Andrew Carlquist
Critical Race Theory
9/18/08
The first two days of this class were extremely intimidating. The only philosophy I had studied was in PH 10, and other than that I was completely ignorant in the subject. It was difficult for me to understand many of the terms in the readings, but one topic really granted me a breakthrough: facticity. Reading Bernasconi, I had no clue as to what facticity was, but as we discussed it in class, it dawned on me as an extremely, almost severely accurate way to picture human consciousness, as something that I’ve almost always had on the tip of my mind, though never fully completed as a thought. Viewing race as facticity adds a completely new, valuable dimension to the concept of race. It’s hard to think of how I thought even moments before I grasped the concept of race as facticity, but from what I recall, I had the feeling that the inequalities established on the basis of race made race an inherent and unfair handicap. I’ve spent some time studying structural and psychological aspects of race and racism, and understanding what facticity is and including race into that category has not only expanded my views on race and racism, but also tightened them up and tied them together, further unifying in my mind what race is, can be, and does, as well as some of the ways in which race shapes our world.
Another concept that really appeals to me is that of authenticity and living authentically. I had heard this term before in my Intro to Political Theory class, in regards to the ideas of Rousseau and his Discourses on Inequality. His idea was that human society prevents individuals from living authentically (specifically, by establishing a system of inequality), and in society people were in a constant state of alienation. Now, Rousseau’s authenticity is in a very different context than Sartre’s authenticity, but the two strike me as quite similar. Rousseau’s alienation could easily be seen as Sartre’s bad faith; I know Sartre’s bad faith swings two ways, as it has been said in class, and I believe Rousseau’s alienation could be seen as that the majority of people swing towards the “too much facticity” aspect of bad faith. Either way, both paint a fairly gloomy picture of society as it is. However, I feel that in this case Sartre seems to have more hopeful prospects. The only way for Rousseau’s authenticity to come to pass is if society is completely restructured to remove inequality, but from what I’ve learned about Sartre’s authenticity is that so long as an individual does not live in bad faith, they are living authentically. The two clearly do not match up, which leads me to wonder where the differences lie, and I think that it is in how the two view “human nature.” Rousseau’s human nature is fixed, and Sartre’s is not. To Sartre, human nature is consciousness, and consciousness, by nature, is not fixed. We are beings-for-ourselves and also beings-for-others, but that in no way assigns specific qualities such as “spiritual” or “social” or “greedy” to our consciousnesses. This is one appealing facet of our discussions on Sartre: instead of attempting to nail down a concrete human nature, he completely throws this idea out the window and says that we create our nature, both individually and socially. That, at this moment in time, race, gender, and other qualities can be viewed as facticity does not necessarily mean they will be forever. I think that, as a conglomeration of consciousnesses, society is just as transient as an individual consciousness, and thus will change eventually.
Moving on, during our discussion of Weate’s article, we hit upon the idea that the black body is an object of the created freedom of the white body, and this has really stuck into my mind. I find myself linking many of these ideas to others that I’ve accumulated over my college career, including some historical conceptions of body that have been applied to both people of color and women as of the body, rather than of the mind as white males have tended to be cast. I find it extremely gratifying to learn about these philosophies that makes sense in themselves, and then when applied to the real world also work very well; both ends of the spectrum (minorities, so to speak, vs. white males) are being pushed into living in bad faith. The people on top wish to believe that they transcend their bodies, and since it is within their power to believe this, it basically forces everyone else to accept the facticity of theirs. All parties are living in bad faith.
Next, I feel that in hearing the words “race not as essential, but as a construct” and understanding the meaning of this has really pulled together many different ideas in my mind that have been in need of pulling together. I have long been convinced that race is a social construct and that all of its power lies within the social realm, which leads me to this line of thought: A single person cannot carry the essence of blackness, or be essentially black, because even if blackness were an essential quality, we would be hard pressed to distinguish where this essentiality had come from, as it is clearly not genetic/biological. Blackness as it is commonly thought of in stereotypes is a social construct, and as such cannot be inherent or essential. Furthermore, the conception of blackness differs slightly from culture to culture; if it were inherent, this would not be so. However, race is a strong defining force, and I didn’t have a word for this until “facticity.”
However, the corporeal schema, the body as that which our consciousnesses work through in order to interact with the world, was something that I didn’t have any basis for before, never mind that certain bodies could be excluded from this schema. That there is more than one dimension to the facticity of body than simply “consciousness embodied” wasn’t something that occurred to me, and I think this is because of my own worldview and conditioning, that everyone is equal or was created equal. I also think that if I had not been introduced to the actuality of inequality in this world (basically, racism is still alive and kicking), I would have been hard pressed to accept this philosophy of body. Which leads me to my final point: this Critical Race Theory builds upon the idea that racism is still very much alive, that “race matters,” yet gives no… concrete evidence up to the admittedly misplaced standards of an “average” person. I know many people who simply don’t believe in the racialized nature of the world, and I think that it would be difficult to get through to such people with Sartre’s, Fanon’s, and Weate’s ideas on race.
