We Have Never Been White: Afropessimism, Black Rage, and What The Pandemic Helped me Learn About Race (and Psychoanalysis)

Amidst a pandemic and the events following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, discussions of race have escalated in the psychoanalytic community. One theoretical formulation, Afropessimism, has served as a lightning rod across both psychoanalytic and academic circles. Another, Black Rage, offers a psychoanalytic theory of the psychic effect of racial oppression on traumatized subjects. Using both as catalysts, this essay explores the historicity of the questions raised by the racial unrest of the pandemic–-the deep embedding of questions of race and Blackness in unconscious prehistories of modernity, the human, and our understanding of our social worlds.