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3 Alas Poor Jimmy They serve you at the table, they shine your shoes, they operate your elevators , they carry your suitcases, but they are not your business, and nor are you theirs; their business is with the elevators, suitcases, shoes. . . . Not one of their words, not one of their gestures, not one of their smiles are destined for you; it is dangerous for you to go out in the evenings in quarters that are reserved for them; if you were to stop in passing, if you were to bear them some interests you would unpleasantly stun them and you would risk displeasing the other (white) Americans. These thirteen million men, who slip by your sides like shadows, are no longer slaves. More than a half century ago, the United States freed their grandparents. They are not all necessarily from the laboring class, yet the majority of them live in horrible misery; some are lawyers, doctors, professors, some manage major newspapers, but their recent fortune does not confer upon them any rights; they count as much as the elevator boy in the eyes of the whites. They refer to themselves as “third-class citizens.” They are the blacks. Do not call them “niggers”: you will insult them. They prefer the expression “man of color” which is from official use or that of “brown American,” which flatters them, or, if need be, “Negro.” —Jean-Paul Sartre, “Return from the United States” If a black is overdetermined, then to see that black is to see every black. . . . One is led to believe, for instance, that one can “have blacks” by virtue of having that black, that anonymous black. The black representative emerges. One seeks out black leaders. Black novelists emerge as more than symbols of blackness; they become blackness on our shelves, our curricula, our mythology. —Lewis R. Gordon, “Existential Dynamics of Theorizing Black Invisibility” this depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience. —James Baldwin, “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” 96 I beg your indulgence as I take a moment to readjust the clumsy apparatuses with which I am attempting to demonstrate some of the finer points of midtwentieth -century Black American intellectual “crisis.” I ask that you forgive my obvious disorientation, the enervating vertigo that makes itself apparent with each laborious sentence. Indeed I fear that I have lost focus, relinquished rhetorical precision, as the damp, heavy cold sneaks into peach-colored rooms and a strange gray light plays tricks on the eyes and the spirit. I will attempt then, at least in passing, to defend my somewhat outdated interests in existentialism, to explain again why it is that I have returned so late to a failed and unfashionable humanism. They serve. They shine. They operate elevators. They carry suitcases. They are not your business, nor are you theirs. Sartre creates a pristine, elegant taxonomy of the so-called race problem in which there are no black individuals , only black facts, black history. And even this presumably profound reality does not confer agency—or even will—upon them. Indeed all the trappings of human freedom seem beyond their reach. Their grandparents, sleepy, half-conscious mass that apparently they were, had no hand in their own manumission. On the contrary, Freedom came as a singular event, one for which they had neither planned nor prepared. No thought, no struggle, not a single human action escapes the horrible misery that they, the blacks, collectively represent. Of course, my readers will understand immediately that Sartre simply reiterates the centuries-long tradition of writing black individuality out of narratives of Western modernity.1 He establishes, like Burke, Hegel, Freud, Marx, and many others, a humanist discourse in which blackness stands as a sort of absolute boundary, the place at which even the most rigorous logic falls apart. What is pitiful though, what wounds the contemporary critic, is that existentialism , at least in its finest iterations, is established on the assumption of innate, if not exactly unassailable, free will and responsibility. Indeed Sartre imagines himself at the end of a long line of philosophers who announced and privileged the human subject, the individual, as the primary— the only—agent of history and culture. That he loses his nerve in the face of all those black waiters and porters suggests finally that he had not seriously considered the racialist structures that supported his projects. He does not understand that the structures of desire that he announces, those many...

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