Abstract

Frederick Douglass’s socio-political narrative is explored through an existential lens, arguing that Douglass is contesting the proposition that essence precedes existence. Douglass, through his fight with Covey, a white ‘slave breaker’, and his escape to freedom, affirms his existence as being for it-self over and against the reduction of his existence to that of being in-itself. Drawing from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was greatly influenced by the phenomenological and politico-praxic work of Black novelist Richard Wright, it is argued that Douglass disrupts the power/knowledge regime of white American slavery, exercising his existential capacity for transcendence. Examining whiteness as a species of what Beauvoir calls ‘the serious man’, it is argued that whites within Douglass’s text are in a state of flight, performing their whiteness as ‘the serious man’, that is, where whiteness is accepted as an unconditioned state of being. Douglass’s narrative depicts whiteness as a flight from freedom ; for his very act of protestation against whiteness demonstrates that whiteness is not an objective, hypostatized thing, but a performative choice that sustains white hegemony.