the anti-left left

Sitting in a classroom with about ten other graduate students talking about the book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None , I realized that a critical reexamination of leftist discourse, as it exists at the immediate social level, is long overdue. The book, written by geographer Kathryn Yusoff in 2018, describes the history of slavery as an aspect of geological processes - a surprising and "exciting" thesis in many ways, but also one that several of my classmates took issue with. These issues were not with the argumentation of the text, the evidence provided by the author, nor the content of the work as a whole, but rather with its ideological position. They took issue with a text about Blackness written by a white scholar; they took issue with the general tone endemic to the academic text genre - which often excludes the immediate experience of the people from its analysis; and they took issue with our professor's relationship with the author, claiming that the prof was