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Abstract

This article is a brief, retrospective overview of key deliberations within afro-pessimism with an eye toward how sociologists have, and can continue to engage with the paradigm. The anchoring theoretical and epistemological puzzle for the article is whether and how afro-pessimism can be used for sociological analysis of race within the latest technological transformations in artificial intelligence and computational power. To think through this puzzle, I examine the epistemological basis of criticisms of political ontology to argue for the ongoing necessity of the concept to critically complement empiricist study of anti-blackness. By examining recent work coming from Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, I argue that academic conversations stemming from afropessimism have begun to grapple with the racial implications of the increased role that the computational sphere could play in social life. In doing so, I conclude that it is possible, and increasingly necessary to recuperate political ontology as a means to pointedly interrogate how anti-blackness may function without Black populations.

Keywords

sociology of race political ontology afro-pessimism anti-blackness science and technology studies

Given the expansion of academic and popular engagement (Sexton, 2016) with the paradigm of afro-pessimism, it may be easy to overlook that Wilderson's Red, White, and Black – a landmark text in afro-pessimist thought – begins with a clear assertion about the sociological prospects of afro-pessimism. He writes, ‘I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my argument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed’ (Wilderson III, 2010: 9). Despite his clear lack of interest in sociology, the years since Red, White and Black's publication have featured limited, but thoughtful attempts from sociologists, including myself, that point to the theoretical contributions from, and debates that have developed within, afro-pessimism. Both Moon Kie-Jung's critical reading of Du Bois’ work on racialized labor and Venus Green and Cedric De Leon's recent article adopt Saidiya Hartman's (Hartman, 2008) historical framework of the afterlife of slavery which prioritizes the implications and reconfigurations of chattel slavery since the 19th century. In line with Hartman, Jung reframes Du Bois’ theorization of race and labor through slavery's social context of social alienation (Patterson, 1982); Green and De Leon use Hartman (Hartman, 1997, 2008) as a theoretical explanation for racial exclusion among North American trade unions in the mid to late 19th century (Green and de Leon, 2024; Jung, 2019). Also using the starting point of Patterson's social and natal alienation, scholars within and beyond sociology have provided illuminating criticisms of the criminal justice system in terms of policing and incarceration (Tillman, 2025; Wilderson III, 2003). Presently, however, it appears that even some successful efforts at bridging afro-pessimist concepts and axioms into the discipline still can largely be portrayed as foregrounding ‘injury’, such that the harms of discrimination against Black labor or racialized incarceration provides both the urgency and object of afro-pessimist inquiry. In this brief commentary on afro-pessimism, I seriously consider Wilderson's observation about sociology and redeploy it as a starting point to outline what present readers might take away from the last decade of intellectual growth of afro-pessimism. Prospectively, I urge researchers and theorists to consider the implications of abandoning the ‘establishment of injury’ in the adoption of afro-pessimism. To highlight the epistemological stakes of Wilderson's declaration, I will point toward an emergent post-humanist theme within afro-pessimism and indicate its possibility for a speculative mode of sociological analysis.

Afro-pessimism in review

The impulse behind Wilderson's book that I highlight above is, as Jared Sexton would say, what composes one of the essential starting points that defines the approach of afro-pessimism. Sexton writes:
What accounts for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what I called elsewhere ‘a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy’ has more likely to do with a growing understanding of the common (which is not to say shared, much less identical) political conditions of diverse black life-worlds with respect to claims and practices of freedom. That common sense of things is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally, the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. (Sexton, 2016)
Sexton's outlining of this broad, but clear basis for the academic conversation denoted by the word ‘afro-pessimism’ is essential in its breadth; futility abounds in efforts to declare what texts are and aren’t afro-pessimistic. For the goals of my own argument, it is more useful to describe a key distinction in academic understandings of the concept of political ontology among the texts that form the ‘citational network’ of the approach (Sexton, 2016) to highlight questions, disputes, and interventions that form the crux of afro-pessimist thought.

To start, it would be easiest to point out the numerous scholars who have critically built upon the psychoanalytic approaches to race and colonialism that began with Frantz Fanon and were succeeded by Hortense Spillers and Frank Wilderson III. Over time, authors such as Patrice Douglass, Selamawit Terrefe, Rinaldo Walcott, and Sabine Broeck have complemented Fanon's existential approach to psychoanalysis to theorize queerness, gender, and sexual violence under the racial structuring of anti-blackness (Broeck, 2018; Douglass, 2025; Terrefe, 2018; Walcott, 2012). Beyond an explicit focus on gender and sexuality, Derek Hook, David Marriott, and E. Chebrolu have further enriched academic adoption of Fanon's approach to race and also have applied psychoanalysis to explain ongoing manifestations of anti-black racism (Chebrolu, 2020; Hook, 2022b, 2022a; Marriott, 2018). As such, one tendency within afro-pessimism builds on Fanon's work but also, of course, takes cues from other thinkers within psychoanalysis, namely spanning the works of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva (Kristeva, 2024; Lacan, 2001: 200). While Red, White, and Black is squarely within this psychoanalytic strand of thinking, the book's popularity, or notoriety, overshadows the comparatively small group of scholars in the social sciences who have thoroughly engaged with psychoanalytic theory through its import into the conversation of afro-pessimism. When such works appear in the social sciences, scholars often adopt Hartman's historical framework or work through the concept of ‘political ontology’. Political ontology – perhaps one of the most controversial tenets of afro-pessimism – is consistent, but not synonymous, with this existential psychoanalytic approach. However, my contention is that the controversy around the concept hinges largely on how a reader locates its roots in Frantz Fanon. There is a distinct way of reading political ontology through Black Skin, White Masks as constructed in the moment when the social meaning of Blackness is sutured to the status of object, in the psychoanalytic sense (Weddington, 2019). On the other hand, works from David Kline and Lewis Gordon, along with Loic Wacquant's recent essay in The New Left Review do a good job of exemplifying the criticisms of political ontology when read more as an existential claim about race in terms of Black populations. For the former two authors, the charge against afro-pessimism is that of a political fatalism, such that the approach does not recognize the value or history of Black struggle against institutional and structural racism. Wacquant, on the other hand, levies two principal claims: The first being that afro-pessimism is primordialist, such that the existential, epistemological, etc. implications of Blackness are exclusive only to those in the United States. The second claim is that afro-pessimism overlooks how White populations have observed differences within Black populations among characteristics such as skin color, with implications for health, income, incarceration rates, etc. (Gordon et al., 2018; Kline, 2017; Wacquant, 2023). While anyone familiar with Gordon's intellectual legacy should refuse any insinuation that his objections to the concept of political ontology reflect a broader trend that Sexton calls ‘uninformed resistance’ to afro-pessimism (Sexton, 2016), I read his objection to the concept as operating on the existential and political level. On the other hand, Gordon has recently advocated for the psychoanalytic analysis of racism that inform the concept (Gordon, 2025a, 2025b). The dynamics of negrophilia/phobia, racialized paranoia, and sadism (Myers, 2022), among other phenomena that are the hallmarks of psychoanalysis within afro-pessimism are why I would argue that the concept of political ontology retains analytic utility in the face of such criticisms. Instead of using it as a flattening, or even depoliticizing claim about the structure of race across the African diaspora, it would instead be better as a heuristic to diagnose the dynamics of anti-blackness as a distinct structure and theory of racism.

It is in describing this distinct type of racism – anti-blackness – in its processes, structures, outcomes, etc. that it becomes clear that the roots of afro-pessimism are not solely the domain of Frantz Fanon or psychoanalysis. Green and de Leon's aforementioned article falls within a broader adoption of the concept of anti-blackness into approaches based in racial capitalism. Though the two authors’ article is based in historical analysis, scholars continue to return to lessons from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (Robinson, 1983) to ground inquiry into race and social change (Dantzler et al., 2022; Foote and de Leon, 2023; McMillan Cottom, 2020; Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022). Since the emergence of afro-pessimism in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, there has been an emerging group of scholars who have placed Robinson's work in the afro-pessimist conversation to critically extend his original theorizing to ecological and Marxist critique (Agathangelou, 2009; Broeck, 2016; Murphy and Schroering, 2020). Nikhil Pal Singh, for example, contributes to afro-pessimist dialogue by arguing – in a complementary manner to Lewis Gordon – that anti-blackness is a product of capitalist development (Singh, 2016: 29–30). Singh's argument succinctly highlights an important distinction that is hidden under the unity of the word ‘anti-blackness’; grounding anti-blackness in the historical and ongoing development of capitalism means that anti-blackness – and relatedly, political ontology – can be situated as an outcome of historically contingent institutional and organizational structures. On the other hand, those who approach afro-pessimism through its psychoanalytic history might remind the reader that, essentially, this is repeating the same lessons that Stuart Hall presented over 30 years ago (Hall, 1986). Subsequently, a psychoanalytically inclined scholar might also state the important distinction that anti-blackness is acutely indicated by the phenomenon of ‘gratuitous violence’ – that is the sort of violence that bears the mark and symbolic meaning of a racialized alienation, or social extrainstitutionality (Wilderson, 2003). Then the issue of whether and what kinds of violence are structurally determined by capital forms the difference between the two camps. The conversation flowing from Black Marxism tends to focus on environmental racism or Black exclusion from labor organizing whereas the psychoanalytic focus prioritizes racial violence such as lynching, sexual violation, and genocide.

Because this is a brief summary of the key tendencies within afro-pessimism that I find most relevant for my own argument, I would direct the reader to additional works from W.D. Hart, Jared Sexton, and Calvin Warren for more detailed treatments of theoretical strains and disputes within afro-pessimism (Gordon et al., 2018; Hart, 2020; Sexton, 2011). I would also like to clearly state that I believe that the core of the differences and disputes that I highlight above, in my own opinion, tend to reflect a divergence in political commitments and animating motivations more than gracious engagement with the richness of the legacies that constitute the field of afro-pessimism itself. As a matter of fact, as I move to address the empiricist conundrums that animate the present article, I believe it will become clear that my argument necessarily requires understanding the role of racialized capital in the present moment of technological transformation. However, my own argument goes beyond that to ask the cultural implications of such transformations.

Afro-pessimism and the subject of social diagnosis

As I stated at the outset of this commentary, there have been a handful of sociologists who have encouraged engagement with afro-pessimism (Bracey, 2021; Jung, 2019; Randolph et al., 2019; Ray et al., 2017; Weddington, 2019). However, reviewing these encouraging attempts to bring afro-pessimism into sociology reveals tensions between social science's ideological, and even political commitments that I previewed with Wilderson's quotation. It is no surprise, then, that adaptations of afro-pessimism have often maintained this deep commitment to empiricism. Though they do not necessarily invoke a structural analysis of racial capitalism, their approach similarly locates instances of anti-blackness in organizations and institutions (Kenney, 2025; Wun, 2014, 2016; Zaino and Bell, 2021). In a related, but distinct commitment to demonstrability, researchers have shown how people maintain anti-Black ideologies or how Black populations experience anti-blackness (Curington and Bailey-Hall, 2021; Greene, 2022; Wallace, 2023). While I have already stated my hesitation to name such adoptions as afro-pessimist, or even deliberating what adaptations are and are not afro-pessimist, I do believe that further efforts are simultaneously necessary and lagging. I am skeptical of the value of naming such adoptions since – returning to the Wilderson quotation at the outset of this commentary – I read his objection with the ‘disciplinary needs’ of political science or sociology as being that they are opposed to the goals of his text. He continues to write on the same page:
If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psychoanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest ‘allies’, and in some of the most ‘radical’ films. Here – not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship – is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. (Wilderson III, 2010: 9)
Following this quotation, and in line with Fred Moten's similar commentary on sociology (Moten, 2013: 749), it may be the case that sociology, along with other social sciences, are disciplinarily and epistemologically limited to affirming and borrowing from afro-pessimism while being unable to fully commit to the epistemological stakes of the paradigm. Perhaps it is necessary to further delve into the questions that animate afro-pessimism with the very real possibility that the answers may not appear as recognizable effects of anti-blackness as they have been understood as of late. As I will show shortly, though, it appears that the telos of such engagements being ‘proof of injury’ or ‘demonstration of racism’ have overlooked the themes of speculation and post-humanism that have increasingly become sites of intellectual discussion within afro-pessimism in the past decade. The present proposition, then, is akin to those encouragements that I highlighted at the beginning of this section: that scholars within sociology should be paying much closer attention to the developments within afro-pessimist discourse as they not only concern, but often hold deep critique of well-tread research questions in contemporary sociology. What I will outline below is a distinct strand of theorizing that has overlapped afro-pessimism which is much more attuned to theorizing anti-blackness without to Black people as the site of injury. I will conclude by speculating that such theorizing is useful to provide a mode of analysis going forward.

The prospects of a post-human speculation

As I recounted in the prior portion of this commentary, the notion of political ontology has been a lightning rod for criticisms of afro-pessimism over the past decade. At this point, perhaps the concept is more of a Rorschach test, in that adopting or refusing the concept may be a matter of signaling investment in, or disdain for, afro-pessimism as an approach to the study of racism. What I wish to show at this point is what is lost in the conceptual distance between an epistemological commitment to studying the realities of anti-blackness, on one hand, and a commitment to analyzing the structure of anti-blackness as a structure of racial antagonism. Yes, political ontology in afro-pessimist discourse is derived from the very real histories of racialized slavery and colonialism that Black populations experienced on the African continent and throughout the diaspora. With that said, some authors such as Tyrone S. Palmer and Ezekiel Dixon-Román have worked through the concept to show how Blackness exists in a paradoxical force-in-absence on cultural, ideological, epistemological, and even algorithmic levels (Dixon-Román, 2017; Palmer, 2020). The implication is that, for all of the alleged shortcomings of political ontology to grapple with Black traditions of resistance or to deal with the changing conditions of Black people, such shortcomings do not make the concept less useful, but instead point toward much more imaginative questions and analyses.

Fanon's exemplary anecdote about being objectified by a White child in Black Skin, White Masks – ‘Look! a Negro!’ – is just a still-shot of the overlap between his phenomenological mode of writing his book and the more structural approaches to psychoanalysis and race that have characterized his lineage within afro-pessimism (Fanon, 1952, 2008: 109). However, it is in this latter register that the notion of Blackness being in the position of the ‘unthought’ or ‘abject’ (Hartman and Wilderson III, 2003; Wilderson III, 2011) begins to have a clear delineation from Black people. The Blackness here instead acts as force, or potentiality (Ashley and Billies, 2017) that can become attached to bodies, actions, spaces, events, and of course individuals and groups. Though Nicholas Brady's work (Brady, 2023) analyzes the potential events of slave rebellions through a psychoanalytic approach, works such as Ada Ferrer's history of the Cuban slave industry's reaction to the Haitian Revolution provide detailed accounts of the how the fear of spreading Black rebellion drove social change on the former island (Ferrer, 2014). It is on this plane of potentiality that it is possible to see afro-pessimism as not only based in a history of the very real horrors enacted on Black people, but also as an approach that outlines the foreclosure of Black social life, or history, itself. Colin Patrick Ashley and Michelle Billies call this mode of estimation a speculation on ‘Black risk’ (Ashley and Billies, 2017: 78), but I am interested in taking their theorizing further to state that as computation and capitalism evolve, what is on the horizon is not only the possibility of replacing Black social life or even capitalizing on Black futurities. Instead, as I will show now, the prospect is over a related change in the racial order itself (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2014). The works of Ruha Benjamin, Luciana Parisi, and Ezekiel Dixon-Román, among others, generate a profound synthesis of the implications of an increasingly computational and algorithmically governed social sphere for racial politics (Benjamin, 2016, 2023; Dixon-Román, 2016, 2017; Parisi, 2021). My own argument builds specifically on Parisi and Dixon-Román's work. It is possibly the case that because these two authors approach Blackness and technology in direct conversation with Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Sylvia Wynter (Da Silva, 2007, 2017; Wynter, 2003, 2007) that their theorizations of Blackness within the epistemology of algorithmic governance have not attracted the attention of afro-pessimist sympathizers and critics in the social sciences. Nonetheless, their claims cut at the foundation of critical approaches to artificial intelligence that are grounded in bias and inequality (Howard and Borenstein, 2018; Intahchomphoo and Gundersen, 2020; Zajko, 2022). I would recommend reading Dixon-Román alongside Sylvia Wynter to understand why the former depicts the emergence of algorithmic technology alongside prior epistemological revolutions. Suffice it here to say that Dixon-Román adopts Wynter's notion of cosmogony in its prior influence for science and technology. He writes ‘As that which forms and shapes our understandings of the world, our autopoietically instituted ways of being, and the social order, cosmogonies also inform science and sociotechnologies. They inform what we study and how we study it. As stated above, Darwinian bio-cosmogony of evolution led to the developments of eugenics ideology and science. This included the development of intelligence test in order to identify fixed innate ability…’ (Dixon-Román, 2017: 51). I will also quote Parisi at length to demonstrate how she builds on Wynter to provide a concept of ‘techno-semiosis’ to explain a mechanism by which algorithmic technology can fundamentally change our current epistemological foundations. She writes:
Wynter pushes Frantz Fanon's articulation of sociogenesis to argue that the human is not a biological concept but rather coincides with regulatory practices that are social and yet replicate the social code in the flesh. In other words, what Wynter calls culture's ‘descriptive statements’ describe a social situation that alters the psycho-social structure of the human prior to the reflectivity of consciousness but is nonetheless irreducible to physical laws. Descriptive statements become the functions of a semiotic technology or language, entailing a semiotic programming of human sapience according to racialized and gendering explanations of biological exceptionalism. For Wynter, this sociogenic process has evolutionary consequences insofar as it is stirred through language and thus social interactions into the space of cognition (2007: 13). By considering the material effects that techno-semiosis has on the social structure of reality, this article argues that algorithmic thought too is locked within the representation of a neuro-cognitive schema inspired by a Promethean myth of creation, according to which machines are prosthetic extensions or upgrading scaffoldings of Man's sapience. (Parisi, 2021: 35)
Without recounting the breadth of Wynter's historical argument that Parisi and Dixon-Román are building upon here, it is plainly clear that they outline the insufficiency in seeing algorithmic technology as merely generating new, or exacerbating existing racial inequalities. Instead, the present and growing technologies present a new epistemological-racial order. It is here that is possible to concretely see new stakes in the concept of political ontology that, for many, might have been unheard of 10 or 15 years ago. By this, I mean to say that political ontology, or something akin to it, presents an essential analytical tool to observe and describe the implications of Blackness, and anti-Blackness, in cultural, social, and technological contexts in which Black people can at best be verifiably absent, and at worst, in a state of ‘indeterminacy’ (Dixon-Román, 2025: 414).

Conclusion: Unthinkable and unthought

In some ways, Wilderson's aforementioned conversation with Saidiya Hartman reflects the epistemological antagonism between the appearance of Blackness – which I highlight in the Fanon reference in the prior section – and the social alienation of the slave that is a starting point for afro-pessimism. They write:
On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought. So, what does it mean to try to bring that position into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our claims are more radical. (Hartman and Wilderson III, 2003: 185)
As I have attempted to show in this brief commentary, the racial antagonism (that being the social life of Black people despite the political ontological structuring of their appearance) is simultaneously an epistemological antagonism. Though the few pointed criticisms that I highlighted earlier in the text warn of the political shortcomings of afro-pessimism, it is important not to construe their criticisms as epistemological rejection of the approach. It is surely the case that, as Du Bois observed over a century ago, the drive toward demonstration that marks the beginning of the present commentary is not a viable solution to anti-blackness (Du Bois, 2000). More importantly, it is imperative to question how the imperative of demonstration can be part and parcel of the same dynamics of anti-blackness, whether grounded in a racial capitalist or psychoanalytic approach.

Of course, one implication given the very rapidly evolving technologies undergirding the production of AI deepfakes, as well as the broader algorithmic production of social facts, is the need for afro-pessimist inquiry to be acutely aware of the limitations of demonstration, both as a politic as well as indicator of well-founded conclusions for and against the paradigm. Instead, what scholars must cultivate is a mode of afro-pessimistic speculation which can fathom Blackness and anti-Blackness as a process and structure that does not necessarily involve Black people and to trace how Black potentiality may be able to usher in a new era of racial domination. More importantly, however, the process of techno-semiosis raises the question of what sort of Black and anti-Black futurities remain hidden in the computational sphere. Of course race, and racial antagonism shape how data enters this computational sphere (Beller, 2021), but what remains to be seen, or whether it can be seen, is how racial antagonism is constructed in an emergent sphere of computational thought and algorithmic knowledge. The challenge is to describe an emergent racial-computational future whose existence may be counter-intuitive to the cognitive and sensory sphere of the human observer. Indeed, I would argue that the opportunity that afro-pessimism presents is the grounds to complement study of the manifestations of inequality of environmental racism that characterize extant research and popular commentary on algorithmic governance and artificial intelligence. Of course, these are important phenomena. However, inquiring how anti-blackness operates – as process as well as political ontology – within computational systems challenges even radical modes of inquiry that have characterized sociological lessons from the last two decades of afro-pessimist scholarship.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

George Weddington

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Afro-pessimism and a posthuman sociology

Abstract

Keywords

Afro-pessimism in review

Afro-pessimism and the subject of social diagnosis

The prospects of a post-human speculation

Conclusion: Unthinkable and unthought

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

References