Musings on Existentialism, Race & Love is Blind
...and whether one really has the power to shape their consciousness
I became an existentialist at the Coffee Project on 5th street. There were many reasons why this philosophy—which argues that we’re responsible for creating the own meanings of our lives, and that said meaning isn’t prescribed— appealed to me when I first learned about it in college. First of all, as I’ve said before in a million ways, I am primed for the undertow. I love to lose myself in something that eclipses all else, something that appears to finally give meaning to “an era without meaning.” This is also the quality that makes me a serial crusher. I empathize with antivaxxers, cult victims and conspiracy theorists because in another universe, I am absolutely handing out Scientology fliers in Clearwater, Florida. While wearing some sort of tin hat that protects me from the 5G waves programmed to grill our brain cells and distance us from Ron L Hubbard. Oh, absolutely.
Anyway, the idea that I could change my own life, be my own salvation etc meant a lot a few years ago. I was growing less religious, and needed a new framework, a new morality. Or at the very least, an intellectually grounded lack of one. I liked that Sartre’s existentialism allowed for a certain flexibility: nothing was wrong per say, except for lying to yourself about your own desires, and acting on untrue impulses. In At The Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell retells a story in which a young soldier brought an ethical dilemma to Sartre. Should he go off to war to fight the Nazis, leaving his mother alone and in probable physical danger, or should he fulfill his filial obligations, in the process missing the opportunity to fight for a cause he believed in? Sarte responded: “You are free, therefore choose—that is to say, invent” (9). The decision was irrelevant; the relevant part was that he had to choose, and choose what he wanted.
This sort of horrible anecdote has stuck with me forever, as has the Kierkegard quote: “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” According to Sartre, “living in good faith” didn’t mean following a set of guidelines. It meant being true to yourself, a self that you were free to create—and not only that, absolutely required to create, and with a sense of urgency—through your actions. If you think that something about this idea is familiar, you might be remembering the main idea of every other Disney movie, as hilariously problematized in this Christian blog post from 2013. Anyway, living in good faith didn’t mean being “good.” You could be “bad” if you wanted, as long as you were acting in line with your beliefs. This was revelatory to someone who, not to be a broken record, grew up religious.
The main and obvious challenge of existentialism is that structural forces define and shape our existences so dramatically that it’s difficult to determine where they end and where individual existence begins. White people get to be people; you get to be Black. Or Sikh, or Muslim, or Woman, or whatever thing you are immediately, visibly identified as when you walk down the street. You are either The Thing, or defensively a lot more than The Thing; you are perpetually in a state of negotiating the identities that you are forced to hold in public space. I’m focused on visible identities here because they are the only truly knowable ones, snippets of public information that complete strangers constantly process and react to in a way that reinforces them at every turn. I’m also focused on visible identities here because existentialism was hugely influenced by phenomenology, a philosophy that breaks down existence into concrete phenomena and the analysis of said phenomena. It can be weilded to study the most minute reactions and interactions of a body with the world; a look, a touch, a turn, etc.
Sartre was big on phenomenology, and in works like On Being and Nothingness1 runs the script all the way back: what happens when you walk down the street, in public, and are faced with “The Look” (ie the gaze of someone who is not you)? How does The Look trouble the waters of your existence, forcing you to act or think differently than you might have originally? In the best case scenario, your existence is tainted; the water of your life purpled by a single dip of the watercolor brush. In the worst case scenario—and especially if you are not a fellow person walking down the street, but a visible Other—well, perhaps that consciousness isn’t your own after all, so influenced it is by The Look and your subsequent reactions to it.
The idea that you cannot ever fully realize your own individuality has been searingly captured by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks. In the iconic beginning of “The Fact of Blackness,” he writes: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found out that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Seared into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others” (109).
This is a transparent critique of Sartre’s limited conception of The Look. There are many Sartre digs in BSWM, and if you have the relevant context, it’s really exciting to read. Anyway, a few pages later, he writes more specifically about the Black person’s initial encounter with the white gaze:
And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounter difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciouness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.
In this section Fanon is saying: white man, you have got it WRONG. Creating oneself is not as simple as wishing it so, and acting upon that wish. In the real world, well, the real world intervenes. Fanon draws upon his training as a psychiatrist as well, arguing that the white gaze results in psychological, existential, and even physical stunting.
He exemplifies this breakdown very artistically in the text itself. The figure Fanon invokes, both him and not him, both philosophy and reality, both the experience of an individual and of a people, is worn down in the span of a few pages. The consequence of being watched, and then watching himself being watched, collapses; for a split second, his reality and the reality of the white gaze becomes one the same:
“I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtones, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro! (116)”
The premise of Love is Blind is a phenomonologist’s wet dream.2 Couples talk to each other through a wall (“sight unseen”), and only meet after they get engaged. When they meet for the first time, the drama is played up visually. Each person is contained behind a glowing door, that rolls up slowly; when both people are revealed, they must walk (or run) across a long red hallway to come face to face. It is the ultimate exercise in The Look.
It is perhaps for the best that the meeting is so prolonged; the second the couples face each other in the flesh, it’s like an immediate countdown to their breakup begins. In any case, their dynamic immediately shifts. As is often the case in real life, there is often a party who really wants it to work and a party who thinks they can do better, usually because they are more socially valuable in some way (male, rich, more “attractive” ie skinnier or whiter, etc). After the couples meet each other, they meet everyone else on the show, in mixers that often prove dramatic. They move in together and play house, and in the finale must decide—at the altar, no less—whether or not they really want to marry the person they’ve chosen sight unseen.
One couple this season immediately takes my interest, Zainab and Cole. Some context: Zainab is a brown woman, and Cole is a white man. Not only is he a white man, but he is the epitome of The American White Man: tall, chiseled, able-bodied, Christian as fuck. He is a blue-eyed, dark haired, objectively “hot” man who has effectively been the standard of beauty since before The Little Mermaid’s Prince Eric. His eyes look reptilian: impossibly light, like if you mixed one part Listerine and 30 parts water.3
Before Zainab and Cole met, I called it. Cole is going to find Zainab ugly. Zainab is going to love him. They are doomed because Cole will never accept her, and will always fantasize about what could’ve been: a relationship with a thin-lipped white girl who has a Minnie Mouse voice, a designated wine night and a pair of knee-high Uggs. She has one Black friend who she loves very much, and very sad, very complicated feelings about the fact that she will one day inherit a former plantation. Super Size Me was a very formative film for her, politically speaking, and she cries sometimes when she thinks of the mass electrocution of chickens, or when the image of one very overweight, waddling chicken crosses her mind.
Ultimately, I’m right. Zanab and Cole’s storyline rotates around an instance where he confides to Colleen—another contestant on the show, and yes you guessed it, a white girl—that she is more his type, and that he definitely would have hit on her if he saw her at a bar. They fight a lot, and Zanab ultimately rejects him at the altar.
Their story is more complicated than that, but honestly, not by much. If I'm being real, I sort of feel obligated to say that after watching multiple post-show interviews with them. Sure, the show was all edited and shot in the most dramatic and incriminating way possible, but the core of Zanab and Cole’s dynamic is racially charged in exactly the way that you might assume. Or not assume—depending on who you are, what constitutes your consciousness, what you see and don’t see.
I got too worked up watching Zanab and Cole, and literally had to turn off the TV midway through an episode. Very embarrassing stuff for me. Like, the show actually ruined my mood and my entire night, and sort of my life in a way, because I had to return to existential philosophy and Fanon and type this all out. I was thinking about it for days. In reacting so intensely, my fixedness become apparent to me; I was reminded once again why I see the world the way I do. Is there ever an escape?
This is getting long, so, I’ll end with a resolution. This year, I want to read more critical race theory. I'm curious about Charles W. Mills, who has written to problematize white philosophy and to examine the relevance it has to Black people. Stay tuned…
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I’ve only read parts, thank you very much.
Or worst nightmare. After all, phenomenologists dissect encounters bit by bit…in the chapter of BSWM I focus on, Fanon describes the bodily experience of reaching for a pack of cigarettes upon wanting to smoke.
And here I fall into the trap, reacting to whiteness in perhaps a futile attempt to uphold the integrity of my Blackness…in other words, kill me.
I suspect you're overthinking this. It's not like you have trouble blowing potential prospects off nonchalantly:
https://twitter.com/romaissaa_b/status/1700163847124836379
Was race involved in those interactions? Probably not. Besides, Zainab came across as very narcissistic and manipulative. He was literally eating with her out of the bowl. Told her to save her appetite for a large dinner. How did she turn that into being disrespectful. IMO, she was always finding flaws. Cole is the good guy.