The Black church survived on a wager. The bet was that the God who raised Jesus from the dead would do something with all the suffering that African Americans have experienced throughout the country’s history. It was a bet that the lynching tree was not the last word. And that the God who brought Israel through the Red Sea would bring his people through whatever America had planned for them next.
That wager has held for more than two centuries, from the earliest slave congregations to the present. But a generation of young Black men and women who love Jesus are now wondering if it still holds. These are Christians who have looked at the distance between what the church proclaims and what their lives contain and have begun to question whether the whole apparatus of Christian hope is a mechanism for enduring what should be confronted. Some are angry. And I sense many Black Americans—Christian or not—are just tired.
That tiredness doesn’t always have a name, but it has created a climate in which an academic philosophy called Afropessimism has found oxygen. Frank Wilderson III, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the most prominent voice on the theory and has provided the movement’s clearest articulation in his 2020 book on the topic.
The argument runs like this: The world is divided between Humans and Slaves. All Black people, regardless of class, station, or nationality, occupy the position of Slave, and that is unlikely to change.
Wilderson argues that abolition was not the end of Black people being treated as subhuman. On the contrary, he says, this abuse has persisted in every society that touches the African diaspora. Anti-Blackness, in this account, transcends every other form of oppression. It undergirds civilization. And because slavery is not just a historical event but a permanent condition, there is no narrative path available to Black suffering. No equilibrium to be restored. No arc bending toward justice.
I don’t agree with Wilderson’s conclusion. However, I do take his views seriously and believe Christian leaders need to formulate a fruitful response not just to his theory but also to the crisis of Black hope at large.
As a pastor, I see this despondency in my own ministry. Recently, a young couple visited my church and stayed after the service. They were both professionals. Both had been raised in the church. The husband told me they had been visiting churches for months, looking for one willing to speak honestly about race, about the world their future children would inherit, about why the headlines seemed trapped in the same terrible loop. But everywhere they went, the answer was essentially the same: Trust God. Stay faithful. Things will get better. “I believe in God,” he said. “I’m just not sure it will get better.”
They weren’t deconstructing. They were simply two people who had done everything the church asked of them and now, sitting in a lobby, were wondering why the spiritual answers they had carried since childhood no longer seemed strong enough for the world they inhabited. They were not self-proclaimed Afropessimists. But they were breathing the air that philosophy describes: that the system is working exactly as designed and that much of what the church has offered has been too thin to account for what Black people see in the news, in their neighborhoods, and in the weary inheritance many are asked to hand to their children.
Afropessimism itself protests false hope and the thin promise that time alone will heal the racial brokenness in our society. And what it gets right, it gets devastatingly right. It will not let America off the hook by treating racism as a problem mostly solved in 1964. It looks at the killing of some unarmed Black people in broad daylight, at the wealth gap, at the incarceration numbers, and it says: This is not a glitch.
Globally, Wilderson’s argument resonates wherever the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism has produced entrenched racial inequality, from Brazil to the United Kingdom to South Africa—where Wilderson spent years as an elected official in the African National Congress.
Outside the church, some critics of Afropessimism argue it gives away too much. Detractors see it as a death knell for Black freedom struggle, multiracial coalition-building in politics, and the moral energy needed to confront present evils. Adolph Reed Jr., a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argues Afropessimism can treat anti-Blackness as a timeless phenomenon and drift away from addressing both concrete inequalities and political solidarity. Criticism from another academic, Cedric Johnson, runs nearby: When racial identity hardens into the whole story, it can make the broader coalitions required for change harder to build.
Wilderson is honest about the implications. He calls for “the end of the world” but does not define what he means. And without a definition, the logic leads where it leads: separatism or nihilism. The philosophy that begins by honoring Black suffering ends by taking the slaveholder’s definition of Blackness and etching it into the cosmos.
The church can offer something better. We need congregations where young Black men and women can bring their exhaustion, anger, and doubt and find a community that groans with them. We need churches where they can sit long enough for the pain to become prayer and pray long enough for the prayer to become praise. We need to be equipped to talk about the difference between birth and death pains. And to do it well, we will need to look back.
In Jesus and the Disinherited, the book Martin Luther King Jr. carried during the Montgomery bus boycott, Howard Thurman identified the three forces that destroy the oppressed from within: fear, deception, and hate.
Fear comes first. It arises from the violence to which people are exposed and teaches the oppressed to despise themselves. “There is but a step,” Thurman wrote, “from being despised to despising oneself.” Then the underprivileged might deceive themselves about their lives or their surroundings as a coping mechanism. But “if a man continues to call a good thing bad, he will eventually lose his sense of moral distinctions,” Thurman warned. The survival strategy eats the soul, and hate arrives last.
Against all three, Thurman, an unorthodox mystic, set Jesus as a disinherited person who walked through fear without being consumed, who refused deception when it would have saved his life, and who faced the hatred of the empire and loved.
The logic does not stop at Good Friday. Jesus did not come merely to model freedom from fear, deception, and hate. He came to die for sinners and rise again. Only from that finished work does he become the pattern of the redeemed life.
If the way of Jesus is the way of suffering that avoids fear, deception, and hate, then the resurrection is God’s vindication of that way. It is the public, historical, bodily declaration that the strategy of the Cross was not naive and that the disinherited one who refused to let empire set the terms of his inner life was right. And more than right. He defeated all that holds the world in bondage (Col. 2:15) and shares his risen life with his church as the living King and “the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27, ESV throughout).
The Black church carried this hope. Our ancestors believed the God who raised Jesus was present with them, making them spiritually free even when their circumstances were not. The spirituals gave that hope a voice: “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? And why not every man?” That is a theological declaration that the lions do not get the last word.
While the Black church has historically been one of the most powerful forces for justice, many American Christians have acted in ways that silenced the cry of justice on earth. And Black churches, for all their prophetic power, have also had their own flaws and failures.
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The whole creation groans, Paul says. Believers groan. The Spirit groans. But God also subjected creation to futility “in hope” (Rom. 8:20). Our world is inching toward full liberation, which is the counterclaim to Afropessimism in its most precise form. Where Wilderson says anti-Blackness is ontological, Paul says the futility of creation itself is temporary. It is bounded by God and destined to give way to “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (v. 21). “For in this hope we were saved.” (v. 24).
This kind of hope bypasses optimism, which can be destroyed by circumstances or data, and puts its anchor in the fact that God has acted and will act again. But we need more than hope that only points to the renewed world. After all, the Spirit who groans alongside me does not tell the suffering to wait quietly. He commissions all of us because the whole gospel—Christ crucified for sinners, Christ raised in triumph, Christ present by his Spirit, and Christ returning in glory—is a reality that demands something in the present.
Because Christ is raised, we can confront racial injustice knowing the eternal outcome is already secured. Because Christ is present by his Spirit, we can build up the multiethnic church as a sign of the new creation breaking in and as citizens of a kingdom that has already arrived. Because Christ is returning, we can work for justice out of joy, confidence, and obedience, trusting him evermore with our anxieties.
We can recover the double register of the spirituals, singing toward heaven while working to repair the broken pieces of our societies. All of this is critical because the engine of Christian endurance is not only justice-hunger. It is delight in the one who conquered the grave and who promises to make all things new. “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Neh. 8:10).
Black suffering is real enough to break optimism. The question we now face is whether it is real enough to break resurrection. The church, at its best, has always answered no.
Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.
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