It has occurred to me, in between the time of drafting this and the time of its publication, that my intent in comparison of anti-Uygur and antiblack violence may be obscure. Let me make clear that this is NOT an analogy. Afropessimism teaches us that there are no analogues for antiblackness; further, that any attempt to analogize antiblackness and dehumanization (e.g. anti-Uygur repression) is false and obscures our understanding of antiblackness. The logical form of dehumanization requires the possibility of rejoinder with humanness, i.e. a point of entry into humanist discourse; it is precisely this that Afropessimism teaches us is always already foreclosed to blackness insofar as the concept of the human is only able to mobilize its technology against that which it implicitly renders absolutely other, absolutely non-human (although even this register may be misleading about the amount of “being” blackness is allowed to claim in humanist logics), i.e. black.

While I do not intend to analogize the dehumanization of Uygur people with antiblackness (which is NOT a form of dehumanization but is the very condition of possibility for de-HUMAN-ization, as the model for non-humanness), I nonetheless think that important dynamics of state repression can be commonly demonstrated in both cases, even if the logical form of violence remains irreconcilable.

The important thrust of my thesis here, informed by Afropessimism, is that western anti-China rhetoric is mobilized by the logic of antiblackness, even as the logical form of particularly anti-Chinese violence culminates as dehumanization of Uygur people (which is irreconcilable with the logical form of antiblackness). There is no separating our anti-China rhetoric from anti-Uygur dehumanization and, more fundamentally, antiblack violence.