# Success or failure? Defining blackness through Afropessimism  
This view of blacks in the diaspora having more in common with Africa than their compatriots of different ancestries strongly informs Afropessimist thought, which also has some roots in the theories of Martinican psychoanalyst and intellectual Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon argues that the culture and, especially, the language of the colonizer can only lead to further oppression, not liberation, when employed and deployed by the colonized. The term 'Afropessimism' gained prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was used by intellectuals such as Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey (Africa Betrayed, 1992) as a way to critique and emphasize the weakness and corruption riddling postcolonial African nations and pointing to a bleak future. Unfortunately, within the realms of economics and political science, this critique, aimed at discussing the material obstacles postcolonial African nations faced, also became an opportunity for some white critics, such as Paul Johnson, to return to the worn stereotypes of black Africans' biological inferiority rendering them incapable of self-governance (Colonialism's Back - And Not a Moment Too Soon, 1993). For contemporary figures such as the American academics Frank Wilderson (Incognegro, 2008) and Jared Sexton (Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism, 2008), the work of Fanon, Ayittey, and other early Afropessimists is an important touchstone towards arguing that blackness will always find itself exploited and oppressed by whiteness and thus always hindered from progressing.