Ainsley LeSure's "Locating Racism in the World"

Ainsley LeSure is the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University. She specializes in political theory, with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democratic theory, and feminist theory.

LeSure applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Locating Racism in the World, and reported the following:

On the 99th page, a reader will find important concepts—blackness, hallucination, myth, reality, the world, and vulnerability—that are central to the argument of Locating Racism in the World. Page 99 is twenty pages into chapter 3, “Blackness as a World Problem,” which is devoted to explaining what Frantz Fanon, a prominent 20th century Francophone psychoanalyst and political theorist, meant when he described blackness as an ontological problem in his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks (1967).

Afropessimism, a relatively new school of thought in black studies, reads Fanon’s claims about ontology to mean that black people are objects—not subjects—who amount to nothingness in the antiblack world. I argue that this is a misreading. And it is important for me to show this because Afropessimism and its widening sphere of influence use this reading of Black Skin, White Masks to cast as naïve a core claim of my book, that democratic politics is our only hope to effectively challenge antiblack racism and to craft a commonly shared world that is hospitable to racial justice.

I argue, to the contrary, that Fanon actually means that blackness is nothing to the extent that it is like a hallucination in that blackness does not exist in a spatio-temporal environment, nor is it an actual phenomenon (object, person, or event). Nonetheless, like a hallucination, blackness establishes a parasitic relationship to this environment and the phenomena it holds. Ultimately, Fanon’s description of blackness as a hallucination demonstrates how racial practices project onto the living black body blackness—a mythological, European fabrication—and how this blackness gets materialized through human relations oriented around the myth.

By page 99, I am beginning to explain Fanon’s struggle to challenge blackness and how his vulnerability to hallucination whenever blackness is exerting its force on his perception of the world is his guide for discovering a solution. I argue throughout that Fanon’s thinking about blackness in Black Skin, White Masks models two democratic practices that are essential to making a world that protects against the harms of blackness: 1) awareness about the symbolic power that blackness, a form of racial common sense, makes available to us and 2) a committed refusal to partake in it in our everyday relations.

Visit Ainsley LeSure's website.

--Marshal Zeringue