The existential struggle of being Black

The history of philosophy is mostly the history of various schools arguing with each other about what’s good or true. The Epicureans, the Empiricists, the Stoics, the Skeptics, the Positivists, the Pragmatists — you get the point.

I’m not an official member of any of these clubs, but if you asked me to pick one, I’d go with the Existentialists. For me, existentialism was the last great philosophical movement. Part of the reason for that is purely historical. Existentialism emerged in the early- to mid-20th century, against the backdrop of two devastating world wars, and many of the existentialists were responding to that.

Another reason for the movement’s appeal is that its leading proponents didn’t just write arcane academic treatises; they wrote novels and plays and popular essays, and their ideas crossed over into the culture. They also engaged with concrete questions about freedom and responsibility and authenticity, and those ideas will always resonate because the human condition hasn’t really changed.

But every historical moment is unique and so the question is always how does this tradition address the world we inhabit today?

Nathalie Etoke is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of the book Black Existential Freedom. It’s an exploration of Black existence through the lens of existentialist thought, and it ultimately makes a case for something like tragic optimism. It’s both a critique of “Afro-pessimism” — more on this idea below — and an affirmation of political realism, and that makes it a distinctive contribution to the discourse.

I invited Etoke on The Gray Area to talk about the book and the unique perspective she brings to this conversation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Before we get to the story you want to tell in this book, I'd like to do just a little philosophical table-setting for the audience. What does existentialism mean to you? How do you approach this tradition of thought?

Well, I come from a Francophone schooling background, so I was exposed to philosophy in high school. Right away, I found the questions that philosophers were asking very interesting.

I read Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. I read some Kierkegaard; I read Camus. Questions of existence were always part of my thinking process, but there's something about existing as a Black person in the context of white supremacist capitalist society and the whole idea of the dehumanization of Black people, which thinkers like Du Bois, Fanon, Ralph Ellison also helped me think about.

So you have the traditional existentialist school when you think about the white thinkers, but honestly when you think about African writers and diasporic African writers who did not present themselves as philosophers, you continuously have them engaging the question of existing as a Black person. Those writers don't have to label themselves existentialists.

Is there something about the historical Black experience that informs or expands existentialist philosophy?

Yes. The question that I ask is: What does it mean to be human when you've been historically dehumanized? And regardless of where you find yourself on this globe, you will see that people with darker skin are at the bottom. So there's something about this legacy of dehumanization that creates an existential tension. Of course, it manifests differently depending on where you find yourself.

I was born in Paris, France, but I was raised in Cameroon, Central Africa, and I grew up there. I never thought of myself as being non-human or as being Black.

But once you move to a space where the majority population is white and the interactions you have with people make you realize that you are “the other,” although you never really see yourself as being “the other,” you realize that although race is a construct, it's a lived experience. For whatever reason, even in this country, citizenship is not enough to be part of the nation. Once you've been defined as non-human, what can you tell those who think that they're human what it means to be human?

Because what they don't realize is that they too have done something to their humanity. [Frantz] Fanon wrote about it, the question of dehumanization/being human is still at the core of Black existential thought.

When I first started your book, I was thinking, because existentialism is about the universal human experience, what does it even mean to say Black existentialism?

But then your book very quickly drives home the reminder that we have this tradition of Western thought, and part of the history of that tradition is the devaluing of Black humanity, and that dehumanization is part of the historical Black experience, that sense of exile is part of the experience in the West, and so there's just no way to engage with a tradition like this one without also dealing with that history.

Exactly. Even in the African context, we are conditioned to think about the question of the human and racism only in racial terms. Cameroon, the way we spell it today came from “camaroes” because the Portuguese were the first to show up there, and they saw a lot of big shrimps.

To me, that's the beginning of dehumanization: People claim a land and they act as if the people they find on that land are of no value. They rename the place, they balkanize it, and we are still trying to make sense of those spaces.

There's a term you use in the book: “Afro-pessimism.” What does that refer to? And is the argument you're making in this book opposed to this, or is the relationship more complicated?

Afro-pessimism says that there is a continuous and ongoing process of dehumanization that people of African descent go through. And in many ways, there's no way we can be fully human because we make everybody else human. In other words, it’s the dehumanization of people of African descent that makes other people human.

I focus on the ongoing struggle for freedom. I'm not dismissing the reality of white supremacy. I'm not dismissing the reality of the dehumanization of Black people. I'm not dismissing the material conditions of our lives. But I'm looking at it from the perspective of those who, for a very long time, had to fight in order to exist.

At the very beginning of the book, you say explicitly that Blackness is not synonymous with victimhood. Why was it important to state that so clearly?

Well, because I think historically, people of African descent have been victimized, so they're victims. But at the same time, the other side of the story is that they always try to find a way to free themselves. I cannot separate the two, so that's where I draw the line between being historically victimized and being a victim and the state of victimhood. And it's not even just in the US or in France.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the dictatorships and the many ways in which neocolonialism and the setting up of a power structure that still oppresses Africans is happening at the moment. People are still trying to be free. And to me, I'm not being pessimistic. It's just the facts of Black life. It's how you deal with it and how continuously you’re still trying to improve the conditions of your lives. Whereas the Afro-pessimists will say that there's no point talking about the struggle because why should you even be struggling in the first place?

There is a certain pessimism, to just stick with that word, that I feel in so much of the race discourse in America, and I just don't know what to do with it. So I'm a white guy who grew up in the deep South. That's just a fact about me. And I'm not saying that in some performative way. I'm just acknowledging that that's my experience.

I also believe in the universality of the human condition and the power of language and ideas to bridge differences. And when the pessimism goes too far or when we become trapped in our given identities, we sacrifice our agency on some level. We sacrifice our ability to define ourselves in the here and now and project ourselves into a better future. But at the same time, we are products of material and historical forces. How do we accept the all too real constraints imposed on us by history without, at the same time, reducing ourselves to historical props?

I always go back to the lived experience because African people or people of African descent are not concepts. I honestly believe that every day when someone wakes up, they try to figure out what they have to do, how to go about it. It is not an academic matter. It's very concrete. It doesn't mean that you're not going to be facing difficulties, challenges, problems, but you still go about your life because that's the life you were given to live.

But I also think, to paraphrase Gramsci, that you need to strike a balance between the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. You need to be able to deal with reality; otherwise it's a flight from responsibility. Once you're able to look at a situation for what it is and you don't lie to yourself, you are able to deal with it.

And this is not some grandiose philosophical statement. I see that every time I go back to Cameroon. Coming from a perspective of somebody who has lived most of her life overseas, you can come and be like, "Oh my God, these people are suffering. They don't have this. They don't have that." You can look at their daily lives from a perspective of lack and deficiency, but that is not how they're living their lives. They're still trying to work whatever job they can do. They're still having children, they're still having a certain kind of joy. Horrible things happen to them, but they don't sit in a state of pessimism and paralysis.

I cannot afford to be pessimistic because all the people who came before me had to endure and fight when it seemed like everything was dark and there was no hope. Had those people not believed, and had they not fought, where would I be today? So that's where I also find a certain hope.

Some of this gets at the ambivalence I felt reading someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who writes beautifully and in a way that helped me understand his experience. What I wrestled with was the philosophy of hopelessness that seemed to undergird his work. I think it yields too much to the forces of oppression. Do you think I'm misunderstanding the point there?

Well, yes and no. Remember that people of African descent in the United States, and — I'm paraphrasing Baldwin here — they're the only people who never wanted to come here. So they didn't come here because they had a dream or they tried to improve their living conditions. They've been through hell and they're still going through hell. We are talking about at least 250 years of free labor. We are talking about Jim Crow laws. We're talking about lynching. So I cannot say that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a preacher of hopelessness per se, because in the United States, there's also this obsession with hope and happy endings, which I do not have because I come from a French background.

That's why I love the blues, because the blues is an African-American art form that helps you deal with the dissonance of your existence. And you cannot be in denial of your reality, but you have to be responsible about it. You can be humorous about it. You can have a sense of irony. And when you listen to some blue songs, you can see that the lyrics can be sad or tragic, but the melody is upbeat. What is the blues singer expressing? Joy, happiness, hope? He's expressing an existential struggle.

I wonder what you think is the principal struggle today, and where freedom is to be found in that, for Black people in this country?

When you think about the ’60s and the ’70s, the Black struggle was not just for Black people. It was universal. Most of those Black leaders were Marxist or leftist. They were also anti-capitalist. It wasn't just anti-racism.

I think the difficulty today is not necessarily just a question of freedom, it's the fact that leftist politics is divided. You have the cultural left and then you have the left that focuses on class, but also there is this neoliberalization of identity discourse.

The question I have is, are we framing freedom in terms of becoming part of a system, which by definition will produce inequality? If that's what we're claiming, you're going to create a minority elite class and then they will be part of this world as it is. Or do you want to create a world that is difficult to actually create because we all have to lose and risk everything, and that includes the Black bourgeois?

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts,Spotify,Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.