Black nihilism
Yet what is crucial to note is that Coates’ racial pessimism is tied to a larger philosophical movement known as ‘black nihilism’, of which he is not so much its architect as its sycophantic and ardent devotee. Black nihilism is an anti-philosophic movement, intellectually out of focus, and against – as its advocates state – philosophy, hope, metaphysics, epistemology, redemption, liberal democracy, free markets and even the grammar of liberation itself. Its best articulation can be found in Calvin L Warren’s essay ‘Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope’, published in the New Centennial Review in 2015.
Warren writes that black nihilism is a political philosophy that advocates an end to black emancipation through politics, and characterises any form of political hope as pointless. ‘Black suffering is an essential part of the world’, Warren writes, ‘and placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the political, will never resolve anything’. Black nihilism, he continues, speaks of a ‘blackened world’ that will ‘put an end to the word itself’.
According to Warren, black nihilism is ‘anti-grammar’, and it resists the appeal to both liberal democracy and its political, social and emancipatory schemata on the grounds that to do so will reproduce the very metaphysical violence that is the source of back suffering. He writes in support of this claim that: ‘The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution” is, in fact, another problem in disguised form: the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself.’
Black emancipation, Warren argues, is predicated on black nihilism, which in turn relies on world destruction. This world destruction is the destruction of, we may assume, whiteness; the very foundation on which anti-blackness has been systemically grounded. He writes that black emancipation is not an opening for future possibilities and political reconfigurations. This is because anti-blackness infuses the fabric of social existence, and so it is ‘impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world. Moreover, this means that black emancipation will not yield a new world or possibility for reorganisation – black emancipation becomes something like death for the world.’
The nihilistic thrust of this type of thought, articulated by Warren and Coates, is so irrefutably bankrupt that it rejects all categories on which human cognition and, therefore, man’s conceptual mode of human survival are based. Warren states that all philosophy, including metaphysics and epistemology, was created against the backdrop of the non-reasoning black who was thought to be situated outside of history, moral law and consciousness. Warren writes that for the black nihilist, anti-blackness is metaphysics; that metaphysics is unthinkable without anti-blackness because ‘it is the system of thought and organisation that structures the relationship between object/subject, human/animal, rational/irrational and free/enslaves – essentially the categories that constitute the field of ontology’. All social rationalisation, loss of individuality and economic expansionism and technocratic domination depend on anti-blackness.
Even epistemology, that branch of philosophy that validates and verifies human knowledge by justifying our beliefs, is a problem for back nihilism. For the black nihilist, the dominant epistemology privileges metaphysical forms of anti-black organisations of knowledge. Warren writes: ‘If we think of epistemology as an anti-black formation, then every appeal to it will reproduce the very metaphysical violence that is the source of black suffering. Nihilistic hermeneutics allows us to fracture epistemology, to chip away at its metaphysical science, and to enunciate from within this fissure.’ In Warren’s view, black nihilism shatters the coherence of anti-black epistemology and cannot be known or rendered legible through traditional epistemology. In other words: ‘Anti-black epistemology is somewhat schizophrenic in its aim. It at once posits blackness as an anti-grammatical entity.’
But where does this leave the black subject? Warren writes – and we see strains of this in Coates’ writings when he says that hope itself and the cognitive machinations out of which hope arises are doomed to failure – that metaphysics engenders forms of violence as a necessity, as a byproduct. Coates sees the American Dream in precisely those terms, as a species of metaphysics. He writes in Between the World and Me, that the dream ‘thrives on generalisations, on limiting the number of possible questions… the dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing’. It is, for Coates, the means by which people are seduced into thinking and acting white.
Warren takes this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, when he writes apocryphally and apocalyptically: ‘Thinking itself is structured by anti-blackness from the very start.’
This means that man’s mind, his mode of acquiring knowledge, his reason and thought, are to be rejected as forms of anti-blackness themselves. They are to be regarded as creations of white racists whose universal systems of thought corresponding to an objective reality applicable to all human beings who share a common mode of survival, as human beings, are nothing more than a social compact among white racists to exclude blacks from the human community.
The black nihilists have one thing correct. They and their adherents are outside the historical process and the moral law, denying consciousness and a conception of themselves as truly free subjects. But it is not Hegel, Hume and Kant who have condemned them to that station in life. It is they who have betrayed their own constitution as free radical agents, and committed spiritual suicide by negating their radical freedom, usurping their agency and repudiating the only world they have to enhance their modes of continued personal becoming and the creation of an abstract juridical and political personality.
The end-of-the-world coda should not be taken lightly. It is code for the destruction, I believe, not of whiteness, which in and of itself is an anti-concept denoting nothing and no one in the world. Since the world of the black nihilist is a crudely reductionist socio-economic and political world of white institutions created by white people tyrannising over the world of all black people, for the black nihilists to speak of an end to black emancipation in terms of an end of the world, is to speak in terms of an end to the white world. The death of the world they write of is the death of all white people. Coates, who to my mind is the most ardent of the black nihilists, wrote in Between The World and Me that in America the problem was not really with the police, ‘but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs’.
The black nihilists have declared the final answer to the problems of black suffering and black emancipation – an end to the world – which means an end to white people, and the white world and its institutions.
It is up to those against whom such apocalyptic judgments have been issued to find the response to this indictment. Their very survival depends on it.
Jason D Hill is honors professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of several books, including: Becoming a Cosmopolitan Civil Disobedience and The Politics of Identity: When We Should not Get Along. His forthcoming book, We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, will be published in July by Bombardier Books/Simon and Schuster. (Order this book from either Amazon(UK), or Amazon(US).)