His writing has been honored by the legacy award for creative nonfiction and any a literature, in his new book afropessimism, memoir and philosophy flowthrough and from one another as Frank Wilderson discusses an afro pessimist world of the occult with examples from his own life which in turn inform a lot. The screen is all yours. Guest it seems new every time. I thank everyone for coming up and sharing their evening with me in the auditorium of the free library of philadelphia. We are to gather like this perhaps. As horrible as this is, would have been in an auditorium. It is not worth the extra numbers. I hope everyone is safe and healthy. I am going to share with you an episode from my book. Those of you who have seen the book or read my other work or some are familiar with afropessimism, there are two trains running and i told John Williams of the new york times, what is the chain of critical theory which speaks to explain the structure the structure of black suffering that cannot be recognized old reconciled with press winning. The working class and postcolonial subjects. That is the high theory intervention we have made in the last 10 or 15 years but i want to reiterate the intervention was made for at least 200 years for a sublimated way in the form, story, and music of black people. In the first principle and constituent elements with respect to critical theory. That is one part of the book. Probably a lot of questions for people Like High School or college the baiters who use this extraction in their debates or College Students are graduate students or in marxism or psychoanalysis but the general public may not have an idea what is at stake with respect to the afropessimism intervention. Taking up all the time i have to share a story with you and i really cant go into that. What i hoped you would do, that you would buy this book and then as you read if you are not familiar with afropessimism, note for people who have been quoted in this and because a trade book as opposed to a Critical Theory University press book, footnotes were embedded which are found in the back of the book. I dont know if i can show you, not with numbers but with bold letters of words, various parts in the body of the text itself. You see the phrase inside of a story. You dont know what the economy is . Turn to the back of the book and find in the economy and bold and there is a definition of it from my friend and colleague, they are not numbered but they will help. Before i begin this vignette. What the stakes are, for that i need a stage prop. This is orlando patterson, to my mind this is a book as momentous through thinking about captivity and slavery as carl marxs volume one was as compared to the racial dynamic in 1869. Theres a piece in slavery and social death. The problem in a slaveholding society, to the status of slaves, they died out, the workers were fired, remains be worker. There is no shift in getting fired. You are in the same position, unemployed but you could become employed later on. But the slave was no longer a slave. To repeat the violent act of transforming free man into slave, to repeat, read it again. To repeat the original violent act of transforming free men into slave. I found to be for me, one of the problems we deal with is that the structure and ritualistic performance of antiblack violence cannot be reconciled with the structure and ritualistic performance of antiimmigrant bias. There is a way in which there is Something Different going on here. The act of violence constitutes the prehistory of all satisfied society, the prehistory of all stratified society. Economists understand what that means. 300 years ago we did not have a racial dynamic of capitalism. In order to produce a new paradigm that will describe growth you need an ocean of violence to transform into proletarian and it is called the prehistory of the paradigm. Then the after i will read it again. Determining the prehistory and concurrent history of slavery, that is one of the golden moments of terror and trauma. What it says is inside the structure of capitalism once people have inculcated their role then you do not want the gratuitous nature to continue on, you want to rule those people through hegemony, you want them to be different. You want the violence that created capitalism when there is resistance. The cuban revolution, with slavery and what constitutes the paradigm, the concurrent history of the lived experience of the paradigm. The slave lives in a soup of irrational or nonsensical violence, cant be reconciled with the violence of the working class, the violence of the slave doesnt transform itself into hegemony when the slave acquiesces to the position. Is at stake for me. The other mode of expression, a different kind of vernacular is a story and it resonates with what i just said even only i can read you 6 pages and it may not be clear but if you read the chapter, you understand what i say. Let me begin. Chapter 3, a few pages that begin on page 55. And and that is okay. One thing i want to say in norton to produce this beautifully constructed book, we are in the first printing of the book. What all the folks in ww norton, really heavy, literally heavy paper, with special return of its material value, wont have heavy paper. This is the years 19761980. 2024 to jump around in that particular time period, 761980. The city, minneapolis, minnesota. This is a story i never told before, not to my brother or sister or who i partnered with or married. 40 years came and went. What i always thought, could only cause embarrassment for me. The natural response to a confession. Even now the story makes me squirm leaving the shame of wanting this when i thought i could die. I believed when it was time, i would face a manlike black Liberation Army soldier of the new jersey turnpike and state trooper shutter in the chest. I would get busy as Charles Jackson got busy at the courthouse in california. It is a revolution that required my sacrifice and tap a secret reservoir of courage accumulating inside you from the age of 12. My Junior High School teacher, the doppelgangers, defendant of a political trial by chicago aid. This happens to be one of those. Together almost ten years, she was 38 when we met. I was 22. I met stella at the end of march, 1958, meeting black students in a campaign in solidarity to the people who need food and clean the toilets just outside of town. Apparently complained to the Administration People from the appalachian trail brought on by what some Fraternity Brothers called two early in the greetings. Seeing them in the appalachian trail eating in the same room system gives them indigestion. The Administration Responded by ruling that a dining hall and buildings and grounds workers from that moment on must eat during offpeak hours at the chamber, set aside for them and them alone. This was a fascist decree and we had to take action. The workers who came from nearby backwaters in New Hampshire and two store and one saloon town skirting the mountain through the confederate flag, speeding pickups as they drove past us. Lost in the countryside at a time when not even dick tracy had gps. We drove past houses ranged along the courts of matchsticks on the floor. Every fourth or fifth car was a carcass on cinderblock wheels. We started by the lack of hatred in the eyes of children who stared as we drove by. I turned and looked back at them, waiting for god to help them name what they just saw. In the end, the africanamerican society at Dartmouth College aimed at forcing that ministration to rescind its decree. During the campaign, i was arrested and jailed. The New Hampshire courthouse, he handed me a 2page single spaced charge sheet. I told him who had drunk all the charges. He implored me to read the letter. The troubles with the town distended he said. But your troubles with Dartmouth College have just begun. Two years prior just before i turned 20, the fbi tracked me to trinidad. Like most intelligence file that is when we were declassified, reactions like buckshot, attached on the flank of the deer. The name of the agent killed in the winter of 1976, the winter of my sophomore year at Dartmouth College has been redacted, nor did he or she seem interested in a not quite 20yearold young man he or she shadowed at the university of the west indies. He studied the other. He had research on a major family in trinidad in carnation of the west african religion. The third course with an independent study designed himself, 50 page piece of paper he wrote as a participant researcher of the communist party in trinidad. The fbi filed a reference, none of this. The report went like this. During his day in trinidad he was in contact with a member of the Trinidad And Tobago solidarity committee. He promised that individual he would attempt to make contact with that organization and attempt national aid, to procure financial aid. He claims to be a member of an unspecified revolutionary group from the United States was he was born april 11th, 1956, in the United States from a student at Dartmouth College, number f 23216 one 7 and his Mailing Address is 3983 Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This report, ght from caracas, the legal attache in venezuela, jay a good hoovers successor at the fbi. According to official propaganda the fbi legal attache works for the agency in the host country with investigation of interest in both countries. The role of legal attache was one of coordination that did not develop counterintelligence investigation. More explanation was given why they were running an asset from trinidad to spy on an American Students to make sure the operation between the us and the country, trinidad or venezuela might be. The report began, this confidential source mentioned in the memorandum, the action is nearly 2 lines long. In other words more than a name is being withheld. It continues, it came to the attention in the past of extremist activities in the United States. Then the Boston Office requested to provide what came to prior attention to the security activities. This is not the story of every africanamerican child but this fbi report complicates that story. A corrupt the causal link that helps me make sense of what we were subjected to four years after i returned from trinidad in 1980. Two years after Dartmouth College in 1978, there was a campaign on behalf of workers who were white to our black, on an unrepentant basis. In the middle of writing this chapter it corrupted the events that make my head quiver as i stretch these words with my pen. I thought at last i could go point to point, what chose stella and me, and 11yearold daughter from our home. And there are other ways to live in safety. From the state of minnesota, friends and sanctuaries. The fbi file came when i was steadfast in my conviction that what happened had to do with that. Hers alone. I even blamed the break at my studio apartment by two white men who wanted collateral heat. Against the government. I was not yet driving a cab at that time. That would start when i moved in with our. I worked as a waiter in uptown minneapolis but the restaurant, i was sent home early. The studio was on the ground floor from the lake of the aisle. It was change from the inside, how could he have done that, i thought. It is like a moment for me to realize i could not have done that. Someone else did that. Someone was inside. One red curve out the window, to the other leg. And the other one rolled out with the grace of clearing the bar, in the low yellow light, chasing them halfway down the alley like an even bigger pool. I called the cops. When the Police Arrived even with my clothes into the wall, one large cop at the sink, me and his partner in the middle of the room. There was a lot of cash on you or when you went to work is what he said to me pointing to the money in the dish trainer that was left by the sink before i could close the bank. I told him i had rested there. Did you leave the camera here . He went to the restaurant. Whoever did this i said, knew my schedule, they had time, time for what . You done know unless you investigate. Investigate what . Got you. How murder went unpublished. Carl marx. He placed both books back. What are you doing reading this stuff for . Not surprising i soon moved in with estella and a gun in the closet that we didnt know how to use. Thank you. Thank you for the reading. Before we move to audience questions, i wanted to circle and allow you to wind things together again by asking you would you talk about afro pessimism and how that applies to your book . A small passage from book and one of the things that i i think this notion that hes bringing up is gratuitous. Violence has no coherent sensemaking reasons for it. In other words, you cant say awe, its not triggered and paradigms need to discipline people to produce, say, occupied land or to produce surplus value in capitalism. So if you live in a paradigm of contingent violence, then you can actually tell stories of redemption. Redemption in abstract way. Moving from plenty and equilibrium, 1492, if youre native american. Art of conflict in america which would be different equilibrium. Occupation of europeans and genocide, and then moveing to equilibrium restoreed, reimagine ed. People look at cinema, cinema of colonial revolutionaries, the story doesnt have to end in real life with the regaining of liberation but what it can do is it can end in a conceptual coherence of what liberation might look like. The one thing that can happen, among jackson and many other people that i can name, the interesting thing about this is if there was no moment, in other words, if there werent black or africa noting are indicated, african continent. If theres no if there are people before that, but they not are black, they are bugadi, this is very much like the structural position of workers, theres no such thing as a worker 5020 years ago. Worker comes into being with capitalism. So if you have a situation in which you were back, what you dont have that the macro schematic is you dont have a whole before, is that making sense so far . So far. Then you come back by what patterson said about the violence, violence is necessary to create a paradigm. You cant have a paradigm. We are coming together, collective agreeing that theyll be on top and people on the bottom. So if we also say so thats the case of the worker. These two working artificial positions, man and woman. The native and if thats the case, paradigm where theres no prior libertarian moment for this position and if is the antagonist is not the worker, not the man, not the colon dominator, humanity itself, needs to distinguish itself from what it is now. Then youre in something which its rough, you cant imagine what was before and if youre antagonist its not that kind of system, change in system, its not a certain kind of system, antagonist is a human race itself then what you have is a situation in which a its constructed, it can be dealt with, but, you cannot write a sentence as to how to deal with it because the past with plentitude and equilibrium, the lid off of concept of redemption by suggest its not universal human being than it requires its other, it requires being Walking Around that can never be redeemed. Thats the place that blackens occupies in the economy, especially people who say, i dont see race. [laughter] you know, im like dr. King. I judge on character and quality and not color of their skin. What theyre telling you, theyre not lying consciously but they are not tapped into the primary processes of signification like most people talking to you through conscious mind and saying theres all to me. No, theres something more essential. Phobic response to black bodies, actually does not have a conceptual grounding. Im phobic. Anxiety to black body. But unlike my eruption of native americans, phobic anxieties to jews, my phobic anxiety, i cant say why i have the anxiety. And that and that is symptomatic of the first thing i said before i started reading. Its symptomatic of living in a structure of violence because his or their structure of violence goes on with the gratuitous nature even after people conquered and acquiesce. You cannot say why did the cops shoot me if its necessary to restore health of world. Understood. Did i misread it . Those dais are over. I will listen. If you find the [laughter] i didnt do that this time because i can see exactly and i dont want to give it away. I will say it has to do with a relationship with my mother and i can see how the general reader its important and important because it does something it does something to better the daytoday experience of slaves in the plantation. The plantation im calling out house in minneapolis, minnesota. It does something to better the daytoday in short mural experience. What the book recognizes that there are important political differences between these people that can never be reconcile but they seemed to they will not fight about this so much anymore. Both suffer antiblack violence even though attitude wards the country cannot be reconciled. This is a good people that during race theory dont always get. People with get it better. Antonio great columnist, the first 20 years of century is mortal enemies to, host to parae called capitalism and just after fascist and implement capitalist domination and the communist workers are pressed by capital ism and constant advise to rail against it. Thats important. It would be great. If the fascist could understand, woe, jack, we dont need to look, we need to be part of the communist party. It would be great if that happened. The point of the matter, structurally if it never happened, those two entities are the same in the paradigm of capitalism. The end of the book doesnt make the argument because in the end of the book im trying to speak to black people about how we are with each other and what i have to do to do that in this episode with my family is to forego the apparatus of critical theory but if the person is curious theyll get it. Aha, this is an episode of the social life in social death, this