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The Argument of “Afropessimism” | The New Yorker

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The best time to read a book by Frank B. Wilderson III, it turns out, is during a hot summer of uneasy isolation, social heartbreak, and racial uprising. I read his latest, “Afropessimism” (Liveright), twice: once before the world crawled to a halt under the horror of covid-19, and again after anger about the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis—Wilderson’s home town—erupted into a righteous spectacle of fire and glass. Since then, Wilderson’s work has received notice in unlikely places. In mid-June, the temperamentally soft and sunny conservative Times columnist David Brooks—who, five years ago, lamented that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-seller “Between the World and Me” would “trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future”—suggested that readers who wished to understand the alienation of African-Americans should read “Afropessimism,” quoting the book’s insistence that “the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of

Save this story Save this story The best time to read a book by Frank B. Wilderson III, it turns out, is during a hot summer of uneasy isolation, social heartbreak, and racial uprising. I read his latest, “Afropessimism” (Liveright), twice: once before the world crawled to a halt under the horror of covid -19, and again after anger about the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis—Wilderson’s home town—erupted into a righteous spectacle of fire and glass. Since then, Wilderson’s work has received notice in unlikely places. In mid-June, the temperamentally soft and sunny conservative T

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