Have you read Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson? It is easy to find online and I think it is very illuminating when read in the context of the post-BLM black intelligentsia, many of whom accept his premises in whole or in part but find his conclusions too disturbing to seriously consider. At severe risk of oversimplifying, Wilderson posits not just a political but an ontological opposition between black people and the rest of the human race. He describes blackness as a sort of negative image by which the idea of the human is created, and thus any value system or political program built on human rights as having antiblackness built into it. Correspondingly whiteness is imagined as maximum distance from blackness and other non-white people essentially caught in between, partially blackened but maintaining antiblackness in their own ethnic consciousness and efforts at inclusion, indeed by even having such things. In the book are a number of anecdotes about his attempts at working with activists from American indigenous nations, Palestine, and South Africa's ANC, all of whom eventually ostracized him ostensibly because of their latent antiblackness but really because he couldn't stand that they had agendas independent of the axis of blackness and antiblackness and would not let him hijack their movements for his own purposes. Eventually he would make such a nuisance of himself that his erstwhile allies would tell him to go away.
I haven't, no. The comparison between the ideology you describe and Kendi's is quite interesting, because in both cases everything comes down to a black-and-white racial binary. The difference between them is what happens to all of us inconveniently miscellaneous people. For Kendi (this will be the topic of an upcoming post) we all get lumped into the non-"White" umbrella. With Wilderson we get more lumped in with the white people and anti-blackness. Neither approach gets you anywhere near the truth, but if I was forced to pick between those two bastardizing alternatives, I might actually go with Wilderson's: in the US context I think there's a decent case to be made that systemic anti-blackness is a real thing. Systemic whiteness, on the other hand, seems more like the conceit of self-flagellating white people obsessed with the exaggeration of their own power.
Have you read Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson? It is easy to find online and I think it is very illuminating when read in the context of the post-BLM black intelligentsia, many of whom accept his premises in whole or in part but find his conclusions too disturbing to seriously consider. At severe risk of oversimplifying, Wilderson posits not just a political but an ontological opposition between black people and the rest of the human race. He describes blackness as a sort of negative image by which the idea of the human is created, and thus any value system or political program built on human rights as having antiblackness built into it. Correspondingly whiteness is imagined as maximum distance from blackness and other non-white people essentially caught in between, partially blackened but maintaining antiblackness in their own ethnic consciousness and efforts at inclusion, indeed by even having such things. In the book are a number of anecdotes about his attempts at working with activists from American indigenous nations, Palestine, and South Africa's ANC, all of whom eventually ostracized him ostensibly because of their latent antiblackness but really because he couldn't stand that they had agendas independent of the axis of blackness and antiblackness and would not let him hijack their movements for his own purposes. Eventually he would make such a nuisance of himself that his erstwhile allies would tell him to go away.
I haven't, no. The comparison between the ideology you describe and Kendi's is quite interesting, because in both cases everything comes down to a black-and-white racial binary. The difference between them is what happens to all of us inconveniently miscellaneous people. For Kendi (this will be the topic of an upcoming post) we all get lumped into the non-"White" umbrella. With Wilderson we get more lumped in with the white people and anti-blackness. Neither approach gets you anywhere near the truth, but if I was forced to pick between those two bastardizing alternatives, I might actually go with Wilderson's: in the US context I think there's a decent case to be made that systemic anti-blackness is a real thing. Systemic whiteness, on the other hand, seems more like the conceit of self-flagellating white people obsessed with the exaggeration of their own power.