sociologists. Although we touched on blackness as a political ontology, we were focused more on the conceptualization of antiblackness and with tracing Afro-pessimistic thought from social death to slavery’s afterlife. Although we used social death and its afterlife as our point of departure, Weddington centers political ontology and its theoretical underpinnings in psychoanalysis and biopolitics. Weddington’s summary of the literature on these topics is an important contribution. That said, it also serves as one of his most significant critiques of our article.

In our centering of antiblackness, social death, and the afterlife of slavery, we did not give the political ontology of blackness the primacy that it has in Afro-pessimist thought. We agree with Weddington that understanding Fanon is central to understanding the political ontology of blackness. We did not give enough attention to the role of psychoanalysis, through Fanon’s thinking about the racialized process of subject formation, in our discussion of Afro-pessimism. As Weddington (2018) argues, Fanon’s explanation of how whites gained their subjectivity through “constructing blacks as a phobic object” is important for understanding how the negation of black humanity structures all nonblack groups’ view of themselves as human (p. 4). We jumped to slavery, social death, and slavery’s afterlife as the factors that give blacks their singular political ontology, but we did not acknowledge Fanon’s concept of subject formation through negation of the Other as the factor that structures the antagonism between blacks and nonblacks.

Still, we disagree with Weddington’s (2018) contention that we misrepresent this ontology as merely “different” (p. 4). In fact, our discussion of social death highlights exactly this special ontological status of blackness in Afro-pessimist thought. It would be hard to understand this given that Weddington selectively quotes the passage in question to make his point. He quotes us as saying, “What is new is Afro-pessimism’s claim that slavery and the middle passage, through the experience of social death, gave blacks a different ontology than other racial groups” (p. 4). Yet he neglects to quote the next sentence, in which we write, “Three characteristics define slavery as social death: natal alienation, gratuitous violence, and social dishonor” (p. 4). In this way, our discussion of black political ontology accords with that of other Afro-pessimist theorists who characterize blacks as “outside of, but also essential to, construction of humanity” (Weddington 2018:9). Ultimately, we conclude that Weddington’s critique here is based partially on a selective quotation that misrepresents the broader argument in which we spell out exactly how strands of Afro-pessimist thought explain why black political ontology is different.

Weddington also states that we reduce antiblackness to “individual attitudes and preferences toward African Americans” (Weddington 2018:7) a claim we find strange, as we explicitly call for an analysis of structural relations, which are extraindividual. For example, Weddington writes that “the authors’ call for sociologists to test whether diversity practices reproduce antiblackness reduces antiblackness to individual attitudes and preferences toward African Americans” (Weddington 2018:7). Although this interpretation is understandable given the use of a citation in our review related to employer preference for skilled Latinx laborers over African Americans in California (Waldinger and Lichter 2003), diversity practices and initiatives are institutionalized. That we adopt a view of these practices as institutionalized is clear in from the first sentence of the section on diversity’s organizational value, which states, “Diversity enriches (white) organizations,” and when we discuss the “white centering of organizational culture.” Although hiring decisions may sometimes be individually oriented, examining the structure of diversity programs broadly and disaggregating how these practices affect different racialized groups would necessarily illustrate whether disparities exist between black people and others. Furthermore, this could illuminate how organizational culture is connected to the afterlife of slavery or, as Weddington (2018) suggests, “how the dynamics of slavery structure institutions such as schools, prisons, or even the market” (p. 7).

Finally, we disagree with Weddington’s (2018:4) claim that an engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” was essential to the goals of our review of Afro-pessimistic thought. Some Afro-pessimist scholars argue that blackness has the status of bare life, that is, life that is outside of social recognition, life that is stateless and nationless, life that does not own itself such that it cannot even be sacrificed as a political act (Sexton 2010). Yet that elaboration is not essential for understanding the singularity of black political ontology or for understanding that black political ontology is not analogous to that of other “people of color” (POC). Our goal in discussing the problems with the POC concept was to offer antiblackness as distinct from white supremacy and to show how the POC construct elides and capitalizes on the erasure of antiblackness (Wilderson 2010). Our discussion of the distinct political ontology of blackness, through tracing the antagonism between blacks and nonblacks due to the advent of racial slavery and its afterlife, was adequate to make this point.

Now that we have dealt with Weddington’s major critiques, we will discuss the implications of his argument that Afro-pessimism is beyond empirical validation. Afro-pessimism, like other critical theoretical traditions, reveals the power dynamics behind seemingly neutral knowledge production processes. Afro-pessimism grounds its critique of scientific knowledge in the inability of social science to render the experience of chattel slavery without reifying blacks as nonhuman. Western science cannot take up the “position of the unthought,” the subjectivity of the enslaved, without inserting ideas of progress or the redemption of Western liberalism into the telling (Hartman and Wilderson 1993). Sociology, like other social sciences, uses the supposed objectivity and neutrality of positivism to support its truth claims. However, enlightenment scholars developed ideas about human subjectivity that rendered blacks as nonhuman objects at the same time as they were developing the scientific method (Mills 2007). In this way, the subjectivity of the enslaved is an oxymoron within Western thought.

Weddington levels three Afro-pessimistic critiques at empirical sociology from this standpoint. He offers a phenomenological version of ethnography as a possible ethical method for studying blackness that rejects the idea of objectivity and hews to experience. This model, as posited by P. Khalil Saucier (2016) and exemplified in his works, avoids sociology’s tendency to collapse racialized experience into the fact of racial identity. We applaud Weddington for taking up the epistemological critique of sociology that Afro-pessimistic scholars have made. The scientific method is not neutral, and its uncritical acceptance perpetuates the racial progress narratives that our article challenged. Weddington also claims that Afro-pessimism cannot be empirically proved but then asserts that phenomenological ethnography is likely the only ethical method with which to explore the theory. This would seem a fruitless endeavor for a body of theory that is detached from the underlying empirical reality it is supposed to represent.

Perhaps most perplexing, Weddington seems to at once abandon the empirical project of sociology and simultaneously claim an empirical mantle. Paraphrasing Wilderson (2010), Weddington (2018) argues that

a reliance on “facts” places a false burden on the project of Afro-pessimism, such that the reliance on empirical analysis of black populations exists to inaugurate an ongoing but ultimately futile industry of applying faulty theories and concepts to populations of black slaves. (p. 6)

To our knowledge, however, the only way to decide if a theory is faulty is to test it. It is a basic assumption of social science that theories are incomplete and we are attempting refine, through repeated testing, better theories that explain more about social life. Indeed, our tools are imperfect and sometimes implicated in constructing the very racial structures we hope to turn them against (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). The answer to these problems is not the rejection, a priori, of the possibility of testing. Rather, we should search for better tools. Sociology as a knowledge project loses tremendously if we refuse to examine the empirical status of theoretical ideas.

Still, we recognize the limits of sociology and of the scientific project. Like Afro-pessimists, we agree that science could never fully capture the political ontology of blackness. As Christina Sharpe says, blackness escapes the hold of science (Terrefe 2016). The remedy may not be a rejection of sociology, but a simultaneous embrace of other ways of knowing. To recognize, as Du Bois did, that we need to work in multiple registers and across disciplines to capture the fullness of black experience. Du Bois wrote novels, conducted research, and led social movements to take the measure of blackness. As Weddington says, sociology may not be the best fit for exploring the claims of Afro-pessimism, though we think it is worthwhile to try. Putting sociology in conversation with Afro-pessimism gave us a chance to wrestle with the limitations of sociology as an epistemology. We welcomed that opportunity.