Sartre’s imaginary and the problem of whiteness

Introduction

When Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black Orpheus was published, it was immediately met with criticism from Black intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Both Fanon and Césaire were rightly concerned with how Black Orpheus reinforced white supremacy by treating Black revolutionary action as a step to be surpassed in a larger class-based struggle; a class-based struggle that at its core was a perpetuation of whiteness. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, referencing Lucius Outlaw, notes that the main point of Black Orpheus was to displace the image ‘of the African invented by Europeans […] through radical critique and counter-construction’. ¹ Nonetheless, Sartre’s failures in the text seem to vitiate any use that may be derived from it for conducting anti-racist work today. It seems as though Black Orpheus can offer us no tools for resistance against white supremacy today. While no one has as of yet, to the best of my knowledge, read Sartre’s failure in the text through his work on the imaginary and critical whiteness studies, I argue that in doing so, Sartre’s failure in Black Orpheus offers us tools for anti-racist work today.

I argue reading Black Orpheus in conjunction with The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness offers insight into how racist stereotypes and implicit biases function within the white imaginary, and thus provides a method for radical critique of the white imaginary. This is so because the imaginary is a site where individual freedom and the sociopolitical situation in which the individual exists are merged. This conclusion is contrary to the prominent view that Sartre’s earlier work on consciousness and the imaginary is too individualistic to be read with his later works which attempt to account for material conditions and social structures. ²

My aim is political. In the introduction for Les Temps modernes, Sartre states of the journal, ‘our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us […] we align ourselves on the side of those who want to change simultaneously the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself’. ³ In What is Literature?, Sartre states ‘The writer presents [society] with its image; [the writer] calls upon it to assume it or to change itself’. ⁴ If we read Sartre’s work in tandem with Fanon, Césaire and others among which include George Yancy and Thomas Flynn, then a white supremacist society is presented with an image of itself with the aim of effecting changes in the image whites have of both themselves and Black persons, which, in turn, the hope is, will effect lasting societal changes. Sartre continues, ‘the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the object which has been thus laid bare’. ⁵ Freedom calls upon other freedoms, calls upon white people, to either assume the image or change themselves, and thus to take responsibility for the sociopolitical situation in which white supremacy exists.

My method is synthetic. Sartre’s failure occurred in part because he treated the work of Black poets as an antithesis to be synthesized away. I do not follow Sartre in applying the synthetic method in this manner. Instead, I begin with the thesis; what I read Sartre’s intended project to be. I read Black Orpheus together with Being and Nothingness and work on white double consciousness to argue that what Sartre intends to do is demonstrate the particularity of whiteness through a dialectical white double consciousness.

Next, I offer the antithesis; the unintended consequences of Sartre’s project as argued by Fanon and Césaire as well as by critical whiteness theorists such as George Yancy. Sartre’s failures, I argue, are revelatory of how whiteness is facticity. As such, whiteness remains intractably operative at the level of unreflective consciousness and it can only imagine Blackness through itself.

Lastly, I synthesize Sartre’s intended project with his failures by exploring his work in The Imaginary in conjunction with Being and Nothingness. I argue that whiteness operates at the level of the imaginary; thus, whiteness is both facticity and transcendence. Whiteness is a social ontology. It is the macro-institutionalized structures that we are born into; a social construction that shapes our phenomenological worlds. It is also the micro-social individual actions that we are freely responsible for. It is the ways in which white people choose to assume or resist whiteness and the white supremacist imaginary. I argue that this synthesis is useful for anti-racist work today because it provokes white people into confronting and challenging whiteness at the mico-social level of everyday individual actions that accumulate to justify and perpetuate white supremacy at the macro-institutional level.

White double consciousness and the gaze

At the very beginning of Black Orpheus, Sartre directly addresses white people. He states:

When you removed the gag that was keeping these Black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are Black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you – like me – will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen; he was only a look – the light from his eyes drew each thing out the shadow of its birth; the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man – white because he was man, white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue – lighted up creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. Today, these Black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, Black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese [sic] lanterns swinging in the wind. ⁶

I read Sartre here as aligning with Robert Bernasconi’s interpretation of his work in ‘Revolutionary Violence’ as a ‘phenomenology of the oppressor’ in the sole sense that what Sartre is offering us here is the way the oppressor experiences situations of oppression. ⁷ Bernasconi argues Sartre’s aim is to put white readers in ‘the position of finding oneself, for a change, the one who is seen, rather than the one who sees’. ⁸ He notes Sartre’s appreciation of Richard Wright’s novels, stating, ‘Wright, as read by Sartre, not only gave whites a glimpse of certain select aspects of Black life: he showed the oppressors how the oppressed regarded them’. ⁹ Sartre’s project in Black Orpheus, argues Bernasconi, was directed at white people in that it urged European white people to apprehend themselves as colonized Africans perceived of and apprehended them. He states, ‘In Sartrean terms, so long as Europeans and European-Americans failed to pass through that totally disarming reversal of the gaze, their sense of their own superiority would remain untouched’. ¹⁰

If whites were to actually apprehend, instead of perceive, the look of peoples’ who are differentially situated, then the centrality of the white gaze would be disrupted. The look reveals the other-as-subject while simultaneously revealing myself-as-object. It is a reciprocal relation in which ‘the revelation of my being-as-object for the Other’ also entails that I ‘must be able to apprehend the presence of his being-as-subject’. ¹¹ While I cannot experience the world as the other does, the other ‘is the subject who is revealed to me in that flight of myself toward objectivation’. ¹² The possibility of the other to see me, to perceive and apprehend me, turns the other into a subject and turns me into an object. As Steve Martinot states, ‘white supremacy relies upon the denial of subjectivity to Black people […] The Other of racism is obsessively looked at (even in absence), and appropriated as a pure object, while being refused the recognition of being able to look back’. ¹³ Sartre states, just as we ‘cannot perceive and imagine simultaneously’, ‘we cannot perceive the world and at the same time apprehend a look fastened upon us […] because to perceive is to look at, and to apprehend a look […] is to be conscious of being looked at’. ¹⁴

The white gaze fixed in perception is incapable of apprehension. Just like the voyeur peering through the keyhole, whiteness has historically peered into the embodied experiences of objectivated others. Just like the voyeur, white people have been unreflectively engrossed in their situation. ¹⁵ white people cannot fully apprehend their situation and themselves in the world. ¹⁶ When the other-as-subject perceives and apprehends white people in situation, inciting their reflective consciousness, drawing them into an awareness of themselves in situation, then they are able to more fully apprehend themselves; their gaze is returned, reflected back to itself. ¹⁷

The white gaze reflected back to itself through the look reveals the contradiction of whiteness as both a normative subject and an objectivated other; that is, the contradiction between how whiteness perceives of itself and how the other-as-subject apprehends whiteness. This is a conception of white double consciousness. white double consciousness, states George Yancy, is where white people ‘learn to see the world differently and to see themselves differently through the experiences of Black people and people of color’. ¹⁸ white people would, as Robert Jensen states, ‘walk in the world fully conscious and try to see what is usually invisible to us’. ¹⁹ Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes double consciousness as a split in consciousness that arises due to a contradiction between how a person perceives of themselves and how the world perceives of them; that is, a contradiction between seeing and being seen. ²⁰

Maldonado-Torres suggests that while the double consciousness of oppressed peoples arises from the conflict between conceptions of oneself and systematic dehumanization, as W.E.B. Dubois argued, people positioned as the normative subject may also experience a sort of double consciousness. ²¹ He states, ‘This ‘double consciousness’ resides in the split between the self who, with the help of an impressive cultural, symbolic, material, and epistemological arsenal, posits itself as normative, and the self who knows itself to be purely a self’. ²² This split occurs when the person brackets the normativity of their position and engages politically and ethically with the experiences of the oppressed, as Sartre does, Maldonado-Torres argues, when he engages ‘a different universe of ideas’ in dialogue with Césaire and Fanon. ²³

There would be at least one significant difference between double consciousness and white double consciousness. Double consciousness is forced onto oppressed peoples; people whom are oppressed have no choice in the matter. However, white double consciousness, at least within a white supremacist society, would have to be actively sought; whites could choose whether or not to reflectively engage with a different universe of ideas. What this means is that white double consciousness may not necessarily lead to an anti-racist position. It could very well lead white people to obstinately occupy positions of privilege in bad faith. I will speak to this point in the final section.

With that said, Sartre is careful to note that the Black poets are not concerned with addressing white people; they are concerned with uncovering and celebrating their Blackness. ²⁴ I argue that this is a dialectical move in which, by negating the white gaze, the white gaze is reflected to itself in its particularity. The vast majority of the text is Sartre’s analysis of colonized Black poetry. In the poet’s quest to uncover and celebrate their Blackness within the situation of colonization and oppression, the poet must rely on the oppressor’s language; whiteness remains operative. Sartre states, ‘since the oppressor is present in the very language that they speak, they will speak this language in order to destroy it’, and along with it, the ideas and images of whiteness contained within. ²⁵ The oppressor’s language is regarded as insignificant; the universal rules of the language are disengaged with becoming contingent, dependent upon the utility towards the poet’s creative end. Sartre states, ‘We think we are essential to the world – suns of its harvests, moons of its tides; we are no more than its fauna, beasts. Not even beasts’. ²⁶ Bernasconi also highlights this point as well, albeit not in relation to language: ‘Europeans would discover themselves not through the smile, the averted look, or the direct gaze, but, more humbling still, by positively being ignored. They would cease to be the center of attention’. ²⁷

In a dialectical white double consciousness, the thesis and image of whiteness as the universal, transcendental and essential norm is met with the antithesis of whiteness as insignificant to result in the synthesis of whiteness as particular. Inasmuch, Sartre is provoking white people to apprehend themselves as particular.

Sartre’s dialectical project and the social ontology of whiteness

We can learn from observing and recreating what people do well. We can learn from Sartre’s rendition of dialectical white double consciousness and how he identifies whiteness as particular. We can also learn from observing and improving upon how people fail. Sartre’s failure is in neglecting to understand how his situated position as a white bourgeois man influences his sociopolitical conception of the world. Martinot argues that Sartre ‘renarrativizes’ Black poets ‘so that Europe can […] see itself as an object for those it had for centuries objectified’ and in doing so, Sartre ‘himself then becomes the look of the decolonized eyes rendering Europe an object for itself’. ²⁸ The result, Martinot argues, is that he ‘appropriates the look of these Black poets’ and ‘imposes his own Eurocentric gaze on their decolonizing act of “turning away” from Eurocentricism’. ²⁹ I agree that Sartre unintentionally projects whiteness in his attempt to perceive whiteness through Blackness. I argue that this projection reveals something to us about how whiteness operates. It reveals how whiteness is a fact of existence that operates at the level of unreflective consciousness; at the level of consciousness that is operative when one is engrossed in the moment of doing an action and not considering or reflecting on what one is doing.

For example, Sartre’s conception of a raceless society is a manifestation of whiteness. ³⁰ Sartre argues that ‘the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class’ because ‘the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract’. ³¹ He argues that Blackness, as the antithesis to the thesis of white supremacy, ‘aims at preparing the synthesis of realization of the human being in a raceless society’, where all oppression is subsumed under capitalist oppression and all struggles are subsumed under class struggle. ³² Fanon rightly criticizes Sartre’s attempt to universalize away Blackness within a dialectic that is essentially white, treating his Blackness as ‘only a minor term’. ³³ Césaire, sympathetic to Marxism, also rightly criticized Sartre’s brand of universalism, stating ‘There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the “universal”’. ³⁴

Within Sartre’s dialectic, the particularities of individual Black existences become subsumed under one universal image of Blackness. ³⁵ Even while there are important and significant differences between European colonization and U.S. racism, the drive to universalize under a transcendental norm is a shared aspect. For example, Sartre treats the experiences of French colonized Black peoples the same as the experiences of Black people in Harlem. ³⁶ As Fanon argues, there is not one universal Black experience but many particular Black experiences. ³⁷

And yet, as race itself is only a particularity for Sartre, it will become subsumed under the absolute universal, an absolute universal of a class struggle that takes the form and image of whiteness. There is no phenomenological and epistemological space for the diversity of working-class experiences in Sartre’s universalized class struggle. Sartre’s dialectic seeks to universalize to non-existence Blackness as experiential difference. Fanon and Césaire did not want their experiential differences to be nullified and along with their differences their particular phenomenological and epistemological worlds. The very conception and movement of universalizing away difference is whiteness. One aspect of whiteness is universalization, and universalization takes the form of an idea and an act; whiteness imagined as a universal and transcendental norm universalizes.

It is a valid point to argue that if, within the dialectical movement, the Black liberation struggle becomes subsumed within the larger movement, then there is a sense in which the struggle would maintain a historic position analogous and not subordinate to class struggle. ³⁸ However, consider Bernasconi’s statement on this topic: ‘Presumably if the Black proletariat and the white proletariat were capable of uniting, the Black problem [sic] would no longer be determined by racism, at least in its familiar sense’. ³⁹ The question is: If class oppression were abolished, would racism no longer be an issue? ⁴⁰ This important and complicated question goes beyond the scope of the phenomenological argument I offer, and thus, I will not attempt to answer it here. Yet, I am suggesting that this question is at the core of Fanon and Césaire’s concerns. As Bernasconi points out, Sartre treats anti-Black racism as analogous to anti-Semitism, and one of the central problems with Sartre’s position in regard to anti-Semitism is that it denies ‘that the Jewish community represented a concrete historical community’. ⁴¹ The concern, as I understand it, is that Black communities in different situations represent concrete historical communities. The erasure of those communities and their differences through abstraction in a universal portraiture of ‘Blackness’ or ‘humankind’ is a white supremacist and colonialist move because it is the multitude of differences that get erased to make everyone the same. The problem is not only that Sartre treats anti-Black racism as analogous to anti-Semitism, but even more it is that he seems to just assume that racism will no longer be a problem if classism is resolved. The issue is that racism can take the form of erasure of difference.

Sartre is attempting to apprehend whiteness through Blackness. However, he can only do so through whiteness; whiteness socio-historically conceived of as a universal and transcendental norm. As Fanon and Césaire argue, the white gaze is still operative. Despite his attempts, Sartre is not immune to the historical accumulation of white supremacist image-ideologies that have persisted over time to become imbued within the white social ontology.

Yancy argues that the socio-ontological construction of whiteness is imbued with racism to such an extent that white people, in our everyday lives and despite ourselves, exude racism in our mannerisms, interactions with others, and in constructing our social spaces. ⁴² As argued by Charles Mills, the conception of whiteness as a social ontology is opposed to whiteness conceived of as a biologically essential identity as well as whiteness as a socially constructed identity. ⁴³ Biological essentialism claims that whiteness is genetically fixed. Social constructionism claims that social constructs fix whiteness overtime after birth. Whiteness as a socio-ontological construction claims that whiteness is never fixed; what is perceived of as white identity is a confluence of social mechanisms and practices constantly re-inscribing whiteness through lived experiences.

One performs whiteness through a repetition of socio-historical practices circumscribed by social mechanisms. The more whiteness is repeated, the more psychologically embedded, unreflectingly and obstinately habitual it becomes, but it nonetheless remains unfoundational; there is only the repetition of practices. ⁴⁴ As Yancy explains, contrary to the illusion of white subjectivity as an autonomous self-creating identity abstracted from embodied social conditions, ‘the embedded white racist self’ is deeply intertwined in ‘a heteronomous web of white practices to which they as whites, are linked both as its beneficiaries and as co-contributors to its continual function’. ⁴⁵

Sartre’s failure reveals Yancy’s concept of the ‘the opaque white racist self’. In so far as ‘whiteness is a profound site of concealment’, no matter how one may try to get out of whiteness, there may be other opaque forms of racism embedded in one’s unreflective consciousness that emerge in ‘responses, reactions, good intentions, postural gestures, and denials’. ⁴⁶ At such times, racism manifests itself as an ‘ambush’ and reveals that underneath the radical self-critique, ‘whiteness as the transcendental norm never stopped happening; it had already installed an opaque white racist self’. ⁴⁷ The facticity of Sartre’s whiteness conceals from him how problematic it is that his project universalizes whiteness through synthesizing to nonexistence the particularities of Black existences. Even as Sartre’s rendition of dialectical white double consciousness disrupts this repetition in one sense, the racist socio-historical mechanisms remain operative in his analysis because whiteness operates at the level of unreflective consciousness.

Whiteness is a fact of relational existence made manifest in repetition. Disrupting whiteness requires disrupting the acts of repetition, but whiteness nonetheless remains one’s facticity. Sartre argues that race is one of many ‘objective characteristics which define me in my being-for-others’. ⁴⁸ As Kathryn Sophia Belle states, ‘Sartre asserts that although we may assume our being-for-others in infinite ways, we are not able to NOT assume it’. ⁴⁹ Equating whiteness as a social ontology with race, one is born into a world of whiteness; whiteness is unchosen. However, one remains free to live whiteness in different ways; whiteness is repetition and this repetition occurs with differences. A disruption of this repetition could be achieved through provoking one to reflect on whiteness.

Whiteness as bad faith and the imaginary gaze

Even as whiteness remains one’s facticity, it can be disrupted; one can transcend whiteness in certain moments. The imaginary offers us a way to transcend the facticity of whiteness.

Sartre’s reading of colonized Black poetry is imaginary. His reading is an intentional act that aims at whiteness through aiming at the image of Blackness. However, his image of Blackness is not the same as the Black poet’s image of Blackness. The image he offers is his consciousness in action. ⁵⁰ Imagining, argues Sartre, is an intentional and synthetic act that aims towards what is absent through an analogous representative. ⁵¹ Consciousness directs itself towards what is absent in its concrete form to make it present in imagination. ⁵² The image, as quasi-observation, does not provide any new knowledge. ⁵³ The image is instead constituted by one’s embodied experiences of the world, what one relatively knows of the world within a situated historical sociopolitical and cultural context and what one spontaneously and creatively puts into it. ⁵⁴

To unpack these claims, the image, specifically in unreflective consciousness, is ‘constituted by a certain way of judging and feeling of which we do not become conscious as such but which we apprehend on the intentional object as this or that of its qualities’, which is to say ‘the function of the image is symbolic’. ⁵⁵ The image is a symbol for what the imaginer puts into it. The image, states Thomas Flynn, ‘is nothing other than a relation’. ⁵⁶ The image is a ‘presentifier’ in that it is ‘the object of our thought giving itself to consciousness’; it is a ‘sens’ or a ‘self-referring’ ‘presence’ that ‘“incarnates” a totality’ of the intentional object ‘but not in all its parts’. ⁵⁷

For example, if I create an image of the moon, I imagine the way the moon looked, full, large and bright, when I was a child peeking through my bedroom curtains into the autumn night sky when I was supposed to be sleeping. I imagine Mona Lisa’s face and smile; a face and smile that I can transpose onto the full moon. I imagine the craters I see as I peer through a telescope. I imagine the moon shape shifting throughout the month. My image of the moon is constituted by at least three intertwined factors: my own creativity, my embodied experiences of the moon and historical sociopolitical and cultural products.

Similarly, Sartre’s image of Blackness reveals his whiteness in action. ‘Imaged comprehension’, Sartre argues, teaches us nothing about the object, but it can teach us about what consciousness and one’s thoughts must be so that one imagines as well as imagines the object as one does. ⁵⁸ Sartre’s rendition of dialectical white double consciousness is an apprehension of whiteness through Blackness. However, Blackness is largely absent for him; he can only engage with it as an image. In regard to colonized poetry, Sartre states: ‘Africa – phantom flickering like a flame, between being and nothingness, more real than the “eternal boulevards with cops” but absent, beyond attainment, disintegrating Europe with its black but invisible rays; Africa, an imaginary continent’. ⁵⁹ Even though he is attributing this imaginary to the poets, it is in fact Sartre himself who is creating this image. And, the image of Blackness is not Blackness in itself. Jonathan Judaken rightly argues that, although Sartre’s ‘depiction of Blackness as the negation of white supremacy serves to destabilize’ the white gaze, ‘he reinscribes typological constructions of Blackness that figure for him the negativity of European values’, resorting to ‘images of [Black persons] as natural man and unchaste woman’. ⁶⁰

The image of Blackness is what Sartre puts into it and what he puts into it is imbued with both his embodied experiences within a historical sociopolitical and cultural context as well as what he spontaneously creates; imbued with whiteness. The image of Blackness that he offers us reveals what white consciousness must be so that it imagines Blackness as it does. Phenomenologically speaking, whiteness cannot be bracketed. What Sartre is unintentionally describing in Black Orpheus is his image of Blackness through the occupation of the distorting lens of whiteness. What is revealed is how whiteness operates within Sartre’s consciousness as a white individual within a white supremacist society.

We can learn from Sartre’s failure how this reflection on whiteness coalesces with freedom. Imagining is an unreflective act that takes place within a situation; from, as Flynn states, a ‘particular viewpoint […] which constitutes the world at the unreflective level’. ⁶¹ Understanding one’s motivation for taking on the imaginative act reveals aspects of the situation; ‘the imagining act emerges from and is revelatory of a situation’. ⁶² The imagining act reveals what consciousness must be to imagine; namely, ‘nihilating, intentional, nonsubstantial, situational, creative, and free’. ⁶³ Unreflective consciousness, in recognizing itself as non-identical with the world, things in the world, and its own past, as well as by intending itself creatively towards the imaginary, expresses its freedom; it moves beyond the world and is the site of human freedom, a possibility beyond one’s human situation. ⁶⁴ The spontaneous creativity of the imaginary is freedom in action.

The imagination is central for the move towards either freedom or bad faith. ⁶⁵ The imaginary attitude makes possible, as Jonathan Webber states, ‘the use of various strategies to deceive oneself into believing whatever it is that one wants to believe’. ⁶⁶ whiteness is imagined as the universal and transcendental normative essence of human beings. It is an imaginative technique that allows whites, using Webber’s terms, ‘to hide aspects of ourselves from ourselves and each other’. ⁶⁷ whites in bad faith are, using Sartre’s terms, ‘hiding a displeasing truth’ from themselves ‘or presenting as truth a pleasing truth’ to themselves. ⁶⁸ To hide a displeasing truth or to present a truth as pleasing, one must in their unreflective consciousness know that of which they are hiding or misrepresenting, which is to say ‘consciousness is fully self-transparent’. ⁶⁹ ‘The imagining’, states Lewis R. Gordon, ‘is completely a function of the will or agency of the individual imagination’. ⁷⁰

Bad faith can take the form of misrepresenting to oneself one’s transcendence as facticity; of claiming that one’s chosen way of being is unchosen. ⁷¹ In this sort of bad faith, one conceives of themselves as a fixed immutable essence. However, to be human is to be ‘a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is’. ⁷² Human existence entails a double negation that disallows one a fixed immutable essence, and this is what makes freedom and responsibility possible. Only a being who lacks a fixed immutable essence can have possibility and freedom, and thus be responsible. ⁷³ As Flynn explains, ‘This nonidentity of consciousness with itself is the ontological root of Sartrean freedom just as self-transparency is the source of Sartrean responsibility: each one “knows” what he is doing’. ⁷⁴

white people fail to go beyond whiteness because they unreflectively in bad faith occupy the transcendent image of whiteness as if it were their facticity. Transcendence is neither necessarily bad nor good; it is creativity for better or worse. Whiteness as repetition creates itself. Whiteness is both facticity and transcendence. ⁷⁵ It is both unchosen in the sense that one is born into the historical sociopolitical and cultural mechanisms of whiteness, but it is also chosen in the sense that one habitually, unreflectively, practices whiteness as a repetition guided by an image of whiteness. One of the aspects of white bad faith is in mistaking whiteness as only facticity; it is in claiming that one’s freely chosen repetition of whiteness is unchosen, as if whiteness is the epistemological and moral norm. ⁷⁶ whiteness becomes concealed and ‘opaque’ when one misrepresents to oneself one’s transcendence as facticity. However, whiteness relies on the imaginary and is an act of transcendence. Thus, one is responsible for their whiteness; the ‘unblinking eye’ of unreflective consciousness remains aware of whiteness as a chosen particularity. ⁷⁷

Conclusion

Sartre’s rendition of dialectical white double consciousness reveals the particularity of whiteness. Whiteness, apprehending itself through Blackness, conceives of itself as particular. In doing so, whiteness reduces race to particularity, then universalizes class struggle. In universalizing class struggle, Blackness as experiential differences becomes nullified. The concern is that in doing so, the unique particular phenomenological and epistemological perspectives of Blackness disappear. What becomes universalized is whiteness, and thus, universalized class struggle takes the form and image of whiteness. This reveals that whiteness remains operative, yet hidden and opaque, despite Sartre’s attempt at white double consciousness.

A white person cannot get out of whiteness – whiteness is facticity. One attempts to view whiteness through Blackness, but because Blackness is imagined, and because one cannot get out of whiteness, one views whiteness through an image of Blackness and in turn views Blackness through an image of whiteness. One views whiteness through Blackness through whiteness. This means that white double consciousness as a Sartrean dialectical move is complicated. It is always susceptible to the white gaze distorting the seeing/being seen aspects of the move.

However, one’s attempt to experience a white double consciousness sparks the imagination. Even though one cannot get out of whiteness, whiteness is not determined. What one can do is perform a critique of the image of Blackness whiteness presents to itself in dialogue, as Maldondo-Torres states, with ‘a different universe of ideas’. The imagining of Blackness through whiteness reveals what whiteness is as well as that whiteness is a chosen particularity. One is responsible for their whiteness because the imagining act is revelatory of freedom; the image is an amalgamation of one’s experiences and spontaneous creativity. Overcoming whiteness requires self-reflectively and in engagement with the work of differently situated peoples examining the image of Blackness white people create in this process. By examining the image of Blackness the white imaginary creates, one could critically examine how whiteness operates and, the hope is, transcend whiteness in certain instances for the better.

In other words, this is a provocation. white people are provoked to engage reflectively with whiteness to disrupt the repetition of white supremacist practices because whiteness remains opaque when operating in unreflective consciousness. white people are provoked not only by the apprehension of being seen by people with different phenomenological and epistemological worlds but also provoked to imagine, to incite the creation of an image of Blackness through which they try to see themselves. The image created is their whiteness in action. The white woman on an elevator who clutches her purse when a Black man enters is operating with a specific image of Blackness. She is relationally perceiving of herself and the man through that image; she is imagining, through her created image of Blackness, the man as a potential threat and herself as a potential victim. This image is reflective of her consciousness, and her consciousness is reflective of larger historical sociopolitical and cultural white supremacist structures. This is the image that requires continuous radical critique to disrupt the repetition of white supremacist practices.