Black existentialism

• 1. Introduction

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  Black existentialism, also called Africana critical theory, is a school of thought that critiques domination and affirms the empowerment of Black people in the world. It emerged in the late 1800s through the work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, but it would grow far beyond any single thinker or nation.

  What makes this tradition distinct from the European existentialism most students encounter in philosophy courses? Why does a philosophy rooted in liberation stretch from the American South to apartheid South Africa to the Aboriginal communities of Australia? And what happens when a tradition born in suffering turns its attention to literature, theology, and even the inner life of Black music?

  This documentary traces those questions through the figures who shaped them: Du Bois and his concept of double consciousness, Frantz Fanon and the pathologies of colonized identity, Steve Biko and his theory of Black Consciousness, William R. Jones and the challenge to black theology, and the writers from Ralph Ellison to Toni Morrison who gave these ideas a fictional form. Lewis Gordon captures something essential about what holds all of this together: that enslaved, colonized, and dehumanized people are forced to question their humanity, and that questioning is itself a philosophical act.

• 2. Du Bois and Double Consciousness

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  W.E.B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, earning his degree in sociology. Yet his work was honored within the canon of African-American philosophy rather than the social sciences alone.

  His most influential contribution to Black existentialism is the concept of double consciousness, which he explored in his 1903 essay The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois described a "twoness": the experience of being Black and American simultaneously, where those two identities were treated by society as contradictory rather than compatible.

  Double consciousness took two distinct forms. The first was the experience of seeing oneself through the lens of white supremacy and anti-Black racism, internalizing the view of oneself as lowly and inferior. The second form, as philosopher Paget Henry argues, was more critical: it involved recognizing the injustice of a social system that limits possibilities for some groups while creating advantages for others, and then expects equal performance from both. Du Bois pointed out that Black people were imprisoned for challenging a system built on the phrase "All men are created equal." He noted that Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and other nineteenth-century Black thinkers had pressed that contradiction further by asking whether "men" included women.

  Du Bois also theorized the importance of Black music, particularly the spirituals. He used them to raise the question of the inner life of Black people, a quality he named "soul," which in his framework of double consciousness became plural: "souls." He also raised the problem of how history itself gets told. The misrepresentation of history as an apology for white supremacy and colonialism, he argued, degraded Black people as passive objects of history rather than as people who had fought actively for freedom.

• 3. Fanon and the Colonized Self

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  Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925 and died in 1961. He was both a philosopher and a psychiatrist, and that double training shaped how he approached the question of Black identity under colonialism.

  In Black Skin, White Masks, first published in French in 1952 and released by Grove Press in 1967, Fanon argued that the modern world offered no model of a normal Black adult. Instead, he described the pathologies of what he called the Black soul, which he identified as a white construction. This left Black people in an alienated relationship with language, love, and even their dream life.

  Fanon observed that Black people who mastered the dominant language were either treated as not really Black or received with suspicion. He also examined the dynamics of love: Black women and Black men who sought recognition from white authority figures, he argued, were caught in a self-deceiving project. It required Black women to ask to be loved as white rather than as women, and it required Black men to fail on their own terms as men.

  Fanon also engaged with Negritude, the intellectual movement coined by Aimé Césaire, asking whether rejecting white reason could allow Black people to love themselves. Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "Orphée Noir," or "Black Orpheus," led Fanon to reconsider. He concluded that Negritude was still defined relative to whiteness. His response was that, while whites had created the figure of the Negro, it was the Negro who created Negritude, and that creation was still an act of agency. He called this quality of acting "actional." At the end of Black Skin, White Masks, he asked his own body to make of him a man who questions.

  In The Wretched of the Earth, published in French in 1961 and by Grove Press in 1963, Fanon returned to these themes at a historical level, demanding not only the transformation of material circumstances but the creation of new symbols for a new humanity.

• 4. Biko and Black Consciousness

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  Steve Bantu Biko carried Fanon's project into the South African anti-apartheid struggle through what he called Black Consciousness. In his collection I Write What I Like, Biko offered an expansive definition: Black consciousness applied to anyone involved in anti-racist struggle who was marked as the enemy of an anti-Black, racist state.

  For Biko, that meant the category of "Black" included not only indigenous Africans but also Asians, mixed-race peoples, and whites who were what he called "blackened" by their allegiance to anti-racism. This was a political conception of identity rather than an essentialist one. Biko's formulation carries a deliberate echo of Simone de Beauvoir's observation that one is not born a woman but becomes one: for Biko, one becomes Black through political commitment and struggle, not biology.

  South African philosophers influenced by Biko's existentialism include Noel Chabani Manganyi. The broader reach of Biko's legacy was examined in the 2008 collection Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel Gibson and published by Palgrave Macmillan in New York.

  Biko's approach to identity also connects to a broader feature of Black existentialism: its argument against the misconception that all Black experience is the same. That flattening, Black existentialist thinkers insist, makes it harder for Black individuals to define their own identity and discover meaning on their own terms.

• 5. Theology, Absurdity, and Jones

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  Black existential philosophy reached the academy in the 1970s through the work of William R. Jones, who brought a sharp challenge to Black theological thought.

  Jones drew on the existential philosophy of Albert Camus, particularly the idea of facing the absurd, and on Jean-Paul Sartre's critiques of theological claims. His target was a strand of Black theology that presented history as God working to liberate Black people. Jones argued that the historical evidence did not support that view.

  His response was humanistic: instead of waiting on divine intervention to eliminate injustice on earth, Black people should take their lives and history into their own hands and build a better future for humanity. Jones was careful to distinguish this position from atheism or from telling religious Black people not to love God. His point was narrower: that reliance on God for the removal of earthly injustice was not warranted by the evidence.

  Cornel West arrived at a related concern through a different route. West addressed the problem of what he called Black nihilism and its effect on the African-American community. In his account, nihilism was not a philosophical doctrine but a lived experience of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and what he named as the most important factor: lovelessness. The result, West wrote, was a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive orientation toward the world. Life without meaning, hope, and love, he argued, breeds a coldhearted outlook that destroys both the individual and others.

• 6. Gordon and Philosophical Anthropology

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  Lewis Gordon synthesized the strands running from Du Bois through Fanon and Jones into a systematic framework. He argues that Black existential philosophy is marked by a centering of what he calls the "situation" of questioning itself, which he also describes as the lived or meaning-context of concern.

  Gordon developed this argument in his book Existentia Africana, where he identified three core preoccupations of Black existential philosophy: problems of philosophical anthropology, questions of liberation, and critical reflection on the justification of thought itself. The first asks what a human being is. The second asks how one can become free. The third is critical even of the methods used to justify the first two.

  These questions, Gordon argues, arise naturally from the experience of people who have been enslaved, colonized, and racially dehumanized. Such people are forced to question their own humanity, and that pressure generates the philosophical inquiry. Gordon advocates for what he calls a Black existential phenomenological approach, which he sometimes names a postcolonial phenomenology or a decolonial one.

  A philosopher influenced by Gordon is Nelson Maldonado-Torres, whose 2008 book Against War, published by Duke University Press, offers a "decolonial reduction" of the forms of knowledge used to rationalize slavery, colonialism, and racism. Drawing on Aimé Césaire, the Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and the Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel, Maldonado-Torres names the practices of dehumanization in the modern world "Hitlerism" and advocates what he calls the "decolonial sciences" as the critical frameworks to carry forward the humanistic project Fanon demanded.

• 7. Literature as Existential Witness

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  Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man stands as what scholars describe as the archetype of Black existentialist literature. The nameless protagonist, a figure Ellison drew in part from his own life, carries a specific philosophical weight: the absence of a name points to the trauma of Black people being given names forced on them through the violence of slavery.

  Ellison structured that loss of naming as a loss of memory, and the novel's plot traces a process of dismemberment as the protagonist moves from one abusive father figure to another, both white and Black, before arriving at a culminating reflection on invisible survival. In the novel, the only Black characters who appear somewhat free are those designated insane, as in the famous scene at the Golden Day bar where residents of an insane asylum become the sharpest critical voices early in the novel.

  Richard Wright came closest among American writers to the Sartrean existentialist movement, though Wright saw himself as working through the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, with a focus on dread and despair. Dismayed by American racism in the South, Wright sought refuge in Paris, where he was influenced by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, all associated with Les Temps modernes. The existential novels he wrote after leaving the United States, including The Outsider, never received the critical acclaim of Native Son. In the introduction to Native Son, Wright argued that Bigger Thomas, the novel's anti-hero, was produced by a system in which police officers randomly arrested young Black men for crimes they did not commit and prosecutors were able to secure convictions in such cases. Wright's insight anticipated what he described as the contemporary Black "gangsta" as portrayed in gangsta rap.

  Toni Morrison's contributions extended the tradition in two directions. Her 1970 novel The Bluest Eye examined how standards of ugliness and beauty dominated Black women's lives by positioning white women as the norm. Her 1987 novel Beloved raised the question of the trauma that haunts Black existence from slavery, a theme that connects directly to Du Bois's earlier meditation on Black music and the inner life of Black people.

• 8. Black Feminist Existential Philosophy

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  Anna Julia Cooper, working in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laid a foundation for what would become Black feminist existential philosophy. She confronted directly the racist claim that the world would be better off without Black people by constructing an argument about worth grounded in the difference between contribution and investment.

  Cooper's logic was precise: very little had been invested in Black people, yet Black people had produced an enormous amount. On that measure, Black worth exceeded that of many whites. She applied the same argument to defend the worth of Black women specifically, using it to challenge the double standards imposed on Black populations in general and Black women in particular.

  More recently in the academy, this strand of thought has been taken up by Kathryn Gines, who founded the Collegium of Black Feminist Philosophers. Gines brings together ideas from Cooper, Sartre, Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and bell hooks, as well as recent work in Africana phenomenology and Black popular culture. Her published articles include "Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary Hip-Hop," which appeared in the collection Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason, edited by Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby and published by Open Court in Chicago in 2005.

  The reach of Black existential philosophy also extends beyond the United States and the African continent. In Australia, Danielle Davis organized work in Black existential philosophy through forums and articles at the Oodgeroo Unit of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, a reminder that the category of Black, as used by Australian Aboriginal people who apply the term to themselves, opens the tradition to forms of experience and inquiry far from its American and African origins. Malcolm X, who came to Black existentialism not through higher education but through activism and his relationship with Islam, organized his concerns through the Afro-American Unity initiative, which sought a social, political, and economic network for creating consciousness among Black people and encouraging cultural self-determination, concepts that point outward toward the same global scale of concern that runs through the entire tradition.