Sartre and the Structure of White Racialized Identity
Abstract
Sartre is one of the few white EuroAmerican
philosophers who
addressed racism directly. To understand white supremacy in the United
States, we have to go beyond Anti-Semite and Jew. In the Critique
of Dialectical Reasoning, Sartre discusses the seriality of white
racism as a relation between whites for which black people (for
instance, or brown) are the means, the mediation. As such, every white
person is the milieu, constituted through a structure of racialization,
for every other white person as identification. What becomes central is
the socially peripheral notion of complicity. Complicity in this
context can be understood as an ontic moment in what Sartre calls one's
Being-for-others. If this reveals the centrality of bad faith and
inauthenticity in white identity, it also exposes the structure of its
tenacity, in that racism traps anti-racism in its own terms, and
thereby insulates itself against it.
Among major 20th century EuroAmerican philosophers, Sartre perhaps is the one who addressed the question of racism most directly. From his work on anti-semitism to his introductions to black writing for French audiences, he has taken stands paralleled by few other philosophers -- never without critique or controversy from both sides of the issues he addresses. But what of the United States, whose founding fathers celebrated it as the first "white nation"?
Let us consider, for instance, three contemporary sociological facts concerning race. First, while many people warned of the white backlash at the height of the civil rights movements, it did not appear until after the movements started to dissolve -- leaving the black communities that had acheived new forms of identity and cohesion defenseless to the backlash's erosion. Second, while Cornell West and W. J. Wilson have noted an economic integration of black people in the US, racism persists, and those same black communities have been subjected to forms of economic and cultural famine within a highly prosperous nation. Third, black incarceration, racial profiling in policing, housing, and employment, and racially unbalanced judicial procedures, have all increased out of proportion to demographics.
Without enumerating long historical precedents, the desparation or hopelessness that attends them inside the boundaries of the US signifies a society in bad faith. If the historical backlash reveals the complicity of the judicial and legalist discourse, the rise of black incarceration signifies a culture under governmental attack, against which drugs render defense of counter-sovereignty almost impossible. In the face of economic destitution, and the dissolution of traditional internal class structuring, black neighborhoods begin to evolve alternate class structures around the drug traffic by default, highlighted by the fact that white communities, graced with continued economic viability, where similar drug trafficing occurs, do not. The site of black labor within the white class structure is increasingly shifted to prison, as a form of neo-slavery.
In Anti-Semite and Jew (ASJ), Sartre explains that one can know the people subjected to racism (anti-semitism in his text) only if one knows them in their situation. For Sartre, the existential bottom line is that to be in a situation is to choose oneself in that situation. (ASJ,60) For Sartre, the question is what one makes of what is made of one by others in that situation. For the Jew in the face of anti-semitism, the choice is between authenticity and inauthenticity. For Sartre, "Authenticity consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it in pride of humiliation." (90) To be authentic is to live to the full one's condition, and to assert one's claim in the face of all disdain. (91) The inauthentic is one who flees, who seeks avenues of escape, (93) or who attempt to distinguish themselves from the motives and narratives attributed to them as a group by their oppressers and detractors. (95) In the US, profiling and mass incarceration present the condition to be confronted or fled.
But behind that, there is a more complex situation involved in a black person's choice to consent or not to the role that white society makes him/her play. This question becomes more and more inescapable for one as police violence puts black people increasingly at risk in any endeavor, even driving a car. All places that threaten them make them again Other in their own eyes. (99) Assimilation becomes impossible; Afroamericans cannot be assimilated because they would have to be assimilated as Afroamerican, and it is precisely their being Afroamerican that marks their exclusion, their being noticed, their danger. (100) White racism forces on those subjugated by it the necessity to know how they are determined rather than self-determining first and foremost. And it is within this necessary objectivity toward oneself that one falls through the gateways to inauthenticity.
As Sartre explains, part of the audacity of the dominators is their humility in proclaiming, in the face of their racism, that they are not a race, but simply men. That is what is attractive to the victims; not the sense of virtue in their chauvinism, but simply their human anonymity. For whites, the form of exclusion of racism is a no-lose situation. The Other is given no option to become human like the rest, because they are always "black" or "brown" first. Race, however, is undefinable empirically, because there are no dividing lines separating racial characteristics, all of which exist on continuous spectra. Only the definition of a purity concept allows whiteness to define itself, and thus to define race through that self-conception. White-identification is at the heart of racism, not a by-product of it. And for Black or Latino people, they can only confirm whatever the racist has invented for them, because they are apriori on the other side of the purity concept line.
In other words, though whites are the situation of "black" or "brown" people in the US, one cannot understand whites through them. Reciprocity is effaced by the purity condition. To understand whites in their social structuring as privileged, or supremacist, one must understand their situation as white. We must go beyond the structures given in Anti-Semite and Jew. The question becomes, what is the ontology of that white integument? If it begins with a profound inauthenticity, to the extent the US expresses an anti-racism by instituting civil rights guarantees proclaiming itself colorblind, it nevertheless fills the jails with those it has profiled and criminalized.
In the Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR), Sartre describes the collectivity of white racism as one in which each realizes the self as passivity (CDR,303-4). Because each lives the enactment of exclusion, silencing, and denigration of an Other through a discourse (of whiteness) given from elsewhere, the propositions of racism are never experientially produced. As generalization, they stand apart from the people they are about, and render them unknowable. People present themselves as individuals; any generalization displaces that individuality and substitutes itself for experience of the individual, obviating its possibility. Racist activity, whether redlining, profiling, derogatory language, or street violence, is always pursuant to generalizing propositions rather than to experience.
For Sartre, the racist idea as action does not count as praxis, but what he calls idea-exis, an idea as Other, or what De Beauvoir calls "ready-made ideas". Exis, for Sartre, is the opposite of praxis; it is activity directed not by the subject, but from elsewhere, as recurrence, a repetition of what others do. For instance, to the extent the factory worker's labor is directed, timed and spaced by the machine he operates, he lives his labor as exis. To the extent we mediate our interpersonal relations through commodification (consumerism, or the capitalization of career or talent), we live them as the exis of their production and marketing. In a similar sense, white racism constructs a relation between whites that is mediated by the Other-idea, the idea-exis of the Other. Each white person finds him/herself in the other (white), and finds the other (white) in him/herself. Idea-exis is what one thinks "elsewhere by making [one]self the Other who repeats it here without thinking." (CDR,302) It constitutes the materiality of a unity in alterity which one lives as Other because through the Other, a seriality constituted by a project to be "like the others," a choice of oneself in which one becomes other by "being like the others".
The language of racism, its stories, explanations, and derogatory propositions are "never the translation of real, concrete thoughts." (301) They are only "the Idea as Other, and the Other as Idea" (300). As the verbal structures of a collective, they constitute "the collective itself." (305) Their meaning is precisely their exchange, as speech and performance. Racist derogation, as assault rather than statement, becomes a sign whose signified is the presence of the actor to others (who may nevertheless be absent), and not to the recipient of the assault. Each racist essentially relates only to other racists, for which the victim is a means. Thus, racist activity cannot be separated from its milieu, since it exists only as the possibility of serial relations to others of the milieu. Racist activity becomes possible only in the presence of social permissibility.
Functioning serially, as mediation, the racist proposition becomes impervious to argument. To contest the content of the racist argument is to be beside the point. Its content (idea-exis), the act of generalization, as an act of power and non-reciprocity, renders the Other outside the picture. A white subject is speaking to the Other, yet not to him.
The central question becomes how to understand this insularity and its tenacity. Racism realizes itself through a milieu of fractured discourse, a unity in alterity whose content is disguised as the facticity of another, behind a passivity toward a given idea-exis (the social construction of race). Dependent on the milieu, it presents itself as a structure of complicity. Complicity is a passivity toward a structure of facticity that is the materialization of a relation between subjects that is non-reciprocal -- that is, a form of membership. It is structured as an ontic moment in what Sartre (in Being and Nothingness (BN)) calls Being-for-others.
Being-for-others contains two ontological moments. In the first, one experiences onself as an object in the other's look, through which one apprehends the other as a subject. The other-as-subject is "revealed to me in that flight of myself toward objectivization." (BN,315) The other is not an abstract "truth" but my own concrete experience of "being-seen-by-the-other." However, as an object, one loses self-determination and becomes adjunct to the other's project. Thus, the second moment, one retrieves oneself as a subject through a counter-look, and thus apprehends the other as an object for oneself.
This is a reciprocal relation: "the Other whom I recognize in order to refuse to be him is before all else the one for whom my For-itself is." (349) But it contains a potential antagonism in the always presents threat of future objectivization. It is self-referential in the sense that it constitutes a point of view on itself; one is the "free source of the knowledge which the other has of oneself, and the Other appears to one as affected in his being by that knowledge which he has of one's being inasmuch as one has affected him with the character of Other" (355). Refusal and recognition become the conditions of facticity of the confrontation. On the other hand, it can become a subject-subject encounter only if one adopts the project of preserving one's experience of the other as a subject as part of the counter-look. (525) One cannot "take a point of view" on that because one is inside it (370). It presents itself as an awareness that "my selfness and that of the Other are structures of one and the same totality of being" (CDR,367). For Sartre, Being-for-others is "inapprehensible since it is produced neither by the Other nor by myself."
Some commentators have argued that because, in the potential antogonism of mutual objectivizations, one encounters only an ontic possibility, Sartre has not provided an ontological account of subject-subject encounter, or of solidarity. It presents itself as if it were attempting to apprehend itself as in-itself, and because the in-itself it attempts to apprehend is a stand-off between threatening possibilities, it can be neither an expression of subjective multiplicity nor a collective subject. As Thomas Flynn argues, "The fundamental difficulty in Sartre's social ontology ... arises from the fact that the very conditions which generate interpersonal relations in Being and Nothingness, namely, internal negation and embodiedness, seem to preclude the possibility of positive mutuality among for-itselfs. (SME,21) Nevertheless, Sartre says, "We find ourselves in a world which is that of "inter-subjectivity;" "The Other is indisputable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself." (Existentialism,45)
But Flynn is looking for collective moral responsibility, a form of "we-subject". The facticity of Being-for-others provides no ontological foundation for either a humanist "we" or a collective subject of praxis. As Sartre says, in its fleeting nature, it is only an "empirical enrichment" (BN,519ff) "constituted at the heart of conflict". (523) For Sartre, the humanist who posits a "we-subject" as a collective subject is in bad faith, because he reifies as a "we" what he sees only from the perspective of one. To give it existential being is to reside in an ideological construct, a form of auto-permissibility. It is a form of inauthenticity because it depends on milieu without owning that dependency. Flynn is looking for authentic mutuality, while factical mutuality is precluded if one requires authenticity.
In Sartre's account of white racism, by contrast, each white-identified person within the milieu of seriality displaces solidarity with something else: a permissibility contained in the objectivization of other whites through the subjugated (Black as Other) as means. Permissibility does not mean that any racist action is ordained, but that the milieu makes each choice of action possible. For racism, and for whiteness, complicity shifts from the marginality of milieu to centrality.
The facticity of racism (the dynamic of relations between racists) is that each racist gives all other racists their meaning; and this is the only meaning it can have for them. The form of the exchange, by which each racist lives himself as the other, and lives the other as himself, becomes its very content; its content is itself self-referential as an object. Racism means to live all the active and passive denigrations and dominations of the Other (necessarily in bad faith; cf. Lewis Gordon) for their own sake, as wholly gratuitous. It is a reification of inauthentic mutuality which congeals the potential antagonism of Being-for-others into the mutuality of membership in whiteness.
But if complicity adheres to whiteness as founded on racism, then what of white anti-racism. Within the seriality of whiteness, there is again an inescapble complicity. Passive practice even in disagreement toward racist idea-exis appears as tacit agreement. The desire of the passive opponent only establishes the centrality of white idea-exis for himself, in silent opposition to racism. The opponent finds the racists in himself, and himself in them as his negative praxis. While the humanist re-objectifies the victim through his liberal concern, and the colorblind non-racist continues the victim's objectification through non-contestation, the anti-racist re-objectifies himself within the racist milieu. This is part of racism's strength against ideological opposition. It insulates itself from the disruption of group disidentification (the other choice), depositing its representation in the racism it opposes. Racism thus flourishes in representational democracy, as an already complicit milieu. And the racist does not hesitate to charge the complicit anti-racist with inauthenticity.
In sum, passive (ideological) opposition to racism renders one's Being-for-others a Being-toward-racism whose facticity is complicity with racist idea-exis. This holds for the ideas of colorblindness, giving up white skin privilege, and integration programs. Passive or ideological white opponents become, against their will, the one for whom the racist action, as terror or derogation, is performed. Passive opposition to racism is the acceptance of the whiteness -- the membership and allegiance to whiteness -- without which racism could not exist.
Yet active opposition falls into the same bind. To oppose racism in terms of its relation to its victim means to have accepted the terms of the racist paradigm, and in contesting it to set oneself in a being-toward-racism of similar facticity, and similar complicity. Hence the tenacity of racism; both opposition to and support for the racist ethos sucks one into its structure of Being-for-others by disguising the discursive relationship between racists as white. If racism absorbs both positive and negative practice, then no distinction can be made between the racist, and the white-identified person. Each is what makes the other possible. This is another aspect of racism's tenacity.
Thus, racism has consistently led white people against their extant interests (whether economic, social, or political), and even their anti-racism, into poverty, political marginality, or totalitarian social control because the anti-racism opposed to it remains beside the point. The real issue is the community of white seriality, the active need to live in alienated otherness, and to preserve a milieu in which to do this. The subjugated group becomes the content of this community's milieu not as scapegoat but as the raw material of membership.
Ultimately, either one understands anti-racism as opposition to this system of complicity (whiteness), and its seriality (permissibility), or one finds an escape from this Sartrean account. To escape from the Sartrean account, one would have to show either that the community of racists was itself a collective subject, thereby giving it an ontological foundation beyond the discursive construct of race (the purity concept), or that whiteness was incommensurable to the racism that had produced it, or that authenticity as a white anti-racist were possible.
In lieu of that, to contest racism, one would have to disrupt the
milieu in which idea-exis can construct the necessary serial
collectivity; and one must loosen the bonds of facticity that keep the
antagonism of Being-for-others from expressing itself, transforming
seriality into face-to-face encounter by whites as ontological
subjects. This occurred during the Civil Rights Movement, and the
various forms of Black Liberation struggle; the facticity of white
membership broke down when its idea-exis became unintelligble as a
discourse in the face of Afroamerican practice. Mass incarceration
became the means chosen to neutralize the results of that practice, and
recuperate the idea-exis of racism neutralized at that time. But
without renewed disruption, educating racist whites to approach black
people as subjects is vain, since such whites think they already do,
though the subject they approach is itself the idea-exis they use to
render themselves white.
Works Cited
Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).
Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George Becker (New York: Grove Press, 1962).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: NLB, 1976).
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism", in Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957).