Abstract

Bad faith is defined as the attempt to hide from ourselves as free and responsible agents. Antiblack racism is shown to be the self-deceiving choice to believe that black people are inferior to all other races and that black people are not fully human beings; as such, it is shown to be not only a form of denial, but also a form of self-denial. The possibility of self-denial is developed through an examination of Sartre's theory of pre-reflective consciousness, the imagination, and the contradictory and ironic "nature" of human reality. Using Sartre's interpretive method of existential psychoanalysis--where human reality is guided by an "original choice" to achieve what Sartre calls the "in-itself-for-itself," the self-contradictory object of all desire--I provide a description of a number of antiblack attitudes, among which is the notion of white supremacy out of which the ascription of an identity relation of blackness with absence and hunger is shown. I argue that the interpretation of blackness as absence and hunger in an antiblack world entails the convergence and conflation of race and gender since femininity is also traditionally interpreted as absence and hunger. I further argue that the existential-theological problem of whether human reality can exist without the desire to be the in-itself-for-itself is transformed in an antiblack world into the question of whether blacks and whites are human in virtue of a white object of desire. An antiblack world calls for blacks to justify their right to exist, which suggests a group--whites--whose existence is self-justified, which is tantamount to whites being the in-itself-for-itself. ;I then discuss the various challenges posed by a Sartrean treatment of antiblack racism, among which are that Sartre does not have a social philosophy in Being and Nothingness and that Sartre's categories of subject and object militate against the egalitarian goal of a world in which both blacks and whites are subjects