ABSTRACT
Discussing Black existentialism for a volume titled The Sartrean Mind has several shortcomings. The most immediate emerges from the Euromodern academy’s tendency to treat black and African thought as derivative of those white. The presupposition is that the normative, the original, and the real are safely nestled in whiteness in the face of which all others have no alternative beyond imitation and application. Whilst Immanuel Kant could influence such white European thinkers as G.W.F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer all the way through to white American ones such as C.I. Lewis and John Rawls, the presumption is that black and African thinkers could only be their subordinates. Their work supposedly is the mere application of white thought. Worse, there is a strain of thinking in which all thought could only be white, which entails, then, that any black engagement with theory must be imitation and application of white, or at least nonblack, thought. That there are African meditations on philosophy, such as found in the writings of Antef nearly two millennia before Socrates offered his first reflection on the unexamined life, as well as struggles on the relationship of faith to reason from Africans such as St. Augustine in the fourth century ace and Zera Yacob in the seventeenth century, offers much proverbial food for thought from the African continent. That also there are reasons for thinkers who suffered the experience of enslavement to meditate on problems of existence and freedom should also be evident. Thought—at least on existence—needn’t hold its breath for a white person to think it for its appearance. 1
