Wilderson, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, is one of the founders of a philosophical school called Afropessimism—a slightly misleading bit of nomenclature. Neither the body of thought associated with the term nor Wilderson’s new book espouses an orientation toward the future, or gives much of a damn about social fortunes. Rather, Afropessimism sketches a structural map of human experience. On this map, Black people are integral to human society but at all times and in all places excluded from it. They are in a state of “social death,” a concept that Wilderson borrows from the sociologist Orlando Patterson. For Patterson, social death describes the experience of slavery as it has appeared across time and space—a slave is not merely an exploited person but someone robbed of his or her personhood. For Wilderson, the state of slavery, for Black people, is permanent: every Black person is always a slave and, therefore, a perpetual corpse, buried beneath the world and stinking it up. “Blackness is coterminous with slaveness,” Wilderson writes. And civil society as we know it requires this category of nonperson to exist. Emancipation is a myth. (Patterson, for his part, does not think that African-Americans are currently “in a situation of social death,” and has called his influence on Afropessimism “ironic.”)
Wilderson contends that “the narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic Slave, who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line.” This principle poses a challenge for the book, which is largely a work of memoir. Wilderson’s solution is to give us life as a series of cutouts. His memories are like scraps fished out of the shredder and reassembled into the shape of a monster; just to figure out the order of the events relayed in the book is a task. He was born in 1956 and spent the early part of his life shuttling among college towns. His parents were middle-class intellectuals, and his father’s faculty positions at various well-regarded universities made Frank’s childhood not unlike that of an Army brat. The Wildersons lived in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Seattle, Detroit, and Chicago, but they stayed in Minneapolis long enough to call it home. They lived in upscale Kenwood; the mansion of the local hero and future Vice-President Walter Mondale was nearby. (Wilderson recalls Mondale’s effort to recruit his father to run for Congress.) Like many of the kids in Kenwood, Wilderson played football and idolized movie stars. Unlike nearly all of them, Wilderson was Black. The toll of that awkward fact accumulated subtly. The mother of a friend asked him, during a playdate, how it felt to be a Negro.