 This is part of our Big Summer Stride events. And you are all here to see Frank B. Wilderson III. And they will be discussing the book Afro-Pessimism. Summer Stride is not just for kids. It's for all ages. So do sign up to do your 20 hours reading and you'll get your iconic SFPL tote bag, which has that beautiful art you see right there from Bay Areas, Keelani Juanita, who has just published a book with Chronicle Books called Ta-Da. Welcome to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people. We want to acknowledge the many Ramutish Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards in the lands in which we reside. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from what these nations with which we live together. We do this by providing useful, factual, fun information. That chat link that I put in has a link to a ginormous reading list and resource list about land rights and first person culture and native identity. So check that out. We have two reading initiatives I want to quickly tell you about, Total SF, which is Peter Hartlob and Heather Knight from the Chronicle. They have joined us for a quarterly book club. Our second one will feature Daniel Handler and Gary Kamaya. And we'll be discussing the book, The End of the Golden Gate, Writers on Loving and Sometimes Leaving San Francisco. And this should be a good one. And then we'll be back in November and February in the Caret Auditorium. It's happening. It is happening. So join us in person for an event. Yikes. Yay. Yikes and yay. San Francisco Public Library has a reading campaign called On the Same Page. It's been going on for years and years. This is a bi-monthly read where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book. And this July and August, we're celebrating Jacqueline Woodson and her book, Red at the Bone. Jacqueline Woodson will be in our virtual library on August 12th, discussing her children and YA books. We will have a book club of Red at the Bone. So come check it out. It was a very good read, very good read. So please check out our On the Same Page campaigns. Tuesday, we have Dr. Keisha Midlemass and Reuben J. Miller discussing the politics and racism of reentry. I don't know if you know that San Francisco Public Library has a jail reentry services department, a small but mighty department. I'm always proud of the work that they do. We do reference by mail for every jail west of the Mississippi. So it's a huge, huge task, an important task. We also serve in the jails here in San Francisco, including our last youth jail, which we all hope will be gone very soon. And on the 22nd, Muslim American Writers at Home, Stories, Essays, and Palms. And the Mexican Museum joined us on July 24th. And academics talking about the Black Panther or Tales of Wakanda. I can't wait for this one. Academics and Black Panther, gonna be good. Along with our jars department, we have a film called The Prison Within. And featuring our friend Troy Williams, who is big in the social restorative movement. And we'll have screen the film and then we'll have a panel discussion afterwards. Film screenings are very rare and they are a one-time only event. So it will not be recorded. You must come to the event. All right, friends, for today's event. And like I said, folks, it is a meeting. So please stay muted if possible. I will monitor as we go along. I will put the, I'll put any kind of notes that we have in the chat and add it to the document. There will be time for Q and A and you can put all your questions in the chat box. I would like to introduce Justin Daemon. And Justin is from the Before Columbus Foundation, who we are always happy to partner with and honored that he brings amazing people to us. Justin is the chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation and the administrator of the American Book Awards. Who will be, the American Book Awards will be in the virtual library in September. Justin, I am turning it over to you. All right, wonderful. Thank you so much, Anisa. And thanks again to the San Francisco Public Library. As Anisa mentioned, my name is Justin Daemon. I'm the chairman of the board of directors of the Before Columbus Foundation. And once again, I urge everyone in our audience who appreciates these programs to visit us online at BeforeColumbusFoundation.com and support by donation programs such as these and the American Book Award, which will be broadcasting here once again in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library on September 19th, Sunday, September 19th at 2 p.m. This afternoon, we are generously gifted with the presence of the author, Frank B. Wilderson. Frank B. Wilderson, the author of three books. I have them here. The first one, Incog Negro, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. And in fact is the occasion on which Frank and I met back in 2008. Since that time, Frank and I have done, oh my goodness, dozens of events on the radio, on stage and now virtually by way of the San Francisco Public Library. His other book is second book, Red, White and Black from Duke University Press. And most recently, the book that we are here to discuss today, Afro-Pessimism, which I am very elated to say will be in paperback in just a few short weeks. So those of you who have been waiting will be able to enjoy this extraordinary work in paperback coming up in just a few weeks. And Frank, I think it's appropriate this afternoon that we're having this conversation at the end of the West, both metaphorically, by analogy and geographically in San Francisco, California. And I'd like to shift our attention to a few years in the Bay Area that are of international importance, magnificent years that I believe are under tremendous violent eraser, a kind of extremity of unremembering. And I'm thinking of the years of 1968 to 1973 in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland and the surrounding area. Now I mentioned that the international implications of these years are part of what have led to their active erasure that is taking place now. But for the purposes of our discussion, these are years that are illuminated and part of the vibrancy, part of what comes in the light of your work and the three books that I just mentioned, but I think perhaps more than others, Afro-Pessimism. So as a way of beginning this conversation, I'd like to turn to the underground press, which was extraordinarily active in the United States and particularly in the Bay Area and this iteration that we're speaking of, revolutionary in content. And by revolutionary, I wanna emphasize that what I mean by that would be defined in the terms described by Malcolm X wherein he said in the Ballad of the Bullet, you don't have a revolution in which you love your enemy and you don't have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it, revolutions overturn systems, revolutions destroy systems. Now in terms of that revolutionary iteration, I wanna point to a specific point with 1970 and Jean Genet is brought to San Francisco by David Hilliard to speak informally to editors of underground presses from around the United States. And what he says to them is that their failure to accept black leadership on the question of political revolution will be their undoing, that the tendency towards liberal paternalism is ever present in the pages of their various organs and that if they do not accept black leadership on this revolutionary question, they will be undone. And I'd like to start there because I think what Jean Genet and David Hilliard are amplifying in this example is part of a larger centuries old historical failure on the part of the United States to accept black leadership on this or almost any question really, beginning with Douglas, the boys obviously more recently Martin Luther King, all of whom at one time were eager to represent the ideals of what the United States ostensibly promises. But again, we're later embittered and turned away from that. So if we could start there with Hilliard and Genet and they're dressing down of the revolutionary underground and its various organs of press. Well, thank you so much, Justin. It's really great to be back with you one more time. We always groove when we get together. So I'm looking forward to it. It's exciting to see you. Yeah, I mean, you're so right. I mean, this period is internationally and nationally very, very important. In fact, pivotal, you know, I don't let me get too far away from Genet and the Panthers and what you're saying, but I just want to say a couple of things. I mean, you have a situation in which even in the academic world, Paris 68, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the urban uprisings, the Ted Offensive which demoralizes the US military and lets the, you know, the Johnson brass know that the American army is not invincible. All these things are erupting around the world. And at the same time as you started with, you know, you've got at a certain point, Core and Telco listed over 600 underground press journals, magazines, newspapers, you know, from the ones that we all know about like scallions and ramparts and the Berkeley barb to the ones that we don't know about, you know? And this is a period in which the questions being posed are not questions of policy and liberal humanist transformation, but questions of is the United States of America ethical or unethical? What are the moral implications of its practices, but what is the ethical foundation of its very existence? I'm very happy to say that, you know, that era influenced me fundamentally, you know? I was 12 years old in 1968. And, you know, as I write in the book Afro-Pessimism, the year before in 1967, I wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest. And 12 months later in 1968, I wanted to be a looter. So it was quite a transformative moment for me. And I was an avid reader coming, living in the home of two academics who traveled around to universities. We spent 68 to 70, living not just in our hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, but living in Seattle, Washington, Detroit, two years after the uprising where the Alger's Motel incident happened, Chicago, right at the moment when Fred Hampton is killed, and then Berkeley during Jackson State and Kent State. And so the newspapers and alternative press organs that you're talking about, this was a moment that, as you're saying, could have gone the other way. And Ginea is upgrading the left for going the way of reconstituting American values as opposed to being authorized. And when we say leadership of being led by blackness, now we don't mean bowing down and serving black people lunch and fanning them with mint juleps and that kind of, we mean being authorized by the existential questions of black suffering, as opposed to being authorized by the existential questions of immigrant suffering or working class suffering, being authorized by the existential questions of a being who has, in the words of France Fanon, no ontological resistance in the eyes of the others, as opposed to being authorized by the suffering of a being who is marginalized and discriminated against. So there's a two, and these are two ways which it could have gone. And the point that you brought up about this meeting in San Francisco or the Bay Area with Ginea, right before that or right after that, I think it was right before, in the very same period, Ginea had been smuggled into the United States on the Canadian border to give a talk in New Haven at Yale in support of Panthers who were on trial. And to give you an idea of an anecdote of what he did that the white left could have done on that little, he's at the podium and he's on the steps of Yale giving a speech to radicals. And the speech is actually translated from the French and printed. But he says he doesn't speak English, he's speaking in French. And there's a black panther next to him who speaks French, who is translating the speech. And what the panther is saying is things like, you know, off the pigs and down with this anti, this imperialist mother fucker structure, this kind of thing, you know. And a white graduate student walks up to Ginea afterwards and he says, by the way, actually he didn't translate the speech the way you actually said it. There was a lot of panthers speak in there and it was an articulation of more black rage and analysis than you actually had in that speech. He went off on his own pluck in a sense, not sticking to the script of what you said. I just want you to know that. And Ginea said, so what? He said, so what? He mobilized what I was saying for the needs of black revolution. I could give a rat's ass if it was not what I actually said. And that's an instance of what you're talking about, of where the white, of how the white left could have been authorized by black agendas, black analysis, the slave as opposed to the worker or the immigrant. The other was, I had a friend, her name was Jones Curranan. And I'm 65, she's about 10 years older than me. And she and two other people made a movie, which is in the California film archives there called The Murder of Fred Hampton, which a lot of people have seen. And she was an ethnographic filmmaker and she went to Chicago with her husband who was the director. And she was a sound person and there was another person who did the cinematography and they said, we wanna make an ethnographic film about the Panthers. We have the resources and what do you say? And Fred Hampton said, no, what I need is a cinematic instrument. Start recruiting people from the Pistole Nation or a black gang to bring them into the Panthers. I don't need an ethnographic film when some white radicals were made. That's what I need. And I want you to use your cinematic and discursive resources to make the film that we Panthers need. And you know what they said, you know what John said? She said, fine, let's chuck our project and go with what you're doing. And why that is so important is so important because that giving over of their agency, Black Revolution, put them on the spot that night Fred Hampton was murdered and they got there two hours later to give us the kind of footage of those 2009 bullets in the walls that we have today. And I think that this is what we're trying to say with respect to Afro-Pessimism. The Afro-Pessimism deepens the revolutionary agenda. But everyone else into the paradigm of the slave as opposed to the slave making a structural adjustment to leave off a part of history of their suffering to find common ground with others. No, they find common grounds with us at the level of analysis and suffering and we can have a deeper and wider and broader and more comprehensive revolution. So you're so right. And this is a period in which that almost happened. Almost. That almost happened, but it didn't. And I think that is fair to say that part of the reason why this particular period, again for those who joined us late, the San Francisco Bay Area 68 to 73 is under such violent erasure is the fact that there was indeed a cultural revolution. No one can deny that. But the political revolution, we were just a hair's breadth away from that. And I believe, and you'll speak to us about your own take on what I'm about to say, that this really is the reason why there has been such an effort to undo that history, to unremember that history, to unravel what exactly it was that took place here. Now, specifically getting back to David Hilliard and John Genet and their meeting with the underground press, one of the things that David Hilliard warned about was that you're allowing your newspapers and your organs to become scandal sheets. And Genet said, listen, you need to stop putting coverage of the Panthers and the revolution in between stories about sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now, the reason I mentioned that is that this has been a traditional means by which blacks have been confined, restrained and reduced to something of use to white progressives, white liberal tendencies and of course, conservatives as well. Could you speak to those points? Well, yes, I mean, and I would encourage people who wanna go, my book, Afro-Pessimism is a trade book geared towards a non-academic audience, even though it is auto theory, in other words, there's memoirs sliced in with critical theory. But I've had to really work with the language so that it does not look like or read like the high level of abstraction of my critique. My critique, I don't mean condemnation. I mean, assessment of psychoanalysis and Marxism that takes place in the middle book, which is called Red, White and Black. That has to, so this book, Afro-Pessimism is an invitation for people to go deeper and there's a glossary and footnotes at the end, but the footnotes are not numbered in the book so that it can read more like story than academic press book. And why I say this would affect your question is because in the back of the book, there are people that I am referencing without slowing down the pace of reading with quotation marks and numbered footnotes. There are people like Sidia Hartman. There are people like David Marriott. There are people like Jared Sexton. There are people like Hortense Spillers. And what one would get if one is not schooled in this kind of archive of high theory in critical race studies of which Afro-Pessimism is a anchor tenet inside of... If you haven't done that kind of vocabulary and that kind of work, then you would then move from my book to these writers and your question then would be addressed as well as in my middle book, which is to say that one of the things that Hartman, Marriott, Sexton and myself in our academic work try to point out through an engagement with Freud and engagement with Rakan, saying there's something valuable here with respect to an unraveling and an elaboration of the unconscious. However, what these two great thinkers have not thought through was the way in which the black unconscious is always over determined by this kind of imperative to turn white or disappear. Number one, and they have not really thought through coming right back to your question, the way in which blackness functions in the libidinal economy in the collective conscious as a resource for everyone else to solve whatever problems that they have. So what you're speaking to and what you've elaborated here is that it's the spectacle and the joy of that blackness whether it's hip hop or jazz or the Panthers and their black garb and guns. It's that resource as a spectacle of joy, joy sense, or even emotional pessimism that works for these left-wing writers in these organs of radical underground press material. They're saying, you're just treating the sizzle. That's right. It's not the steak. And invert that and really talk about what paradigmatically, what does it mean to be black in the world as opposed to performatively, I'm getting off on this, the way I get off on soul music or jazz. And this is continuing to happen as part of the tools that are used to undo the particular period in history that we're talking about. I think that specifically today, we're seeing that more and more in the form of a kind of erotic resentment that is focused and refocused towards blacks in America. I think of last year as being a vivid illustration of this in which the liberal and progressive intelligentsia used the events of Minneapolis to try to quantify and measure the suffering of this murder. This thing that was basically installed as a kind of motion picture lynching photography and centered their efforts around that but then moved gradually by way of their corporate benefactors towards a celebration of black's involvement in electoral politics. Now, as we get closer to the election we're gonna move off of this and we're going to say how wonderful it is when all of you all can vote for us. Now, I would amend that a little bit by also saying that voters, my voters for Trump went up last year, not down. And this seems to be something that among those who are attempting to galvanize the constituency that led to the Biden victory choose to ignore. But let's get back to that point about the use or misuse of images of black violence to further the goals of allegedly progressive or so-called liberal thinkers. Yes, well, I go to the Nation magazine June 14th-June 21 issue which addresses this. And one of the things that I was saying in that article was that whatever black people think about the police, because as you just pointed out with the uptick in the rise of black people voting for Trump what we can assume is that if you take for Friday in early topography of the psyche where you've got one realm of the psyche is pre-conscious interest. That's the way you and I are speaking about who we are and what we think and what we say and what we understand consciously and then the realm of unconscious desire and identification which is also this engine inside of us that is motivating us but we don't have a grasp on what that is. Just like right now as we speak we are being driven by the engine of logical sense through the sentences that we use we're also being driven by the engine of grammatical structure, which is largely conscious and we're not talking about that. So there's two engines going on and then there's the third places which is called paradigmatic position which is to say where are you and how are you positioned paradigmatically in the world? And that's the thing that doesn't get taught a lot in classrooms because it's the thing the aspect of your being which you have no control over. It's not that it's unchangeable but it's not unchangeable by individual actions. So in other words, if ultrasound is done on the mother's belly and that you see the genitals are male the parents go home and they start paying the room blue and the names are John and Jim and that kind of thing. So the child by virtue of this symbol that is given value is brought into a paradigm of masculinity. And so why is that important to what you just said? Well, I think that black bodies are paradigmatically policed everywhere and always. I do not believe, and this is one of the 10 the anchor tenants of Afro pessimism that there is a contingency to anti-black violence. I think anti-black violence is a necessary ensemble of rituals that allow the rest of the world to know that could happen to me. What could happen to me? There had to be some kind of transgression real or imagined there has to be some kind of contingency. And this is, and so there was an opportunity in the murder of George after the murder of George Floyd for people to start thinking about policing through black positionality. And we lost that moment. Because if you think about policing through black positionality, then you have to come to the realization that policing can only be reformed in relation to non-black beings. Policing cannot be reformed in relation to black beings. Policing is organically anti-black in the way that the spotual soup is a soup throughout all of the Spanish-speaking world. And I've had it one way in Guatemala, one way in Mexico, one way in Spain, another way in Cuba, very different. But it is over-determined by tomatoes. You take tomatoes out and you don't have the spotual soup. If you take anti-blackness out of policing, you don't have policing anymore. And there was an opportunity for the left to expand the horizon and intensify the antagonism of its view of policing. And it lasted for a millisecond. A millisecond. And we moved from abolished to defund, to delay, to let's find a way to talk about these issues to white middle America, just got left behind. So this is constantly what's happening. It goes right back to the way you started this program, which is why will the left not be authorized by the paradigm of black suffering? One of the most bizarre examples of this that paralleled this transition from object relationship to the video of the murder, to registration drives, to get out the vote has been, and I know you've observed it, the reduction of one of the greatest riders that this country has ever produced, James Baldwin, to a series of exploiting his aphoristic style into a series of life coaching means for potential allies to do better, treat black people well right now, type of thing. And this really is the evidence of cannibalism making it safe for the food, right? I mean, because we keep seeing this happen over and over again. And it's always this already vampiric to put to use. Nina Simone most recently has been a subject to this kind of abuse. But it certainly isn't the Baldwin of no name in the street. It certainly isn't the Baldwin of tell me how long the train's been gone. No, it's an earlier Baldwin. And the point that comes out of this with these life coaching means has to do with something you just said. And that is the conflation of suffering with redemption. Yeah. In the example of their hero, the guy up there who's suffering for your redemption and they can't get it out of their head, they're gonna try to turn Jim Baldwin into that to help them get along with their thing. Now, could you speak to that? Because this is a pattern that, I mean, Baldwin today certainly, Nina Simone now certainly, but this is a pattern that has emerged for a very long time. Could you talk to us a little bit about that? Well, the white world in particular and the non-black world in general, waits till the corpse is cold enough. We're tired of being here. You know, they like to eat their Negroes at room temperature or like. That's right. That's right. So, you know, it's sickening. You know, I mean, it's like in my first work in Cognigro, I talk about this battle that my wife and Nina and I and two other people fought at UC Santa Cruz to change the multicultural curriculum of first year students from the kinds of books that ask the question, how do different races of people find their way through discrimination and become part of the rainbow nation that America wants it to be? We want to, we want to chuck all of that, you know? And by chucking all that, you know, before years on that curriculum, the fire next time was the go-to book when you came to Black Week, you know? And what we were saying is keep Baldwin, right? But let's go to the evidence of things not seen. I want to talk to the black person when they're old and dying, okay? Don't have anything left to lose, okay? That's what that book is about. That book says, this is what America does. It's about the Atlanta child murders. This is not a form of discrimination. This is not a form of lynching that we need better policy and laws and police reform again. America's job is to kill our children. It is the zeitgeist of that book, the energy and what some would call bitterness but what I would call just plain capacity to stare into the abyss is so different for the fire next time that we had a hell of a time trying to get it out of the curriculum, you know? Go to Asada Shakur, you know? Go to the books at black people at their best, meaning the moment they don't give a rat's ass. Go to the books that they're reading at that moment, not the books that you can swallow, okay? And so we constantly have to have to fight this and they can, as I said before, they wait until the corpse is room temperature and preferable and they can rewrite it as they want it. But this rewrite it as they want it is producing or I think has produced a rather fallow field, hasn't it? I mean, one of the things that has been truly emaciated andemic is popular music, which getting back to the period that we began our conversation with the Bay Area 68 to 73, we find the epicenter of a new popular music that is deeply imbued with revolutionary struggle. And again, revolutionary struggle that aligns the quest for human rights within the United States with anti-imperialist struggle taking place all over the world, something that inside the United States is almost unheard of now. So again, to put a finer point on that, during that period of so much violence, you also had a counterpoint that expressed an extraordinary capacity for joy in the music, an extraordinary capacity, not just for joy, but as you mentioned a moment ago, to also stare into the abyss with that sense of elation, of a new world coming, and that informed the popular music. I'm thinking of course of people like Sly Stone, who coming out of the Bay Area, but that's missing today, isn't it? And I don't think that the United States, the sixth soul of the United States would have been healed if it ever was, and I don't think it has at that time, had it not been for voices like Marvin Gaye and the extraordinary tenderness and gentleness of his music and his message in albums like What's Going On, or Sly Stone's message, I love you for who you are, not the one you feel you need to be. You don't need darkness to do what you think is right. Now this kind of thing, that's not happening today, is it? I'm not a hip hop aficionado, so I don't want to make a... But you dig where I'm coming from. Of course, and I'm supporting what you're saying because I want to put a little footnote before I go right to your point. Because I'm always being miscoded, and I mean, 15 years ago, no one gave a rat's ass what I was saying. Now it's like every little soundbite is taken. And... You know, it's not like that. What has happened is a corporate consolidation of the means of production and the network of distribution. And so it's really difficult for... And also, we have the CIA and the State Department having produced with the Ollie Norths and people like that the crack epidemic. We have seen a churning under, like Dante's Inferno, of Black life possibilities. The way that we have never seen before except one horrible period, which is 1800 to 1830, when one million Black people were re-interned into slavery by being forced through in coffals and tens and threes from the southeastern seaboard to Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi. This is a time when one million people were re-enslaved and ripped from their families in quotation marks on large southeastern plantations. And all these people, statistically speaking, were between the ages of 15 and 25. This is precisely what has happened in the 80s, 90s and 2000s in the prison industrial complex. One million, now two million people, in Asia, 15 and 25, have been re-enslaved. There's over a million Black men in cages. There's more a million on some kind of other lockdown with ankle bracelets or going back to prison at night or halfway houses. The prison population, one academic told me of Black women is going something up by 800% per year. So we're seeing the intensification of channel slavery and that's not even what Afro-Pessimism is talking about. Slavery as a relational dynamic, but we're actually seeing the re-intensification of channel slavery in the way that we haven't seen it since that period of 1800 to the Jacksonian period. And so this has affected our cultural production tremendously, tremendously in that we don't have even a smidgen of the capacity to shape it in the way that we did back in the day like you're talking about. And we didn't have that capacity because we were great musicians, great singers. We had that capacity because there was Black movement in the streets and as artists had to respond to that. I was just before the show, my group is war and out of LA and just some of the lyrics from war like in the song, get down, police and the justice, they've laughing when they bust us, got to get down or the world is a ghetto. It was this whole, and every time war gave a concert, they took it upon themselves to give Richard Nixon the middle finger on stage. And so this is the kind of thing that will get you click, click, locked up or just marginalized in a way worse than Nina Simone was. Worst than Earth or Kit was, and so what my hope is, is that with Trayvon Martin, with Sandra Bland, with what's all that's happening, that we can intensify, that we can start to shift the movement for Black lives and shift the agenda of Black Lives Matter away from policy for meetings, away from policy questions and more towards paradigmatic antagonisms, the way so that those movements can actually meet and conflict with the rage in the streets. And then we're gonna see a change in our art as well. I think it's happening slowly. I'm so happy to hear your invitation to expand the arc and panorama of the description of what is taking place now, because I think that one of the great failures of recent times has been the willingness or the sense of urgency, particularly by people in the cable news sphere or the print organs of corporate media to do that, to make it very, very clear that this cycle is what we're seeing now a continuance of, precisely the description that you just offered. And to that point, I think that really, afro-pessimism is in fact, despite what some people insist on, indeed, a very hopeful and perhaps not optimistic, that would be taking it too far, but very hopeful. And in this sense, that it does not offer a series of programs and prescriptions, admonitions and instructions on how to do things better. In other words, you're not asking anybody to tune up their engine. The engine needs to be dismantled, disassembled and replaced, but by not offering solutions, it gives, I think, a more illuminated and lucid description of the problem. Is that fair to say in my view? Thank you so much. Checks in the mail. I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, what we have to understand is that when black people call for voting rights, the state and civil society, I don't mean the police and the military. What I mean, we're up against the state and we're up against the violence of our neighbors. The state and civil society respond to a call for voting rights, as though we said we want to overthrow the government. Right. The train of violence that comes from us just making a peeve should not be poo pooed. I mean, if there was something like, it's been a while since I've read the literature, but it's like 273 Cointelpo covert operations against the left when it reconstituted itself in the late 1960s, right? Well, over 250 of those operations were against the Panthers. What that means is that that was a move, that was a counterintelligence agency that had started in the 50s to deal with communists, gone dormant in the 60s, then reconstituted itself again and basically targeted blackness. There were over 600 underground organs in that period and by the end of it, there were about 23. So there were Panthers who were murdered, almost 100, 100 in prison and in exile. In other words, in our traumatic memory, the memory that we pass on, what we know, even if we don't use this conversation with our children, what we know is that for other people, resistance has levels and those levels of resistance will give you, you will receive certain levels of state repression, but there's no such thing as a level of resistance or complaint from black people that will be graded with the levels of state response. The state is not, and its citizens, are not violent against us because we crack out a turn. Anti-black violence, and this is one of the anchor-tenant theories of Afro-Pessimism, anti-black violence is a necessary ensemble of rituals that produces a kind of knowledge for the rest of the world that if this were to happen to me, there would have to be a reason. So we have to be assaulted, we have to be assailed. It's part of therapy for the rest of the world. It's not because we call for voting rights, it's not because we call for better working conditions, it's not because we call for fairness and justice, it's because we breathe and because the aggressivity that builds up in the unconscious of other people because their worlds, their worlds are unethical. The white nuclear family is an unethical structure, unethical towards women, it's unethical towards children. And yet, rather than respond to the unethical nature of the white family, there's a resource over here called the Black Amago, and you can use that resource as the destination of your aggressivity so that your particular psychic world can remain stable, take it out on Black people. In so-called primitive cultures, they wear masks, they burn things in effigies, they have rituals to spell the aggressivity that would ordinarily be turned inward. We are the living, breathing destination of the world's aggressivity so that they can live in peace. I think that is absolutely correct. And again, to expand the arc and panorama of the historical perspective that you're inviting us to embrace here, to really look at a bit more carefully is part of the resistance to the facts that you're laying out, which as Gerald Horn has made clear, as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz has made clear, are or rather have their origins in a theological proposition. And I think that's where a lot of people are unable to digest this rich diet that you're allowing us to feast on this afternoon is that it is a religion for these people. Hence the fact that right now, here in the United States of America, there's been more mass shootings than there's been days in the year. Yes, yes, yes, I mean, anyway, you know? If I pick up on that. And I don't want to come back to, I want to echo what you're saying about the optimism of Afro-Pessimism because the pessimism, people particularly in the West and more specifically in the Anglo-American West take these words as kind of at a low level of abstraction, they think that pessimism means a kind of emotional attitude. And if something has a kind of intellectual history of how Afro-Pessimism came about as a discourse, they will say for one thing, Afro-Pessimism existed in the conversations of slaves as early as 625 AD when they started to realize that people would one day be called Iranians, people would one day be called Iraqis, people one day be called Chinese, people one day be called East Indians, people one day be called Arabs, people one day be called Moroccan Jews, who one day be called Berbers, they all vamped on us and harvested our bodies. And as they harvested our bodies and destroyed our capacity for relationality, their capacity for relationality became fine-tuned and they became cultural beings. And so what we are actually saying is that we're not, there's a lot of funny jokes and episodes in all of my books, okay? It's not an emotional dispensation. We're pessimistic about the capacity for a Marxist lens and we completely engage anti-capitalism who are pessimistic for the capacity of a Marxist lens to fully explain the structure of black suffering. We're pessimistic of the capacity of a psychoanalytic lens to fully explain the paradigm of black suffering. It's like to borrow from Gramsci, we have a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. We are hella optimistic about the capacity of black people once they have been recognized in their own rage, own understanding, you set it off to move. And I am always, so afro-pessimism isn't this kind of passive revolution from the top down telling black people what to think and telling black people what to do. It's precisely why we do not have a prescriptive gesture in the question. We feel that afro-pessimism is a series of texts which secure a mandate, not tell the populace. We've secured a mandate to free black imagination for its entire range from love to destruction. And I think that that is one of the most medicinal and fecund aspects of the work is that it indeed does corroborate what intuitively so many blacks and so many young blacks in particular already know and you and the work of your colleagues are creating a space in which that can be elevated to a conscious level. But we're getting in towards the top of the hour. So I know we have a lot of people out here who have questions for you, Frank. And I'm going to pivot a little bit and bring our colleague at the San Francisco Public Library, Anisa Malady, back into the conversation and she can help bring some of those questions to you. So again, thank you for being so generous with your time this afternoon, Frank. And it's always a pleasure over the last 14 years. Now we've been doing this to be with you again. Thank you so much. And Anisa, I'll give that to you so some folks can get on in there and ask Frank what's happening. All right, here we go. Like I mentioned, please put your questions in the chat box and YouTube, you can add your questions in that chat box and I'll bring them back. First question, you talked at length about your experience in South Africa in the book. What is the place of the African continent as a political and geographical category in Afro-Pessimist thoughts? And there's a part two to that. Do you want it now? Yeah, but I might have asked you again. So give it to me now, but I might have to ask you. Go ahead. Part two, your book is kind of auto theory. Could you speak a little more on the motivation for this style of writing? Did you experience any pushback in academia or publishing world on your style? Okay, I'm gonna take the second one first because that's easy. Basically the way the book came about was, was in Germany for the 11 months, spanning over 2013 and 2014. I was called Alexander von Humboldt, experienced researcher fellowship. And that was a really wonderful time because I was able to, I was free of administrative responsibilities. I didn't have to teach. I from time to time met with German graduate students who were doing American studies, specifically in Germany, unlike France, alphapessimism is hotly engaged and debated and where the plant is on that side, you can see the cover of the German translation that will be coming out in September. And on the other side is the cover of the Portuguese-Brazilian translation that just came up. So I use that time to write a, to work on a book, a theoretical book on the Black Liberation Army, but also to write where my first love is fiction and creative nonfiction. And so those that ended, and then a couple of years later, the new press in New York and Bursal Press in Europe called and asked for a book on, book of political essays. And really I was into writing a novel and so I just thought to myself, well, let me see if I can slice some of the anecdotes and stories that were left on the cutting room floor from Incognito into a book that is politically and theoretically engaged. And there was already two texts in the room that did that. In the Black Room, there was Asada Shakur's autobiography which I've been teaching every year since 1988. I even taught it in South Africa. And then in the general non-Black Room, there was the Argonauts, which unfortunately it was easier to push this kind of hybrid genre because those books have been in the world. So any, can you, second part of that question, can you tell me if I hit the high points of what it was asking before we move to the first part? I think you did. Okay, and then the first part was what again? You talked at length about your experience in South Africa. What is the place of the African continent as political and geographical category and Afro-Pessimist thought? I would say that you would probably want to Google and then look up and talk to people in South Africa who are part of a movement, both against white domination and against what the African National Congress has become. This is called the Black First Land First Movement in the townships of Cape Town, as well as the township Soretto and the 15 other townships surrounding Johannesburg because the anchor tenets of that movement are the books of Afro-Pessimism, surprisingly or perhaps not surprisingly. And yet the day-to-day experience of Black people in South Africa has significant differences than the day-to-day experience of Black people in the United States. So then one might ask themselves, why the hell are people in South Africa in a Black revolutionary movement that is moving against the Pompadour class, which has become the ANC, as well as moving against white corporate capital? Why are they reading the work of Afro-Pessimism and translated that into their own experience? And I would say for the same reason that years before that, people all over the world were reading Marx. Reason is that there is a structural commonality to Black suffering in South Africa and Black suffering in the Western Hemisphere, even though there are significant performative differences. So the final point that I'm trying to say is that Black people all over the world suffer from an inability to be recognized and incorporated into two stratas of what we call human relationality. One is filiation, which is to say, the capacity to be known as a people with kin and the other is affiliation, which is to say the capacity to be known as an agent of hegemony as opposed to an object of hegemony. And so what we're saying or what people in Africa, I've done Afro-Pessimist workshops for Black communities in Vienna, in Berlin, in Bremen, Germany, in London, in Toronto, in Cape Town, in Johannesburg. And every time I do these workshops, the actual nitty-gritty of the suffering is going to be different. But the position of the people and their relationship to the world, how they function in the collective unconscious of non-Black people in their world is structurally the same. And this is why it has kicked off like wildfire. It's even been worked through in Venezuela and places like Brazil. So you would say no sophisticated Marxist, for example, would say that because a Latinx woman working in a sweatshop in the Rio Grande suffers and have a life expectancy far shorter than a white Scandinavian professor in Stockholm, that because her day-to-day experience as a laborer is so much more horrifying than his day-to-day experience as a Stockholm professor, that that is a reason for thinking that their relationship to capitalism is paradigmatically different. So no Marxist worth his or her assault would say that. They're both confronted by the command modality of the extraction of surplus value. It's just that one lives that command modality extraction better than the other. And this is the level of sophistication that afro-pessimism has brought to thinking blackness globally and thankfully, as I said to Justin earlier, it's not us telling black people stuff. It's us securing a mandate because black people all over the world are saying, yeah, I get it. It's happening here. Thank you. What if we use race as a specific social category as an analytical tool for difference instead of considering social categories of difference as replacements in contention with race? Shall I read it again? Yeah. What if we use race as a specific social category as an analytical tool for difference instead of considering social categories of difference as replacements in contention with race? Yeah, well, I think that is the path of the trajectory of afro-pessimism and we even take it further than that. I mean, I'm a little hesitant to get a lot further because it requires perhaps some academic jargon that is not suitable for this, but this is why I would encourage people to read Sidia Hartman's work. I would encourage people to read Hortense Spurs. I would encourage people to read the writings of afro-pessimists that are published through academic press because in 1999, 2000, afro-pessimism as a critical lens was basically born. I wanna say that as a way of seeing the world, afro-pessimism existed since 625 AD when Africans in the East of Africa began to understand that the destruction of our capacity to be is the necessary process for the production of other people's capacity to be. So we didn't make this up. This is what Black people have been saying all along. It's just that they have been given permission to articulate it in multi-racial coalitions and they hadn't had the resources to formulate it into a theoretical lens, but we began to do that at UC Berkeley in the late 90s, early 2000s and it really pivoted when Jared Sexton made the point after we had read David Marriott's On Black Men in conjunction with City of Hartman's Scenes of Subjection and in conjunction with Orlando Patterson's Labor and Social Death. In this reading, Jared Sexton said, what if we think the essential antagonism, that phrase, the essential antagonism is the gold, the treasure that revolutionary thinking is always geared towards, whereas reformist thinking is geared towards how do we make the antagonisms livable? Revolutionist thinking is saying, what is the essential antagonism to get back to Fanon in the rest of the earth, where he says the native doesn't always tell the truth, which is to say, just like Justin said earlier, there's some Black people gonna vote for Trump. Says the native doesn't always tell the truth. The native is the truth, the truth of what? The truth of a settler's undoing. And so we were asking ourselves, what is the truth? Who embodies the truth of the undoing of the world? Not who embodies the truth of making this world better. Who embodies the truth of the undoing? And Sestan says, what if we think the essential antagonism, your anti-Blackness, as opposed to capitalism? He didn't say throw Marx out the window, because for a while I taught Das Kapital every fall. You know, I worked for the Communist Party and for non-aligned Communist cells in South Africa, teaching the works of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Marx when I was there. So I'm a rabid anti-capitalist, but the point that we're making is that Marx hasn't thought through the slave, Marx has thought through the worker. And so your questioner is absolutely right. If our goal is to deepen the thought so that we ask ourselves not how we can make this country better, but why does it deserve to exist and how can we undo it? Then we need a theoretical apparatus that gives us those questions. And I would say race is the first starting point, but even in our more theoretical work, we do a number on race by saying that there are people who have races that are not white, but the white race will give them a degraded sense of capacity. I recognize Ohlone Land in San Francisco. Even though, as Justice Taney said in the Dred Scott decision, it is an inferior form of being, right? I recognize Native Americans' capacity as a different race to turn endless duration into the event of culture, genealogy and language and to turn limitless space into the place called Ohlone Land. I recognize that I'm sending Dred Scott back to slavery because the lower courts treated him as though he was a subject of human relations. And that is wrong, he's saying. Dred Scott is not a race. He's not a subject of human relations. He is a possession. He's an object. And the nice thing about the 19th century is that people said what they dreamed. I would not have a job as a rhetorician in 1830 because the radical anti-black unconscious was fully calibrated with the radical anti-black consciousness. I make money by deconstructing the libidinal economy of things that are not said in the opening. We have to move towards what your questioner is saying and then go beyond that to say why is it that anti-blackness is not only the thing that holds together the United States, but it's the thing that holds together Mexico, that holds together Venezuela, that holds together Palestine. Why is anti-blackness the germ, the element that allows everyone, even non-white people to be who they are? Thank you, thank you. Yeah, there's a lot of questions out here Frank. Can the violence of white states against black people migrating from Africa to European countries be understood as a way of commodification? Most definitely. I mean, you think of Lampedusa and people arriving, if you look very closely, what you find is that in a lot of these, all these people who are trying to get from North Africa to Lampedusa and then ultimately to Europe, they're suffering high seas and exploitive traffickers and people who lie to them, but check it out. When you get on board, what you find is that a lot of the Arabs and the Berbers are breathing fresh air on the deck and the Africans are in the hold, just like they were, you know, they're all immigrants, okay, but the libidinal economy, the collective unconscious of these even, you know, shady traffickers are such that they know that the black people belong in the hold of the ship. And so what I'm saying is that even in this dynamic where people of color are being oppressed, turned back and kept in these water camps on Lampedusa and places like Malta so that they don't get to the European continent, even in those situations where people may not have college educations, may not have read, there's a completely intuitive understanding of where blackness belongs internal to that refugee strata. Thank you. This one's interesting. Where does love as expound traditions like Rumi, Jesus, and et cetera fit in? I think Justin, well, you know, I'm not a Christian, so I can't answer it like that. But Justin brought up, I think that love that Justin talked about with respect to what was coming out of the music in that time is vital and important but it is also catalyzed and galvanized by a kind of iconoclastic blackness on the move. It is not separated from those two things. And so I don't believe or I'm not attentive to a kind of theory of love that is delinked from a process of iconoclastic rage and movement. I think that black love works best when black people are on the move, authorized by our own agenda and our own understanding of anti-black racism. Okay, how about, let's see. The concern here is that capital requires difference, requires division to successfully reproduce. So why give capital this access? The concern here is that capital requires difference, requires division to successfully reproduce. So why give capital this access? I'm a little irritated and astounded by the question. I'll say it to you like just like that because it's like there's a verbal volition in there, right? Why give capital this thing? Like, you know, it would be like if it was raining outside, okay? Afro pessimism is a report. It's not doing something, you know. It's not, what I'm trying to say, Anisa, is that I'm addressing the foundation of the question as being faulty. Anecdotally, it would be like if I were to look out the window and it was thundering and lightning and then I said to you, whoa, it's thundering, there's a big storm out there. And then you turn to me and you said, why did you do that? You know, why did you make it thunder and lightning? You know, no, I did not do that, okay? I am reporting on the paradigm of suffering. I am not an ancient, the work of Afro pessimism is not a form of accompaniment for capitalist exploitation and division. So before we can get to an answer to the question, the actual question would have to prove to me that the foundation of what he shared they said is absolutely legitimate. Okay, let's move on to, and oops, I lost it, I lost it. You talk about a presentation you gave somewhere in Europe where all the white professors in the room be rated your points. I found the image you painted in that particular scene very haunting. But again, it seems certain black scholars also try to distance themselves from Afro pessimist ideologies, even when their work points to that direction. What would you say is the reason for this fear of Afro pessimism? Well, for, okay, so there are multiple reasons, but I would say in the interest of time and just overarching, I mean, one is that this is a dangerous theoretical intervention. It's a dangerous theoretical intervention and none of us carry guns. So it's not that dangerous, it's not dangerous in that way. It's dangerous because what Afro pessimism has done is it has assessed, critiqued the very foundation of humanist thought using what Marx and Hegel and the rest of them did, a form of eminent critique. In other words, eminent critique is we have gone into the logic of humanist thought and said, here are the blind spots. And that has, and I think that when intellectual history is done of this particular form of critical race theory, what you will see is that we have actually shaken and rocked the assumed foundation of the humanities in particular and of social theory more generally, because in semiotics, I'm sorry, I'm gonna get a little bit abstract here, but in semiotics, one of the principles of semiotics, which is the foundation of psychoanalysis is that no word has organic value, which is to say, and the way I explain it to my students is I say, what is a table? And they might knock on the table and say, no, the word is not the thing. The word doesn't get value from its organic relation to phenomena. The word gets value from its conceptual understanding. And you get a conceptual understanding of what something is through two modes of processes of understanding. One is its ancillary and or collateral acquaintances. So table is like, but not chair, okay? But also ultimately the understanding of what it is or what something is or what a word means comes from our intuitive understanding of the thing it is not. What is a cat? A cat is not a dog. And we can then begin to think from there. And so the blind spot that we have uncovered and deconstructed in humanist thought is that the word human has no organic relationship to people with flesh. It cannot have a universal meaning. In order for there to be a human, there has to be its opposite. And this comes back to, we didn't start this. I mean, Orlando Patterson elaborates this very well in slave and social death. This word human then, which is the sense that the human in a universal entity is saying, I think we've shot that out of the water. If you read throughout for pessimism and you still think that a human, that everyone is human, then you haven't been paying attention. And so the word human then needs its opposite and that opposite is the slave and blackness emerges through slave-ness. And so that would be the beginning. We do like to state the part of the question again, so I make sure I covered the essential nature of it. Yes, let's see. I found the image you painted haunting, but again, it seems certain black scholars also try to distance themselves from afro-pestimist ideology. Yeah, well, I think it gets back to the whole weather report. A lot of people think, some black scholars think that we are denigrating blackness by saying that people who are not black disdain, elaborate and develop who they are through a constant rituals of anti-black antagonism that we've done something. We haven't done something, that we're taking blackness out of humanness. What we're arguing is that humanness emerges as a conceptual reality through the destruction of black bodies. Humanness cannot actually embrace blackness. And so that's a very traumatizing idea to sit with. Extremely traumatizing for me, and I wrote three books on it, and got another one coming, you know what I mean? Okay, so I can't handle it, and I'm writing this shit, okay? Yeah. So I did that, number one. Number two, the stories I won't tell right now, but the kinds of ways you get your head handed to you, the kinds of ways you get chopped at the knees by being a black graduate student who tries to elaborate these things through his or her studies by being a black faculty member. I mean, that kind of thing that happened to me in Berlin through from the aggressivity from 15 Marxists is the kind of thing that goes on all the time and people have to ask themselves how much of this shit can I take? How much of this aggression from the right and from the left, when I don't get with the common denominator that the left wants me to get with, how much can I take? And what's that gonna mean for my paycheck? What's that gonna mean for my tenure? What's that gonna mean for my future? I personally have been fired for more jobs than I've kept, okay? That's what, those are the stakes of speaking through to and with black people and demanding that everybody come over here as opposed to me going over there. It's pocketbook stakes, it's dinner on your table stakes, it's isolation stakes and a lot of people can't go through that and it's also emotionally hard. Thank you for that thoughtful answer, Frank. Let's see, how about, what would you say about the accusation of this as an agenda of rage, separation, alienation, rage begets rage, violence more violence? Well, I would say, pick a finger, right? And I'll just, okay, I'll pick a finger. What finger do you think I'm answering the question, but okay. Thank you for that thoughtful answer, Frank. All right, how about if we don't include class, if alliances are not prioritized and new hierarchies created, how do we prevent the reproduction of a system of repression? I think it's an unfair question. It's an unfair question. It's a way of saying, I don't want to sit with what black people are saying. It gets right back to how Justin started the show. It's a way of saying, I wanna do my radical shit over here and if black people can get down with it, fine. Or if I could use your sizzle, to give sparkle to my underground newspaper, fine. But I'm certainly not going, what is Afro-Pessimism comes out of that, comes out of that kind of aggressive disavow that underlies that question. We were not only studying as graduate students in Berkeley and seeing how Marxism and psychoanalysis couldn't say enough to and about the psychic and material suffering of black people, but we were being shut down from raising these questions in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland in multiracial coalitions by people talking to us and you're playing oppression politics. So please read my article from the nation magazine I think it's June 14th slash June 21, because that's a tactic of silencing. That's not a real question. Thank you. All right, let's see. I have a question in the chat. Does Afro-Pessimism or DU as Afro-Pessimists find any particular meaning significance in the current US political movement against CRT? There's a part two. That is to say, do you find such a movement kind of unsurprising or relatively insignificant in context of global antagonism? Well, this is facetiously, what I love about the right is that they could give a rat's ass about what's true or not true. Okay? It's like, we are known in the 21st century, Jacksonian moment like never before. When Andrew Jackson used to, you're on the campaign stuff, he used to say, I've never, how did that phrase go? I've never killed a recalcitrant Indian that I haven't scalped. Any of you gentlemen in the audience don't believe me. You're welcome to come to my parlor in my living room where I have the sculpts of about 10 Indians aligned over the mountain piece of my fireplace. I mean, so what I'm trying to say, he didn't wring his hands like Abraham Lincoln, okay, now I got out of the union, but I, oh, I can't, I can't, I can't, I gotta have a perfect union, but I can't fathom the thought of black people in civil society. That's what Lincoln said at the end of the Civil War. I just can't imagine them being part of civil, what am I gonna do about it? Cause I don't wanna sound too racist. Oh, let's build a bunch of ships and send them to Liberia. That could be, it's kind of like the Joe Bidens and the Jimmy Carter's and the Bill Clinton's of the world. How do I, how do I, how do I marginalize black people? Oh, let's get Bernie and Jordan to create a milk toast Negro and we'll call him Barack Obama, right? And then, so we can keep the radicals over here. I mean, the righteous comes along and they're like, what the hell? This is a white man's country, okay? We don't need a lot of verbiage in between that and us. And so that is their whole thing about critical race theory. They're not worried about the fact that what they think of as critical race theory has nothing to do with critical race theory. They couldn't care less. It's like Adolf Hitler said, to get the support of the masses, you're just the simplest and most stupid thing. It's a jingle, like they say in advertising. It's a catchphrase. None of them have read critical race theory. When they talk about critical race theory, all they mean is we don't want people, our kids learning that America did some bad things. That's just history, okay? That's not critical race theory. So in other words, what I find facetiously refreshing about them is the same thing that I found refreshing about the Africana when I lived for five and a half years in South Africa. They didn't ask themselves all these questions. How do I keep one white power and not look too racist? How do I bring in some good Negroes but keep the rest in Soweto? They just, they trained their kids in karate from the age of three. They brought guns to the shopping centers. They've had the thing called the Svart Gavar. In Dutch that means the black threat that was part of their curriculum. And they had four trekker meetings which was like Boy Scouts with Guns where they brought their kids from the age of 12 to 16 out into the bush to learn about the black threat and learn how to shoot. And they did not ask themselves, are we representing Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela or the critical theorists in the communist party correctly? But the right isn't actually doing that here. They're not talking about critical race theory. They're getting talking points to galvanize their base. Yes. We are about at the end of our questions. We have one more here is, what would you say is the role played by the left against black revolution? Well, we've been talking about that. And I think that Justin opened the program with that as the centerpiece of what we've been talking about. And this was, I really think that had we not, what the left should do. And the people, the person who asked the question about the haunting nature of what the way I was put down in the Marxist conference in Berlin in May of 2018, what people have read the book know is that the first part of that chapter starts off with me spending two days in Copenhagen working with a large contingent of multiracial, a lot of the Marxist people in workshops on Afro-Pessimism, who were not theoretically tutored for the most part. In other words, all the people in the room in Berlin were not just PhDs, but they were tenured professors and leaders in their field. And I expected them to have to say, oh, all right. So what you're doing in this critique of Peter Watkins' punishment park is you're saying that in the collective unconscious of a Marxist agenda is the same kind of anti-black suppression that we find in a totalitarian state. As a Marxist professor and putative revolutionary, I'm really interested in your argument. Let's see more of the moves as opposed to this makes me pissed off and shut it down. And this is why I teach Lars von Scherz mandirly every year. Not because Lars von Scherz actually agrees with what I'm saying about his film, but because he opened himself up to the possibilities of black enunciation. And that was shot through him as a director and as a writer. And that's why that film is so analytically brilliant. His agenda was not that. His agenda was to make a film about the occupation of Iraq and he's got a heavy duty misogynist agenda where if you watch his films, he hates women. So the answer to the question specifically goes back to the first part of that chapter called punishment park in my new book, Afro-Pessimism. And the first part of that chapter I'm dealing with a lot of young Asian, Asian Danish, black Danish, white Danish in this all day workshop and then later in a public lecture. And rather than what they did is they opened up a space for us to talk about the ways in which the structure of black suffering is cannot be reconciled with the structure of working class suffering, even though black people suffer as workers also. They opened up this very fecund space of dialogue and analysis. That's what the revolutionary left should do as opposed to saying, well, hold on now. Find the common denominator and stop playing oppression Olympics, okay? I was shocked as hell to find these Marxist professors not being able to do what community activists who did not have PhDs in Copenhagen were able and willing to do and the left needs to learn from that. Yes, we are, I think that is all the questions we have, but I did wanna say to our audience, as I thought many, many, many, many resources have come up while you spoke. I stuck them in the chat, but if you don't know the public library has huge rich, especially our library, we have a lot of budget for huge rich databases which don't get utilized. If you wanna learn more about Afro-customism, get your library card activated and get into those databases. The chat that I put, I'll put this link one more time and I did get the question, can we watch this again? You can, if you need help getting your library card activated or you have some issues, my email is in that link and I will help you activate your card. And there is so much there, Frank. I'm gonna come back on, really. Frank, thank you so much. That was really rich and really thoughtful. Yes, and I'll turn it over to you and Justin. I would only, oh, please go ahead, Frank. Sure, so I don't forget. Happy birthday, France Fernand on Tuesday. That's right, that's right. In fact, I think this is all like our 12th year running, celebrating his birthday, yeah? Very quickly, again, I wanna thank the San Francisco Public Library and especially you, Anissa, it's been such a pleasure working with you. I'll remind our audience that the Before Columbus Foundation, the co-sponsor of this afternoon's program can be found at BeforeColumbusFoundation.com and I encourage everyone to support the programs that we continue to collaborate with San Francisco Public Library and many others by donating to the Before Columbus Foundation. The American Book Awards will be presented right here, again, with the San Francisco Public Library at 2 p.m. Sunday, September 19th. And again, I'll remind everyone that Frank's most recent book, Afro-Pessimism, will be out in paperback in just a few short weeks and yeah, man, thanks again. Thank you, Justin. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you. All right, thank you, San Francisco Public Library community. Frank, Justin, we appreciate you so much for being here and spreading all of your knowledge. Thank you. See you all soon.