In his book Red, White, Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Wilderson describes a Black woman outside of the campus of Columbia University yelling, accusing passersby of having "stolen her sofa" and "sold her into slavery." Her indictment did not explicitly mention race but the implications were as loud as her voice. Although her accusations were directed at everyone — students, faculty, black, white, brown, and yellow alike — there was a system that they represented. Wilderson observes that in her eyes, the world itself, not merely its discriminatory practices, was unethical.[1] The scenario encapsulates Afropessimism's diagnostic power: Columbia University symbolizes the globalized racial power structure of the modern world, predicated on casting Black people as antithetical to humanity — their dehumanization, their nonbeing.

I do not deny that anti-Blackness is constitutive of the modern world. Wilderson has synthesized this critical insight from predecessors such as Franz Fanon, Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman persuasively. Hartman's observation that emancipation did not simply give way to freedom captures this reality with particular force — domination was not abolished so much as reorganized through new institutional forms.[2] I do not contest this diagnosis. What I contest is the metaphysical conclusion Wilderson draws from it: namely, Afropessimism's claim that all insurgencies are trapped within modernity's anti-Black order and therefore can neither abolish social death nor inaugurate a reality beyond it. For Wilderson, the slave is not so much the antithesis of human capacity, which might imply a dialectic potential in the slave's encounter with the world, as she or he is the absence of human capacity.[3] Consequently, the "ruse of analogy" mystifies rather than clarifies Black suffering, and there is no roadmap to freedom so long as the world is structured by anti-Blackness.[4]

Wilderson believes there is no way we can win; reversal is impossible, history cannot be a guide, and the system has already calculated all possible interventions into its machination and attuned itself such that resistance converts into reinforcement. This foreclosure on hope has profound implications for the liberatory capacity of Black people, and that is what is at stake — Black people's liberation.

Afropessimism transforms its structural diagnosis into ontological fatalism, which is neither valid nor helpful. It is invalid because far from being impotent subjects who have not made an impact, our history in modernity has been a perennial battle where our enemies too have suffered losses. They have always needed to fend off Black humanity and fight for its own survival. While Wilderson correctly perceives our fungibility as enduring and stubborn, I propose that the equally enduring and stubborn persistence of Black humanity has gradually eroded that system. Great Replacement Theory, the decline of Christianity, bloated claims of reverse racism, and protests against Affirmative Action, DEI, and Critical Race Theory all suggest a neurotic order anxious about its own preservation. This is what Dr. Frances Cress Welsing pointed toward in describing the fear of white genetic annihilation as a central motivating force behind white supremacy.[5] James Baldwin captured their civilizational unease more poetically in observing that the world is white no longer, and will never be white again.[6] In other words, Wilderson treats the anti-Black order as functionally permanent, yet historically the architects and beneficiaries of that order have behaved as if it is fragile and finite.

Their anxiety can be seen in how Black resistance, however tame, has always been targeted by the apparatuses of the power structure precisely because of its perceived potential to overthrow that structure and because of what this resistance signifies metaphysically. White supremacy has repeatedly behaved as though its dominance were vulnerable. It is as if the enemies know something that we don't. Slave revolts, the Civil Rights movement, and Black Power initiatives have signified an opposing reality that predates white supremacy — a reality that never disappeared but that social death has been mapped onto. This reality has made the structure uncomfortable, forcing it to shift positions and even change seats.

Chief among the insurgencies is the Black Muslim Tradition. Within modernity the religion of Islam has been a countervailing force to the negation and resignation in ways unique to the other responses. Black American Muslims practiced Islam precisely to confront the pessimism that Wilderson succumbed to. I will argue that Islam is the last viable buffer against despair and that the Black Muslim Tradition becomes evidence against Afropessimism's implied impossibility of successful reconstruction.

Numerous Black responses to anti-Blackness — from liberal Protestant integrationism to Black nationalism, Marxism, and artistic worldmaking — generated distinct grammars of resistance. Each negotiated anti-Blackness through different traditions, possessing very distinct strengths, limits, and assumptions about liberation. The Black Muslim Tradition is distinctive because it joins metaphysical anthropology, disciplined practice, and anti-modern sacred temporality in a way not reducible to liberal, nationalist, or materialist frameworks.[7]

The Architectonics of Anti-Blackness and Its Limits

Anti-Blackness is architectonic. Enlightenment liberalism, secular humanism, empire, and modern democracy did not merely coexist with racial domination but helped furnish its conceptual grammar. One need not belabor this point for readers of Afropessimism. Locke — the philosopher of liberty and consent — helped codify slavery itself, declaring that every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.[8] Anti-Blackness was not peripheral to modernity's philosophical anthropology but embedded within its foundational categories.

Wilderson correctly identifies the racist foundation of modernity but is resigned to its permanence. His central question is no longer "What does it mean to be free?" — which is proactive — and instead becomes "What does it mean to suffer?"[9] — which is adaptive coping. This goes beyond rejecting the remediation of liberalism and implies that Black social death is incontestable. Yet Wilderson also stated that the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all.[10] This admission is more telling than it first appears, because here inquiry is a form of refusal. The continued interrogation of the Black plight already demonstrates that Black being exceeds total ontological closure. If the immortal impulse to interpret, critique, and theorize within conditions designed to reduce Black life to negation persists, then Afropessimism has overestimated the omnipotence of modernity.

The Black Muslim Tradition radicalizes this insight by refusing to separate freedom and suffering into opposing categories. Unlike Wilderson's false dichotomy, which increasingly forces a choice between the two, Islam approaches freedom and suffering as inseparable dimensions of the same struggle. The Islamic answer to "What does it mean to be free?" is jihād. The Islamic answer to "What does it mean to suffer?" is ṣabr. Within the Black Muslim Tradition, freedom is not understood as the absence of suffering, nor is suffering interpreted as evidence against freedom — both are integrated aspects of sacred striving.

Blackness at the Origin of Islamic Anthropology

Let us now see how Islamic anthropology destabilizes the ontology of modern anti-Blackness. In the modern racial imagination, whiteness silently becomes universal humanity while Blackness becomes deviation, negation, or social death — but in the sacred texts of Islam, Blackness is the origin of humanity. In Islam, the father of all human beings was Adam, who was a Black man. Classical Arabic lexicons connect the name Ādam to darkness and blackness. The Qur'an states that man was created from sounding clay molded from black mud,[11] and classical scholars such as Al-Raazi explain that the relevant term refers to black.[12] Humanity in Islam therefore does not begin with whiteness as normative Man. It begins with Blackness and earth itself. Equally significant is that when the Qur'an introduces Adam, it is in relation to his authority on earth — Allah's declaration that He is placing a successive authority, a vicegerent, upon it.[13] Khalīfah means ruler or judge entrusted with authority. From this we draw two implications: humanity itself is rooted in Blackness, and the Black father of all humanity is created with political authority. This directly contradicts the modern construction of race in which Black people are cast as powerless and non-human.

"There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab over an Arab; neither white over black nor black over white, except through taqwā — God-consciousness." The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Farewell Sermon

The Khuṭbatu l-Wadā, or Farewell Sermon, of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is perhaps the clearest evidence that Islam does not frame Black people as outside of humanity.[14] This is the first anti-racist speech in world history, and the Prophet ﷺ was the first world leader to decenter racial criteria as the basis for hierarchy.[15]

Muhammad ﷺ did not merely give lip service to Black humanity but practiced it. Aside from the Black heritage of the seventh-century Arabs, the companions whose lineage traced directly to the Nile Valley became prominent figures in Islamic hagiography. Bilal ibn Rabah was among the most venerated of the companions, and his blackness did not make him an exception.[16] In the Qur'an we find a surah named after a Black man — Luqmān (AS), one of the prophets of Allah.[17] Lastly, Hagar, the ancestress of the Arabs, was a Black woman, and her story of faith and courage forms the basis for the rituals of the ḥajj.

An obvious objection is that anti-Black racism has existed within Muslim societies and diasporic Muslim communities, and therefore Islam cannot function as a counter to social death. This paper does not claim that Muslims were historically immune from racism. The relevant distinction is that whereas the United States starts with anti-Blackness, Islam begins with the divine affirmation of Black humanity. Racism in the Muslim world cannot be linked to the sources of Islam and is a deviation from its foundational texts, while in America one must deviate from the founders of the country and the original Constitution if they are to struggle against racism.

Jihād, Ṣabr, and the Permanence of Struggle as Transcendence

The Islamic framework rejects Wilderson's dilemma of "freedom" or "suffering" and does not regard it as an epiphany. Islam possesses a metaphysical grammar that regards both as intrinsic to the human condition. The Qur'an states that humanity has been created into toil and struggle. Humanity is not merely confronted by struggle but constituted through it. Struggle is neither an interruption of existence nor evidence of divine abandonment — it is woven into the very architecture of human life. In this sense, jihād signifies far more than resistance, just as ṣabr exceeds the passive connotations of patience. This is precisely why the Qur'an presents the prophets as paradigms: men who endured defeat, persecution, and in many cases died before witnessing victory in their own lifetimes. Their distinction lies not in uninterrupted triumph but in steadfast striving.

Whereas Afropessimism risks permanence without transcendence, Islam offers the permanence of struggle as transcendence.

Ṣabr is therefore not passive waiting but the mental disposition in jihād: the disciplined capacity to continue struggle under the bleakest conditions without foreseeable victory. That distinction radically changes how Black resistance is interpreted. If the persistence of anti-Black domination is taken as evidence against the possibility of liberation, then Black struggle appears defeated. But if, as Muslims hold, resistance to oppression is a sacred obligation and victory belongs ultimately to Allah alone — its timing, form, and recognition not reducible to immediate historical visibility — then there is no final basis for declaring where we stand in this war.

Treating suffering as the final interpretive category is tied to notions of success rooted in the very theoretical traditions whose explanatory failures led Wilderson beyond Marxism in the first place. A former Marxist, Wilderson became disillusioned with Marxism's inability to theorize the Black condition, arguing that the Black subject position in America represents an antagonism that cannot be satisfied through a transfer of ownership or organization of existing rubrics.[18] He held that Marxism suffered from a conceptual anxiety in which class victory would not reverse social death but would actually help insure the coherence of Enlightenment values of productivity and progress — values Wilderson correctly identifies as inherently anti-Black.

The problem with treating Marxism as the terminus of all Black insurgencies is that Wilderson's own pessimism remains enclosed within secular revolutionary assumptions inherited from the same modern world Marxism emerged from — namely, that progress must be observably linear, so that if liberation has not historically materialized within our lifetime, then it cannot and never will. This limitation becomes clearer when we consider that, unlike Marxism, liberalism, or other modern revolutionary grammars, Islam was not generated by Enlightenment assumptions about sovereignty, temporality, progress, or human value.[19] Since Islam existed outside the racial modernity implicated in anti-Blackness, the modern racial order did not anticipate Islam becoming a technology for racial reconfiguration. Black Muslims reorganized how Black people understood temporality, suffering, obligation, defeat, and collective life.

Al-Qadīr and the Contingency of Worldly Sovereignty

The Islamic concept al-Qadīr is an attribute of Allah describing Him as the Possessor of absolute power over conditions, history, and possibility itself. This distinction is critical because Afropessimism risks treating anti-Blackness as functionally omnipotent, even if that is not Wilderson's intent. Islam deliberately refuses that elevation. No worldly structure — not empire, not whiteness, not modernity, not racial ontology — possesses ultimacy, because ultimacy belongs only to Allah.

"Say: O Allah, Owner of Sovereignty, You give sovereignty to whom You will and You take sovereignty away from whom You will; You honor whom You will and You abase whom You will. In Your hand is all good. Surely You are over all things Powerful." Qur'an 3:26

Hence worldly sovereignty itself is contingent. Political orders, racial hierarchies, and civilizations do not possess independent permanence. Al-Qadīr destabilizes the assumption that the Black subject position represents an antagonism unresolvable through existing rubrics. Anti-Blackness may be constitutive of the modern world, but the modern world and its existing rubrics are not constitutive of existence itself. This is why al-Qadīr does not simply replace pessimism with one form of fatalism — divine determinism. In contrast, the Black Muslim Tradition retains discipline, sacrifice, and jihād as meaningful forms of agency even when historical transformation remains uncertain or deferred.

This is the profound implication of al-Qadīr for Black liberation. The Black Muslim Tradition recovers possibility through a sacred metaphysic of struggle — jihād grounded in belief in al-Qadīr — not reducible to secular modern closure. Wilderson and Afropessimists may object that Islam does not solve the antagonism they describe but merely reframes how we inhabit it. This objection is born of fidelity to a bad formula, because the antagonism is not solved first by proving that the world has already changed. It is solved first by breaking the metaphysical authority the world claims over Black being, and this is realized in al-Qadīr.

At this juncture we should note the immanent worldview underwriting Wilderson's pessimism and how it silently shapes his theoretical outcomes. While revolutionaries have come in all beliefs — monotheist, animist, agnostic, and atheist — it bears mentioning that virtually all civilizational reversals were carried out by theists. Reversal, especially of the magnitude of Wilderson's antagonism, requires faith in a future that can only be dreamed about. Struggle against overwhelming obstacles needs more than political theory; it necessitates faith, a rationality outside the rationality available within the current historical order.

Conversion Narratives: Nuh Muhammad, Jamil Al-Amin, and Jalil Muntaqim

The Black Muslim Tradition is a unique praxis. It transformed the aforementioned precepts into a lived discipline through which Black struggle could be reimagined beyond the secular assumptions of modern liberation theory, and directly intervene into the condition Afropessimism treats as beyond remedy. The clearest articulation of Islam as a technology against despair comes from Nuh Muhammad, a former member of the Black Liberation Army who in 1973 was sentenced to life. He entered prison as a committed Leninist-Marxist. His encounter with Islam fundamentally altered how he understood defeat, struggle, and the temporality of Black liberation.

"I was a very determined socialist when I was placed in a jail with another black leader. He had already become Muslim, and I was confronted by his daily prayers. At first I could not understand why he was praying to a god who, I felt, had abandoned black people... And then you read the ayat in the Quran where Allah told the Prophet, 'Maybe we might show you a victory in your lifetime. Maybe we won't, but you must keep striving.' So then you start to see things in a broader perspective... It was then that I realized that we didn't really suffer a major defeat but that we were part of an ongoing process that eventually would culminate in victory." Nuh Muhammad, quoted in Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam

Nuh did not abandon the struggle. He began where Wilderson began. He experienced the same disillusionment with Marxism and confronted the same apparent historical defeat.[20]

Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, known as H. Rap Brown, recounts his evolution from a Black militant ambivalent toward religion to a Muslim imam who led the West End Muslim community of Atlanta. In Revolution by the Book he writes that to be successful in struggle requires a certain degree of awareness beyond material reality — that success requires a spiritual consciousness.[21] This is necessary in order to see Black people as sacred subjects and not debris. Worship reverses Black abjection by restoring the Black subject to al-fiṭrah — the primordial human disposition created by Allah before the distortions of racial modernity. In doing so, Black being is no longer constituted through negation, social death, or whiteness, but through divine intentionality and sacred purpose.

Al-Amin observed that it became evident that accomplishing what the movement had talked about would require "a practice," invoking one of the most oft-repeated verses from the Qur'an in Black Muslim communities: that Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.[22] The verse reframes the dismal state of affairs Afropessimism cannot move past and highlights a disciplined mode of living — a revolution from within, the revolution Gil Scott-Heron said would not be televised, yet without surrendering to apolitical mysticism or passive esotericism that severs spiritual transformation from collective struggle.

Perhaps Al-Amin's most devastating critique of Afropessimism emerges in his insistence upon the irreducibility of Black agency. He writes that when the first slave rebelled against being a slave, he gave an alternative to slavery.[23] This directly confronts Wilderson's claim that Blackness is incapable of symbolic resistance because there was no prior meta-moment of plenitude, equilibrium, and social harmony to which Blacks can return through revolt or rebellion.[24] There is tension even in Wilderson's own rhetoric: in the acknowledgments to Red, White & Black, he offers gratitude to those ancestors who were not afraid to stay with us in the hold of the ship.[25] If the slave's revolt cannot secure meaningful continuity across rupture, then what function are these ancestors serving in Wilderson's own text?

We should note that the first time the word jihād appeared in the Western Hemisphere was in reference to slave rebellions. The Maroon revolt of 1728, the Malê Bahia revolt of 1835, and the Haitian revolt all were led by and involved Muslims. There were even royal edicts — cédulas — in which the King of Spain explicitly barred slave traders from capturing Africans who were Muslim or practiced "the Mohammedan faith." Al-Amin's invocation of slave rebellions exposes a pressure point: how should one interpret recurrent acts of Black insurgency that arise under conditions of social death yet repeatedly instantiate forms of agency, sacred obligation, and alternative human possibility irreducible to the slave position?

Jalil Muntaqim's conversion is likewise significant precisely because his arrival to Islam was not a retreat from the struggle. He was a committed Marxist-Leninist and member of the Black Liberation Army who already possessed political consciousness, organizational discipline, and a willingness to sacrifice his life. Yet during his incarceration, his debates with Jamil Al-Amin exposed a limitation within the materialist framework he had inherited — not simply state repression or the collapse of political organizations, but the inability of secular revolutionary theory to sustain meaning once historical momentum appeared interrupted. Muntaqim initially viewed the daily prayers of Al-Amin and Sekou Odinga with contempt, seeing all religion as political resignation. Yet through their exchanges he was transformed by a single question Al-Amin put to him: what happens to energy when you die? That question, coupled with witnessing in Muslims a psychological steadiness his materialism could not produce, eventually led him to take his shahādah.

Myopia, Historical Antecedent, and the Limits of Afropessimist Closure

If Wilderson and Afropessimists still maintain that none of these examples of insurgency alter the social death grip on Blackness, how should we register these acts of defiance? If Afropessimism acknowledges such resistance, what exactly do these acts instantiate if not some irreducible dimension of Black being? The system can categorize Black people as anti-human, but if Black humanity repeatedly erupts under conditions designed to extinguish it, why should these eruptions not count as evidence against ontological closure?

It is also worth asking what Wilderson's own sources make of his conclusion. Fanon believed that revolutionary violence was world-making and humanizing under colonial domination. Orlando Patterson framed social death in Slavery and Social Death as historical and sociological, not ontological — in fact his work was a scathing critique of integration, not of all forms of resistance. Hartman comes closest to Afropessimism given her statement about the persistence of anti-Blackness after slavery, yet even that statement does not affirm ontological closure; in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments she highlights non-liberal liberation narratives and asymmetrical forms of resistance, leaving the antagonism Wilderson centers open, not closed.

Afropessimism remains in the raw-materials phase of a theory because it has not proven its most controversial claim. The irony is that much of the conceptual labor underwriting Afropessimism's diagnosis — that anti-Blackness is foundational to the modern world — comes from thinkers who themselves stopped short of Wilderson's closure and preserved conceptual space for insurgency, reconstruction, or transformed forms of Black life. Fanon, an atheist Marxist, used as his case study Algerian Muslims who mobilized Islamically under colonial domination, arriving at the broader view that each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.[26]

To declare that there is no roadmap to freedom so long as the world is structured by anti-Blackness absolutizes the present.[27] Wilderson has not measured the time it took for revolutionary movements, from the moment they began resisting to when they achieved their outcome, to know how long one should strive before quitting. The Struggle of the Orders in Rome between the plebeians and the patricians lasted two hundred years, and they were racially and culturally homogeneous. Afropessimism largely ignores the implications of racial ontology being recent relative to human history — whites, through European military power and technological advancement, were not a hegemonic race before the nineteenth century. Historical actors routinely experience their conditions as totalizing and permanent, yet history repeatedly proves those perceptions wrong. Afropessimism must therefore justify why modern anti-Blackness is the singular exception.

Afropessimism foregrounds the continuity of anti-Black structures; the Black Muslim Tradition foregrounds the continuity of Black refusal.

What first attracted Nuh Muhammad, Jamil Al-Amin, and Jalil Muntaqim to Islam was not theology. It was the religion's ability to widen their horizon of Black struggle beyond the immediate failures of their political movements. Rather than seeing imprisonment as evidence that the movement had reached a dead end, they came to understand their particular moment in the Black struggle as part of a continuum larger than any individual organization, generation, or event. Islam transformed their idea of resistance as a historical project into a sacred inheritance tied to obligation rather than outcome — which helps explain why a significant number of Black militants, particularly former Marxists, became Muslim rather than pessimists. Instead of a retreat from revolutionary struggle, their conversion was a maturation.

These men, and so many others, arrived at this realization while incarcerated — poetic, that their faith should be redefined and rejuvenated under carceral conditions, where all the malevolent forces of anti-Blackness go unchecked and the body exists outside of liberal gloss. Yet they did not resign; they renewed their commitment and emerged with a broadened understanding of the asymmetrical warfare of racism.

Conclusion: Toward a Sacred Futurity

Afropessimists prematurely declare white supremacy the victor. While they do not exaggerate the entrenchment of anti-Blackness, they do exaggerate its invincibility. True, Black oppression possesses a unique severity within modernity — but this was theorized before Wilderson by those who did not treat that oppression as eternal.

One must ask what conception of futurity Afropessimism leaves available to Black people. This is precisely where the Black Muslim Tradition intervenes. The figures who turned toward Islam were searching for a new technology of struggle after the limits of secular revolutionary frameworks had revealed themselves. Under conditions designed to extinguish all expectation — prison — they discovered in Islam not an anesthetic escape from political life, but an orientation toward existence through which suffering, obligation, uncertainty, and Black becoming acquired new meanings irreducible to visible history.