Editor's Column: On the Use and Abuse of Analogy

Afropessimist Frank Wilderson warns against what he calls "the ruse of analogy," urging us to learn to differentiate between anti-Blackness and all other forms of racism. Blackness is not just another difference to be accounted for, something that an intersectionally-inclined critic might in principle be able to accommodate. Blackness is deeply linked to what it means to be a human: to be human is to not be Black (synonymous with the positionality of the slave). For this reason, Afropessimism and other currents in Critical Black Studies display suspicion about the move to analogize. A refrain in the works of Afropessimists is that Black slavery is "without analog" (Wilderson, Red 38). To this point, Wilderson moves to provincialize the Shoah, the Jewish Holocaust: "Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews, Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust" (Red 38). While we can compare the Shoah and chattel slavery as examples of human holocausts, in so doing we interpretively fail to account for the singularity of the metaphysical holocaust. The latter holocaust strips the human of the former of its metaphysical integrity: the ontological evisceration of the African as such. Wilderson adds further: "That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmann) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them" (Red 38). The parallel drawn here is striking: Jews/the Dead-the Mulselmann (the most abject Jew of the concentration camps) and the Dead/Blacks (the most abject expression of death). After rejecting the paradigm of the Shoah and its timeless Jewish Victim, Wilderson proceeds to block other avenues of comparisons, ruling out any counterparts to Black folks. The excluded or racially marginalized—including Palestinians, Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, refugees, queers, and so on—are still deemed human, extended (at least some of) the privileges of humanity. Non-Blacks have recourse, a mechanism—albeit imperfect—through which they can voice their grievances and make appeal:

In its critique of social movements, Afro-Pessimism argues that Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBT, and workers' agendas. These so-called allies are never authorized by Black agendas predicated on Black ethical dilemmas. A Black radical agenda is terrifying to most people on the Left because it emanates from a condition of suffering for which there is no imaginable strategy for redress—no narrative of redemption. (Wilderson, "Afro-Pessimism")¹

For the colonized, there is a solution, a "strategy for redress," a remedy—the possibility for a return to a "prior plenitude," to a "spatial place that was lost" (Wilderson, "We're Trying" 58). For diasporic Blacks, in contrast, there is no surmounting what Orlando Patterson calls "social death."² With the colonized, there is a "recognition of the spatial coordinates of that demand," but for Blacks no willing auditors are available: "The collective unconscious [of the White auditors] is not ready to accept that blacks are human" ("We're Trying" 58). What gives chattel slavery its incomparability is the ungeneralizability of social death, which, as Jared Sexton puts it, "is indexed to slavery and it does not travel" (21).

White civil society is premised on the demise of the Black body: "death of the black body is … foundational to the life of American civil society" (Wilderson, "Gramsci's" 233). Pessimism is the only response to the possibility of Black redemption. And yet Wilderson does propose one analog: the cow. In critical dialogue with a Gramscian model of critique, Wilderson argues for the inadequacies of the Marxist framework, stressing the incommensurability of the worker and the slave/Black. There is no identification between Blacks and workers. In the context of a slaughterhouse, Black people find more proximity with the precarious cows. If the exploited workers (the matter of concern for the Marxist critic) in the slaughterhouse are eligible for some reprieve (better pay, better work conditions), the cows are condemned to annihilation. Exploitation fails to capture the...