Rogers’s remarkable book manages to be both deep and broad, both provocative and persuasive; it attends with equal care to the burdens of historical reflection and of theoretical investigation. I’ve learned a great deal from the text, and expect to keep learning as I return to it over time. One admirable feature is the ease with which it explores particularism while resisting parochialism. Rogers examines a distinctively black tradition of political theorizing, a tradition that Eddie Glaude calls “Black democratic perfectionism”Footnote ¹ and that in Rogers’s account includes Baldwin, Du Bois, and Wells. Rogers neither gives the tradition the name that Glaude assigns it nor shows much interest in naming it at all, apart from a stray reference or two to “Black perfectionism.” This bears further study. He identifies the tradition as a distinct enterprise while noting that it was not hermetically sealed off from the wider discursive world. Perfectionists also contributed to other traditions that one might, in the right mood, call “mainstream,” and that include Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and Sidney Hook. Rogers reminds readers that the perfectionists were in conversation with racial liberals and classical rhetoricians and theorists of democracy and assorted others, and that deepening these conversations is essential both to realizing whatever potential the mainstream views still have, and to understanding the content and value of the black perfectionist intervention.

Darkened Light has a great many other virtues, beginning with its attentiveness to the connections between culture work and soul craft. Rogers insists on the importance of the aesthetic as a space for what we might call moral renewal, and as a tool for the exercises in counter-habituation and character formation that this renewal requires. As a party to discussions like this outside of political theory (in critical race aesthetics, primarily), I was particularly pleased to see these ideas in play.

A couple of nagging concerns complicated my enjoyment of the book’s virtues. I worry about occasional slips in its hard-won balance between breadth and depth. And I worry about the way it contrasts the tradition Rogers proposes to excavate with the Afropessimist alternative that he means to refuse. As an example of the breadth–depth balance concern, consider Rogers’s discussion of Ida B. Wells. Wells joined Whitman and others in trying to shift public sentiment, and she relied in this on “the sense of justice,” or “a capacity that helps us understand the rightness or wrongness of an act” (192). It turns out, though, that Wells referred to the sense of justice only twice: once while reporting Reverend King’s explanation of what kept him from abandoning a man who was about to be lynched, and once to explain what made it possible for her work to prompt moral growth (192). Wells usually used words like “conscience” to capture this vital ethical capacity, but whatever she called it, recognizing this capacity is essential to understanding her project. Telling the truth about lynching was important not just to correct the record, but also to credit the capacity of citizens to scrutinize themselves and to transform themselves and their social worlds.

This argument about Wells’s moral-psychological commitments is, in general, importantly correct. But it moves so swiftly over so much terrain that it left me with several questions. Are we sure the sense of justice maps so neatly onto the conscience? What if we think of conscience as a private matter and leave the politics of justice aside entirely? Similarly, is Wells really concerned with understanding right and wrong, which is an epistemic matter? Or is she focused on cultivating the affective attachments and conative impulses that make it imperative to act on judgments of right and wrong? Did King stay by the doomed man’s side because he knew—because he stood in the appropriate epistemic relations to true propositions about—what was right? Or because he was committed to making that knowledge operative in his life?

These questions turn on a distinction that Rogers stresses elsewhere, and they appear to give up that distinction unnecessarily. I’m thinking of the distinction between belief and faith, in the sense of faith that Rogers helpfully invokes in his introduction. He wants to say that Wells’s project proceeds from and evinces both a faith in the American capacity for critical self-examination and ethical transformation, and a commitment to doing the culture work that activates this capacity. But this way of making the point hauls the reader through an aggressive reading of a tiny sliver of Wells’s writing, only to unearth a point about moral knowledge that is a step short of the non-epistemic matters that Rogers wants to study. Perhaps this worry seems too narrow to warrant attention. But it opens onto a broader concern about the argument of Darkened Light getting in its own way.

Rogers’s encounter with Wells also implicates my worry about his reading of Afropessimism. Wells’s truth-telling, he says, is a way of forcing a confrontation with “the horror of lynching” (189). Cultivating this sense of horror is an aesthetic strategy that highlights the monstrousness of white supremacy and confronts Americans with “a truth mirror, raising the question: Do you like what you see?” (195). This argument borrows resources from Noël Carroll, the contemporary philosophical aesthetician whose work has set the terms of debate on the philosophy of horror. But it sets aside Carroll’s distinction between art-horror and real-world-horror. Art-horror focuses on the sense of fear, disgust, and helplessness that one feels when contemplating fantastical and fictional monsters, while real horror focuses on the way this sense arises from real-world phenomena like the moral monstrousness of Hitler or King Leopold.

Practices like lynching, Rogers says, collapse the distinction by showing that “sometimes the two correspond” (178). Refusing this distinction is a brilliant way of throwing the moral difficulty of racist violence into stark relief. Art-horror differs from real-world-horror in its reliance on a kind of phenomenological bracketing: we enjoy horror movies because we can turn off the responses—like fleeing—that would ordinarily accompany our feelings of fear and disgust. But what constitutes the monstrousness of American lynch law is precisely that a great many citizens turned off these responses in the real world, to such a degree that they could celebrate and commemorate the brutalization and extermination of their fellows.Footnote ²

This is an inspired way of appraising the moral error of lynching. But having mobilized the machinery of philosophical aesthetics to make this point, the argument moves on without noticing that it has also effectively motivated the Afropessimist turn. Imagine the Afropessimist’s response at this point: what was that about holding up a mirror? These people held up their own mirrors and, if the history of traffic in lynching paraphernalia is any indication, they were unmoved. This way of locating precisely what Afropessimism is pessimistic about doesn’t track the gestures that Rogers uses to open the book. His introduction contrasts the Afropessimist’s “background determinism” with the perfectionist focus on agency and transformation (3). Where the Afropessimist argues that “the past’s relationship to the present resolves itself in the form of a fixed future” in which there is no escape from anti-blackness (3), the perfectionist insists on the transformative power of human agency, and denies that the persistence of white supremacy entails its inexorability.

But the Afropessimist’s turn to “metahistorical frameworks” (3) has less to do with baking historical outcomes into a way of narrating history, as Rogers uses Hayden White to suggest, than with insisting on the way the march of history has outrun our current conceptual and discursive resources. Instead of turning to White, Rogers might more profitably have turned to Hegel or Marx. Perhaps the point is not that white supremacy is fated to win and that human agency is inert; it’s that our current ways of imagining agency are too firmly tethered to the world of white supremacy to do the work we need them to. If they are, then all that’s left, for Afropessimists (as, mutatis mutandis , for the right kind of Marxists, if not for the endlessly confident Hegelians), is to call out the inadequacy of the current conceptual resources by heightening contradictions, intensifying epistemic friction, and—as a consequence—hastening the revolutionary ferment that creates new ways of thinking and being that we can’t yet articulate.

If the turn to dialectical philosophies of history is off-putting, think instead of Milan Kundera’s discussion of “terminal paradoxes.” Kundera claims that novelists who explored the self-undermining aspirations of European modernity were not making predictions; they were demonstrating “how, under the conditions of the ‘terminal paradoxes,’ all existential categories suddenly change their meaning.”Footnote ³ Under late capitalism, or state socialism, or, we might say, neoliberalism, notions like “freedom” and “public” and “private” no longer mean what modernity promised they would, and no longer seem up to the work we require of them. What if Afropessimists are after a similar point? What if their claim is not that the past necessarily forecloses the future, but that any future we can imagine as a struggle against this particular past is already foreclosed, and that a real break with the past requires a future imagined on altogether different terms? What if it is a pessimism not about defeating anti-blackness, but about the merits of imagining this victory in terms—like “democracy” or “humanism”—that are locked into a dialectical struggle with the terms they oppose? It is important to figure out what to do with terminal paradoxes, but it is also important to have someone point them out and insist on their importance for our experience of the world, even if, like Kundera’s novelists and Jared Sexton’s Afropessimists, they have little to say about what comes next.

Rogers might have given Afropessimism a better hearing on his way to introducing his perfectionist tradition, but this is, ultimately, a minor quibble. I am willing to press the worry not because I am persuaded by Afropessimism but because I share Rogers’s sense that the right response to it, as to much else, runs through a perfectionist account of the evolving experiences of modern democratic life. I wanted more from Rogers on this point because Darkened Light sets the bar so high in so many other areas. The book shines a light on an underappreciated tradition of thought and culture work, and it shows what’s possible, and what’s required, when one commits to engaging historical figures without flattening their historical depth or blunting their contemporary relevance. This exemplary work lays a sturdy foundation for future studies in the same spirit.