Afropessimism

Racism is a virulent, intractable feature of modern society, argues this vehement memoir-cum-manifesto. Wilderson (Incognegro), a professor of African-American studies at U.C.-Irvine, recollects his experiences of living while black through the lens of Afropessimism, a radical philosophy that, in his telling, views all relationships between blacks and other races—including Wilderson’s own mixed-race marriage—as forms of master-slave domination, and sees antiblack racism at the mystical core of all social ideologies. (“[I]f Black people were recognized and incorporated as Human Beings,” he writes, “Humanity would cease to exist; because it would lose its conceptual coherence, having lost it baseline other.”) These ideas frame a loose-limbed memoir of racial antagonisms great (battling apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s), small (growing up amid microaggressions in Minneapolis) and mysterious. (He and a girlfriend fled their apartment believing that a white neighbor deliberately contaminated it with radioactive material.) Wilderson’s academic theorizing can be turgid and overwrought—“[t]he very paradigm of electoral politics is predicated on sexualized violence against Black people”—but when he sticks to his personal experience of racial alienation, his writing is powerful, nuanced, and lyrical. (“Her hair was white and thin as dandelion puffs,” he recalls of a visit to his aged mother.) Wilderson’s passionate account of racism’s malevolent influence is engrossing, but not always convincing. (Apr.)