Sartre’s influence in Black existentialism

Abstract

Black existentialism is a line of thought whose contributors challenge many presuppositions of what it means to place the terms “black” and “existence” together. In Africana philosophy, of which Black existentialism is a part, the historical portrait is straightforward: Euromodernity attempted to erase the humanity of whole groups of people, rendering crucial the question of what it is to be human. The Afropessimist appeal to ontology diverges from Simone de Beauvoir’s, Steve Bantu Biko’s, Frantz Fanon’s, Jean-Paul Sartre’s, and the list of Black existentialists’ argument that no human being is “really” any of these abject things without being in la mauvaise foi. As a philosophy of freedom addressing the realities of degraded dignity, exploitation, and misery rationalized as ontological, Black existentialism shares Sartre’s insight that action and thought demand addressing the human agency that sustains such maledictions and human commitment required to overcome and transcend them.