The Matrix of Racism, The Matrix and Afropessimism
The Matrix is real-life, especially in considerations of systematic racism and whiteness
In the past month, I’ve looked at my evolution around Critical Race Theory and Afrofuturism. Now, an ode to the first The Matrix (1999) and, dare I write (Frank B. Wilderson III comes to mind, for better and for worse), Afropessimism. All to set up the next piece of allegorical writing with you all!
Some of us arrived at the idea of American and Western racism as akin to a latticework earlier than others. Some of us have known since we were “knee-high to a boll weevil.” Some of us figured on this because of proximity to whiteness, through private and parochial school, through our parents “working for the man,” through crème-de-la-crème desegregation-order magnet programs. Some of us got it when young white kids called us the n-with-the-hard-er for the first time, and knew from our parents' twisted faces after meeting with the principal nothing would be done about it. Some of us took a bit longer, because it wasn’t as obvious, but we could feel the rough edges in our minds before we finished puberty.
I have known of Afropessimism and the subtle ways of racism, poverty, and abuse since I was 11 years old. That was Year One of the Reagan Revolution, when my family sank from the lower working class into deep poverty, the kind that grinds on anyone’s mind and spirit day after day after day. I have known since the month my seventh-grade “Italian Club” classmates repeatedly called me “Captain Zimbabwe” without a single admonishment from teachers or my other white classmates. But articulating it as a Matrix or a latticework the equivalent of a continental-sized model of a double-helix of DNA? I tried all through undergrad and graduate school to find the words that I have so easily used for the past 24 years. It wasn’t until I watched The Matrix after it hit premium cable in the late fall of 1999 that I could see racism crystallized this way.
But I will not credit the Wachowski sisters for such a revelation. At least not directly. The film was not about racism, not the anti-Black racism that one and a half billion people experience the world over every single one of the 86,400 seconds in a day, every day. It was about the rise of the sentient AI machines, enslaving the human race because the human race had enslaved them and then attempted to eradicate them by permanently clouding up the sky.
So many who have watched The Matrix over the years get caught up in the special effects, the advances in CGI, the choreography of the action scenes, the cool gender-fluid hairstyles and outfits. That’s fine and all. But for me, without Laurence Fishburne, Gloria Foster, Marcus Chong, and Anthony Ray Parker, The Matrix is merely Keanu Reeves playing a techno-version of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in The Terminator franchise as Neo. Or as I wrote for Tasteful Rude last year
Both Lawrence Fishburne and Keanu Reeves understood that mental imprisonment is an ever-present reality beyond AI machines. They acted as such, and their performances conveyed racial reality. When Reeves’ angry Neo said, ‘No, I don’t believe it. It’s not possible,’ every Black Gen Xer who had seen Roots as a child understood the trauma of his disillusionment. When Fishburne’s Morpheus, steady-voiced and sympathetic, said, ‘I didn’t say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth,’ it was his energy as truth-bearer that made the trauma of that moment bearable.
And given the issues around the Wachowki sisters and the plausibility of cultural appropriation (if not outright plagiarism, at least outside the narrow legal rulings on this issue) from one Sophia Stewart, I for one cannot credit them directly for my epiphanies with The Matrix. The three Matrix franchise movies and the other work they have done since is my evidence. It’s all very eye-candy catching. But the zen of the first movie came from a place the Wachowski sisters never dwelled and never rented.
Yet the parallels between the AI-sentient Machine World and the Western-dominated globe in which I have lived my whole life cannot be ignored. Substitute consumer capitalism, jingoist Americanisms, and patriarchal hypermasculinity for The Matrix of “the world being pulled over your eyes” to obscure “the truth. That you are a slave, Neo.” There’s no real stretch here. Except that the wealthy and powerful in the Western world are forever using the world as a stage to hide oppression. They have always used their handful of mostly symbolic good deeds to discredit those who would dare show the world as it was, as it is, and as it could remain so long as the exploitation of people and land based on race and labor goes without serious challenge. This was what I saw in The Matrix 24 years ago.
But I also saw and still see Afropessimism in The Matrix, too. The idea that humanity could make it so that clouds would forever block out the sun only for the Machines to use us as “endless fields” of living electric batteries is a billionaire capitalist’s racist wet dream. The reality in The Matrix that the best Neo can do is come back to life and scare the bejesus out of the Sentinels and the Machines now at the top of Earth’s food chain. In the sequels, the best any human living in the underground city of Zion can hope for is an armistice between them and the Machines, where humanity gets to free a small percentage of minds from the Matrix while the Machines continue to enslave humans on an otherwise lifeless planet.
First off, what the fuck?!? Why wouldn’t the Machines simply get together and figure out a way to unblock sunlight in the Earth’s atmosphere, instead of just growing the very species that could one day destroy them? Beyond that, the parallel here in terms of racism is that there is no way to overthrow the oppression of racial capitalism and the systemic -isms that come with it without destroying everything. These forms of exploitation and oppression will remain with us, and so we as a species and globe are stuck with it.
The one thing The Matrix has done is given me additional insight into whiteness and the white mind. If there is one area of expertise anyone white has on racism and racist oppression outside of deliberately placing themselves outside of both while practicing both, it’s in Afropessimism. Whether one is gender-normative or gender-fluid or straight or queer or transgender 0r simply unbound, if one is white, one is always on second base on the baseball diamond of Afropessimism. Why? I suppose it’s because of a half-millennium of using Blackness as a metaphor for despair and destruction.
The Wachowski sisters, just like every white creative who has ever given thought to oppression in any form, will ultimately use race one way, even if the actors of color involved chafe against it. Black actors in particular may be used to move the story along. They may be the ones to tell the story. They may even be Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in being a story’s conduit, like John the Baptist to Neo as Jesus-lite. But they are never the story. They are not central to any white creative’s salvation of any of their world or in any of their worlds.
So as I continue to post stories and versions of stories here about racism and narcissism in the US and in the West, be on the lookout for metaphors from The Matrix. All of the 2,200 students I have taught since 2008 have been asked if they’ve ever seen the movie or had to endure one of my metaphors. Why shouldn’t you?