Dr. Robert Bernasconi, Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, has been investigating in recent years the issue of the phenomenology of racism, a topic brought up by Sartre upon returning from the United States in 1945 yet disregarded by most Sartre scholars.  It is quite tragic that this issue was not addressed by the philosophical circles then, for they could have worked on a solution to Sartre s  black problem.   However,  it s better late than never,  and fortunately Bernasconi has taken it upon himself to not only bring Sartre s ideas to light, but continue the thoughts therein.  In this essay, I would like to address Bernasconi s essay and give, if I may, a response to the issue of the phenomenology of racism from the Black perspective.  I shall then address potential pathways toward a solution; I do not feel that I have a cure-all solution to the questions raised by Bernasconi, but I think there are topics within current philosophical discussion that are useful in our analysis of the question of race perception.

Bernasconi and Sartre: The Phenomenology of Racism

 When I read Bernasconi s essay  "Sartre s Gaze Returned: The Transformation of the Phenomenology of Racism,"  I immediately feel two main points that I receive from my reading.  First and foremost, Bernasconi uncovers an often suppressed Sartrean concept, the phenomenology of racism as  the Gaze returned.   However, secondly, and more pertinent to us, Bernasconi demonstrates the social pressures that affect phenomenology, especially that of intentionality on the part of the oppressor.

 The essay begins with Bernasconi reviewing an article of Le Figaro in which Sartre is describing his observations of American life upon returning to France after visiting the United States in 1945.  He was quite surprised that Blacks and Whites ignored each other:

 On his return to France, Sartre described for Le Figaro how shocked he was by the indifference shown to Black people by White Americans, both in the South and the North.  Racism permeated America.  It was to be found not only in segregation or in the way Blacks were consigned to the most menial jobs.  It was also in the most commonplace experience of how Whites passed Blacks on the streets. (Bernasconi 201)

How did Blacks and Whites treat each other when they passed each other on the street?  They avoided  the Gaze,  the Sartrean freedom shackle of the Other, and did not view each other as being part of each other.

 Sartre had discovered an imperative of White American society: Blacks are not your business, nor are you theirs.  Their business is with the elevator, your luggage, or your shoes.   They perform their tasks like machines and you ought not to take any more notice of them than if they were machines.  (ibid.)

By not making the existential (or human) connection, there was no Gaze, no moment in which Whites saw the contempt in the Black person s eyes, and, likewise, no moment in which Blacks saw the power imperative in the White person s eyes.  This completely amazed Sartre, who, when in America, was treated more like a White man than a Francois.

 Bernasconi connects this experience with the a theme in Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), in which Sartre explains the impact of the Gaze (or lack thereof) on the definition of  Jew.   According to Sartre, Bernasconi comments, it takes the anti-Semite to make the Jew, for the Jew is never singled out otherwise (Bernasconi 203).  However, it is the case that there are such thing as Jewish people, and in many cases, Jews are  defined  by anti-Semites in lieu of self-definition.  Likewise, African-Americans (Blacks in the United States) are defined by White people, particularly Southern slavemasters (Bernasconi 204-205).

 Bernasconi continues his exploration of Sartre s phenomenology of racism by moving on to Sartre s introduction to Black Orpheus, an anthology of Black poetry.  What this did was open up the discussion of the intentionality of the oppressor:

 Wright, as read by Sartre, not only gave Whites a glimpse of certain select aspects of Black life: he showed the oppressors how the oppressed regarded them.  What Wright could do, over and beyond anything Sartre could accomplish, was not just write about the experience of being subject to racism, but also complete Sartre s project of showing the oppressor to himself.  It might seem that if Sartre did not know what it was to be a victim, he might at least know what it was to be an oppressor.  But what Sartre s own analysis revealed was that the oppressor is unknown to himself qua oppressor, precisely because of the mechanisms in place to save himself from seeming himself as he is seen. (Bernasconi 207).

These comments by Bernasconi are very important.  From almost a Foucaultian standpoint, Bernasconi acknowledges the archeology of institutional racism: the kind of racism that does not reflect one person, but rather shields the blatantly obvious from those that benefit from the institution.  I will comment more about this in my response, but in short I shall say here that Sartre, and hence Bernasconi also, raises the question of the Gaze reversed: What happens when Whites begin to see that they are the oppressors?  What happens when the institutional blinders fall, and Whites see themselves as being responsible for  the black problem?   Back in 1945 the solution was simply to ignore it, to pretend that there was no such  black problem. 

 In Sartrean terms, so long as Europeans and European-Americans failed to pass through that totally disarming reversal of the gaze, their sense of their own superiority would remain untouched.  More profound than the invisibility of Blacks to Whites is the inability of Whites to see themselves as seen, protected as Sartre had observed for himself in the United States, by a praxis or custom whereby neither would look at the other. (Bernasconi 207-208)

However, the system backfired, and as the Afrocentricity movement began to catch on in the 1960's (to be discussed in my response), Whites became ignored by Blacks, and Blacks went on with their lives by establishing a type of African-American world order that excluded Whites from participating:

 Europeans would discover themselves not through the smile, the averted look, or the direct gaze, but, more humbling still, by positively being ignored.  They would cease to be the center of attention. (Bernasconi, 209)

In the 1990's there has been a search for the  forgotten White male.   This is due to all the attention placed on minorities (Blacks, gays, women, etc.), thus  robbing  the White male of his place in the  sociological sun. 

 Sartre eventually stops writing about  the Gaze returned  and begins a campaign against colonization in Africa.  He still brings up the concept of race, but he is no longer addressing the  American problem between Whites and Blacks.   In Africa, even in the colonized areas, Blacks were at least noticed, although exploited, by the White powers over them.  The situation is completely different.

 What is the significance of Bernasconi's essay?  I feel that Bernasconi is hitting upon the same idea as Sartre did: if the idea of a White thinker challenging other White thinkers into action is true, then perhaps Whites can begin solving the question of race.  Both Bernasconi and Sartre demonstrate that the question of racism is not a question that only Blacks can bring up, but it is a question for all persons involved in the problem, be it directly or indirectly.  As I will state in my response, I like this move, for it attempts a deconstruction from the inside of the source.

 However, there is a specter, a negative side, to essays such as Sartre's comments on  the black problem  and Bernasconi s displaying of them.  Both essays, both viewpoints, are relatively ignored by the public.  When people discuss Sartre, they discuss en-soi and pour-soi.  When people discuss Bernasconi, he is often praised for his work with Levinas's phenomenology.  The fact that people can  pick and choose  what they want to read, and that discussions, although potential academic gold mines, on real problems that face society are ignored displays the power game that fuels the phenomenology of the oppressor and therefore the phenomenology of race.  For the most part, Sartre and Bernasconi stand in the same spot as Black thinkers that have attempted to show the same thing for many years -- the spot of being ignored.  How is this resolved?  I shall spend the rest of the essay attempting to hopefully find a path to some sort of a resolution.

From Phenomenology to Genealogy: The Afrocentricity Movement

My response seems more like a collection of diverse elements.  Although these humble remarks lack a centralized core, they do fit within the conscribed circle of phenomenology and genealogy.  I am going to number my comments as I change from topic to topic, especially from Bernasconi s points to my points.  My main argument is that phenomenology of racism was not spontaneously born, but rather carefully invented.

 1.  The Gaze and Segregation: Let s begin with Sartre s Gaze.  Sartre had noticed during his 1945 visit to the U.S. that there was no Gaze, no spirit trap that restricted freedom.  Whites and Blacks simply did not interact.  There are several reasons for this from a historical point of view.

 First, and most importantly, the United States was under true and pure segregation.  The judicial decision of Plessy vs. Fergueson set the precedent that Blacks and Whites were  separate but equal.   Let s think on that by playing a quick language game.  If we add a comma, we get  separate, but equal.   This suggest that separation comes first and equality second.  The order of the words are important, too, for it would never  feel right  in the minds and hearts of White America to use the terminology  equal but separate,  for that would have suggested that segregation was merely an issue of race.  Therefore, if we allow language to represent the reality (as Wittgenstein suggested in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it seems clearer that the philosophy of the period,  separate but equal  transcended onto the daily American experience.  Blacks and Whites equally existed -- even on the same street on which they were walking -- but their existences were separate.

 Second, Whites did not feel they had to acknowledge the presence of Blacks.  This requires a switch from Sartre s concept of Gaze to Levinas s idea of the Face.  Stated directly, the power establishment of the time chose what had  Face  and what did not.  Blacks were placed in the latter section.  This creates two questions: (1)What was  Face  by Levinas s definition, and (2) how could Whites control  Face?   These two questions will be the subject of the second and third comments.
 2.  What is the Face?  Did Blacks have it?: What is Levinas s description of the Face?  In his interviews with Phillipe Nemo which were later published as  thique et Infini, Levinas gives a clear view of the meaning of the Face:

 Je pense plut t que l acc s au visage est d embl e  thique.  C est lorsque vous voyez un nez, des yeux, un front, un menton, et que vous pouvez les d crire, que vous vous tournez vers autrui comme vers un objet.  La meilleure mani re de rencontrer autrui, c est de ne pas m me remarquer la couleur de ses yeux!  Quand on observe la couleur des yeux, on n est pas en relation sociale avec autrui.  La relation avec le visage peut certes  tre domin e par la perception, mais ce qui est sp cifiquement visage, c est ce qui ne s'y réduit pas.  (Levinas, EI 89-90, my emphasis)

Levinas clearly states that when one attempts to objectivize  the Other, one has missed the point of other-ness.  To comment on the color of one s eyes (la couleur des yeux), or, in my argument, the color of one s skin, is to completely miss Levinas s description of Autrui.  The Face cannot fall under empirical examination ( c est ce qui ne s y r duit pas ); that is, one cannot make a Husserlian-type phenomenological reduction (r duire) of the Other.

 However that is exactly what happened as the first Africans made the great Transatlantic Voyage (also known as  The Middle Passage ) in 1619 and were sold into slavery.  This slavery was unlike the traditional slaveries found in ancient civilization -- it was dehumanization.  The slaves were not sold by their own families, nor were they mere  political prisoners.   They were goods from the East -- they were reduced to market items.  Before the bidding, potential buyers would  examine the goods,  even checking their teeth for signs of disease, which is a method used by horse buyers.  They bought slaves with the same mentality that people today buy cars -- they did not desire to buy a  lemon. 

 And so began the genealogy of racism in America -- a people dislocated thousands of miles away from home and completely dehumanized.  Their Face had been reduced to the color of their skin, the fullness of their lips, the breadth of their nose and the texture of their hair.  In short, they were completely described.

 3.  Dehumanization, damnation and subordination: The current separation of Blacks and Whites, if I may be like Foucault and attempt to trace entire cultures to single events, began when Blacks were not allowed to legally marry.  This ruling reveals a lot of racist elements: the dehumanization ( animals do not marry ), the damnation ( marriage is a holy institution and therefore Blacks are not allowed to participate ) and the subordination (man and wife could easily be separated at the next auction, or the slavemaster could rape the wife whenever he pleased).  Due to this refusal of Whites to allow Blacks to participate in the  White  institution of marriage and family, Blacks used their own wedding traditions.  Reverting back to some of the African wedding traditions, Black brides and grooms would  jump the broom.   By jumping the broom, Blacks knew amongst themselves who was married to whom.  As one African- Methodist Episcopalian priest once said,  Although it did not count in the slavemaster s eyes, jumping the broom counted in the eyes of God.   To this day, traditional Black weddings end with the jumping of the broom, a pure tribute to a separate Black culture and identity.

 The second part of the separation was the refusal of Whites to allow Blacks to worship in church.  Like with marriage, this leads to dehumanization (religion is reserved for  civilized  people), damnation (there was no way that Blacks would equally live with Whites in Heaven) and subordination (Whites used their religion to keep slavery okay).  Of course, Africans had religions, and most of the slaves who were brought to Virginia were Muslims.  Therefore, the slaves knew who God was and most of the knew Jesus.   Black Church  was the result: an  Islam-Christianity  that also had tribal appeal.  To fight against  Black Church,  especially the Gospel of Freedom (John 8), White preachers were sent to the fields preaching from Ephesians and Philemon about how God ordained slavery, and that if the slaves were going to be Christians (since they could not stop the slaves from being so), they were to be good Christian slaves and always obey the master.  Of course, religion became the tool of deliverance as history would later see in the freedom movement from 1850 to 1968.  Therefore, due to this early separation of tradition, the Church is still to date the most segregated aspect of American life.

 4.  Power struggles and the Ghetto: Michel Foucault states in Power/Knowledge that power infiltrates truth and history.  He writes that:

 truth isn t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.  Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  (Foucault 131)

Hence,  truth  is where the power is.  And in order to better understand any situation, one must analyze the power structures in place behind it.  As Foucault continues,  It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of  science  and  ideology,  but in terms of  truth  and  power    (Foucault 132).

 Let us now apply this to the 20th century and the invention of the Ghetto.  The word  ghetto  was officially first used in Poland, and was the place where Jews were forced to live.  As part of the Nazi anti-Semitism, Jews were evicted from their homes, robbed of their money and valuables, denied passports and moved to outer zones of the city.  This eventually became commonplace in all of the Pan-Germanic empire.

 The birth of the American ghetto came about in the late 30's and early 40's.  Before, Blacks still lived in clusters, but they lived in the same area as Whites.  Blacks had stores, hotels, clubs and their own land and property.  All one has to do to notice this is go back in time to the 20's and 30's and visit Harlem, the capital city of Black music and theater.  The result of the birth of the ghetto produces the modern picture of Harlem.  How did this radical change come about?  To answer that, we have to look at the invention of  urban development. 

 In the black areas, buildings were old and not  the best of architectural style.   The city, in the name of  urban development,   condemned  the black establishments and homes.  In other cases, cities offered large sums of money for the black land so that they could  develop  it into plazas and downtown parks.  The blacks, uprooted from their permanent housing, were offered  temporary housing.   Eventually this institution would become the modern-day housing projects.  This institution became integral to the country as a whole, and is now its own White House cabinet (Housing and Urban Development).  This is probably the largest part of the institutional racism in America.

 What the ghetto did was reevaluate the power struggle between Blacks and Whites.  With no prosperity and no land, Blacks were at the city s mercy and placed on  the other side of the tracks  (literally; Whites did not want Blacks in the city proper).  Blacks faced a forced separation from Whites, which suited the Whites fine.  The rationale to prevent any types of guilt for removing Blacks from a city s image was that the projects were better buildings architecturally and that the government was giving  free and good housing  to those that needed it.

 Needless to say the ghetto generates a dispersion of elements which are deconstruction projects all in themselves.  However, I hope that my quick discussion of the ghetto has made those subissues open up on an institutional level.

 5.  The invention of African-Americans: In Sartre s Anti-Semite and Jew Bernasconi finds the Sartrean idea that  it takes the anti-Semite to make the Jew  interestingly similar to how Whites view Blacks and create  Blacks.   The definite difference is that we know that the Jews were Jews for a reason, and were Jews prior to any type of anti-Semitism.  We easily open the Bible to the Book of Genesis and find the  creation  of the Jewish people as defined by God s promise to Abraham that he and his descendants (the tribes of Israel) would be God s people, and that God would be their God.  The  creation  of African-Americans, however, can be historically tied to the oppressors who created the Black American for their own purposes.

 The largest issue facing Blacks due to this creation is the lack of a history like the kind that Whites enjoy and take for granted.  For example, I can only trace my ancestry back to the 1860's and my great-great-grandfather, George Nelson Stone.  In that year he started one of the Black churches in my town since he had some land and donated the wood.  The sad part of my pursuits on my genealogy came when I spoke with my grandfather, George Preston Stone, who is 63 years older than I, and he only knows as far back as his grandfather.  In short, it can be said that it is possible that George N. Stone never knew his parents perhaps.  That is possible because George N. Stone was born in slavery.  His ancestors lived in Africa, where they had a quite normal way of life, full of traditions and history.

 African-American history has no antiquity.  It begins in 1619 with what Afrocentricity scholars call  the year of the beginning again  with the sale of the first slave from the shores of Ghana at the  auction block  in Jamestown, Virginia.  From there the African-American was created.

 However, as slavemasters quickly learned, the Negroes were not cooperative at first.  These were people who served different roles in Africa -- bankers, teachers, civic leaders, priests, musicians, etc. -- now reduced to the equivalent of beasts of burden.  All attempts to revive African sentiments were crushed by chastisement.  By tactics such as brutal beatings and gratuitous executions, the slavemasters kept slaves in line, and, in short, completely domesticated them.

 This is the image brought to life in Alex Haley s Roots and Queen.  Kunta Kinte, the son of a civic leader and probably destined to follow his father s footsteps, comes to America and has difficulty assimilating.  His original refusal to accept his new name, Toby, almost costed him his life.  Truly other slaves (i.e.  Fiddler  in the mini-series adaptation) wished for the slave that would stand bravely before the whipping post and not give in, but brutal beatings will change bravery into self-preservation.

 Gradually the slaves were brainwashed by either years of practice or massive beating into assuming their  proper place  in American society.  Granted, African-based music, philosophy (the root of Afrocentricity) and religious practices (the root of the  Black  church service and its charismatic feel) remained, and since it increased morale and productivity, the slavemasters didn t care.  However, little to their knowledge, American slaves were forming their own culture.  Spirituals, messages of hope and deliverance, were sung as if they were work songs so that overseers would not catch on.  This continued with Black astronomy and science, and, eventually after emancipation, their own separate world-view.

 6.  The new Face and world-view: Afrocentricity: Probably the first Afrocentricity scholar was Carter G. Woodson, who wrote the now canonical Afrocentricity text The Miseducation of the Negro.  In this text, Woodson offers a complete description of how Blacks in America were educated (or more appropriately, not educated) to insure that Blacks would never reach an equal level as Whites.  This was done by  mental slavery  -- although slaves were physically free, they were still psychically controlled.  Blacks were not taught about Africa as Africa was to their ancestors.  The tricky accusation by Woodson is that in order to keep Blacks uneducated about the wonders of Africa, White children were also miseducated and taught lies, especially that Columbus had discovered the New World., which beforehand was not stressed at all.  The other massive miseducation was that Africa was a country instead of a continent.  The failure to consider exploring African geography allowed Whites to prevent anyone from realizing that (pre-colonial) Africa consisted of not salvage bunches here and there, but organized kingdoms and national entities.  It was of utmost importance that American viewed Africa as being a savage cannibalistic place so that even Blacks would feel that they were  rescued  by slavery.  Black schools, remember, had White textbooks.

 According to Woodson, Blacks began to  accept  the lies found in the textbooks, which led to a schizophrenia and a self-hatred.  This self-hatred manifested itself in a hatred for learning in general, for the subjects did not relate to them.  In order to  undo  the  miseducation,  Black would need to teach themselves about Africa from the African point of view, in spite of what the White academic world held as truth or falsehood.  By splitting the truth/power parallel that Foucault presents in Power/Knowledge, Afrocentricity was born.  Blacks would still learn  White  knowledge in order to survive in America, but they would also learn a separate knowledge as well.

 This empowerment created the secondary phase of Afrocentricity which took place in the early 40's with the invention of Black entities and institutions.  Jet and Ebony started publication, connecting Blacks from California to New York and reeducating the Black conscience about themselves.  Blacks became prouder due to having a Face with each other.  This led to the third phase, the Civil Rights Movement.  The role of  social prophets  like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammed were the  teachers  of the Afrocentricity school, a solidarity which was the result of the  backfiring  of the invention of the African- American: Whites lost control of the Black spirit.  And still today many Whites object to Afrocentricity, perhaps due to the loss of power they used to yield over Black thought.

 Let s end this section by returning to Levinas and the idea of Face and power as explained in Totalit  et Infini:

 L expression que le visage introduit dans le monde ne d fie pas la faiblesse de mes pouvoirs, mais mon pouvoir de pouvoir.  Le visage, encore chose parmi les choses, perce la forme que cependant le d limite.  Ce que veut dire concr tement: le visage me parle et par l  m invite   une relation sans commune mesure avec un pouvoir que s exerce, f t-il jouissance ou connaissance.  (Levinas, TI 172, my emphasis)

The result of Afrocentricity is the loss of Whites  power of power (le pouvoir de pouvoir).  Definitely whites kept the institutional power, but could not control the mind.  Blacks had Face among themselves; they did not need external definition.  This is truly where the American culture gets twisted -- Blacks know the White world due to the power structure, and can fully participate therein.  However, Blacks also share a secret culture with secret knowledge that is unknown to Whites, and according to Afrocentricity scholars, almost impossible for Whites to even understand.  This explains why Blacks seem to share experiences with other Blacks such as the obligatory salutation of other Blacks on the street.

 It is interesting that neither Sartre nor Bernasconi mention that Blacks did return the Gaze to each other.  In other words, Blacks that did not return the Gaze of Whites and vice-versa did so not due to be extremely introverted, but rather very much aware of the Other (Whites) and simply treating them as they (Blacks) were treated.  However, with fellow Blacks, I must acknowledge their presence.  It should be that way with everyone, as Levinas suggests:

 . . . [L] analyse du visage telle que je viens de la fair, avec la ma trise d autrui et sa pauvret , avec ma soumission et ma richesse, est premi re.  Elle est le pre suppos  de toutes les relations humaines.  S il n y avait pas cela, nous ne dirions m me pas, devant une porte ouverte:  Apr s vous, Monsieur!  (Levinas, EI 94, my emphasis)

However, Whites were not aware of such rich-poverty (richesse-pauvert ) distinction, or, as Bernasconi stated in his essay, Whites did not see themselves as oppressors, and therefore could not acknowledge Blacks as Other.  Blacks did identify each other, and therefore could say  After you, brother  to a fellow Black before the open door (devant une porte ouverte).  Of course, many Blacks allowed Whites in front of them, too, but it was not out of identifying the White person as Other, but social conditioning.  The Rosa Parks incident, considered the first event of the Civil Rights Movement, created the first clean break from social conditioning -- the end of the miseducation.

 In the next section, I will dwell on two examples of Face, focusing on Levinas s comment  le visage me pare et par l  m invite   une relation sans commune mesure avec un pouvoir que s exerce.   The Civil Rights Movement exemplifies the one moment of joint Face.  The Million Man March exemplifies the Gaze rejected, and the power to choose.

Afrocentricity and Relation: Two Views

This penultimate section will return us to the point brought up in the first section.  Bernasconi offers a quick preview of what it means to be the oppressor, and what institutions are established to protect them from  the Gaze returned.   I would like to precede my recommendation with two distinct yet similar events: The Million Man March and the Civil Rights Movement, in particularly the March to Selma.

 The Million Man March took place in 1996 and was organized by the Reverend Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.  Although sponsored by the Nation of Islam, Black men from any religious background were invited to assemble in the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a day of atonement and rededication.  It served as the invitation to respark the Civil Rights Movement by improving the lives of Black men, a group that is greatly set apart in American society as drug pushers, deadbeat fathers and spouse abusers.  The day was designed to show the nation that Black men could meet together and carry an agenda without violence.

 However, very few networks carried coverage of the Million Man March.  The printed media claimed that there were not a million men present.  Mediawise, the March was completely ignored -- it dealt with a particular audience, Black men.  Farrakhan was quick to comment on the lack of proper press coverage by claiming that the nation could not face the fact that one million Black men met in a day of atonement and solidarity.  Most of the networks claimed that the March could have been merely another opportunity for Farrakhan to promote his own anti- Semite bigotry to the world, and therefore decided not to risk airing hate speeches.

 How was it possible for the American nation to not pay any attention to a million Black men marching in Washington?  It probably has to do with the perspective, or as Bernasconi would claim, the phenomenology, of the oppressor.  It was very obvious that merely assembling a million Black men together would not change the existing power system that still continues, as Nathan and Julia Hare claim in several of their books, to attempt to drive the Black male into extinction.  The nation did not view the Million Man March as being a serious atonement, but rather a group of militant Black people meeting to fuss about their situation in common.

 The opposite of this would be the Civil Rights Movement, which, along with the Vietnam War, was the first opportunity to use the television medium to truly convey a non-biased playing field where people could actually see what was going on and make their own conclusions.  The Selma March was covered on television stations across America.  Viewers, both Blacks and Whites, watched the horror of activists being attacked by dogs, blasted down by water hoses and assaulted by police.  Unlike the Million Man March, the activists were not in any way militant; theoretically they were just walking down the street en masse.

 When Americans saw what was happening, they could not ignore it.  As Levinas would put it, they were invited into a relation with the Civil Rights Movement.  They found Autrui in the Faces of people being punished for simply wanting to eat lunch inside a restaurant or sit anywhere they wanted to on any given bus.  The Autrui revealed itself, it transcended over all those who saw what was happening, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who directly challenged all preachers, White and Black, to really stand up for God s justice and equality.  This allowed the Civil Rights Movement to have White support.  They were invited into a relationship with the movement of freedom, a movement as American as America itself.  It became difficult to claim that America was a  land of the free  while the televisions were showing Black senior citizens chased by police dogs for wanting their grandchildren to live more freely in a  land of the free. 

 What was it about Martin Luther King, Jr., that allowed him to get Whites on his side where Farrakhan could not?  King s message was not something that was group-specific.  Hence we have King s model of freedom fighting as a paradigm for contemporary Women s Rights and Gay Rights Movements..  When King opened up the issue of civil rights to  all of God s children,  he was able to make Whites aware of the fact that they had to act as well in order for freedom to work.  Here we can see the Deweyan influence on King, the Boston University Ph.D. in philosophy.  The working democracy that claims freedom must contain people interested in maintaining such freedom and securing it for all those who seek it.

 The day that King was shot is a day to be remembered by not only Blacks, but Whites as well.  The greatest account of the event I have ever heard comes from the current president of Georgetown College, Dr. William H. Crouch, Jr.  I cannot recall the complete story, but his father hosted a Black choir singer from a school choir that had visited their church.  The Crouches lived in the South, so hosting the Black student contained a level of interest among the congregation, for some members simply refused to volunteer their hospitality to the young man.  The Crouches were with their house guest watching television that night, and it happened.  King had been shot in Tennessee one day after the prophetic  Promise Land  speech.  The Black boy, the visitor in a White household, began to cry.  It is completely understandable to cry; King was the centerpiece of the entire movement to freedom.  However, he was not the only person in that house crying.  The Crouches cried, too, for they lost a freedom fighter as well, even though they were  losing  to him.  According to Crouch, they stayed up most of night crying for the death of King.  The Crouches were not alone.  In some way, King s life and death offered an Other-ness between the races.  He was a freedom fighter first, and Black second.  The country mourned the death of a true American thinker and leader, regardless of his race.

 Can this Other-ness be repeated or permanently established?  I shall address this in the final section.  There is a problem with relation, however.  For the most part, American history has never denied the relation between Whites and Blacks.  In fact, like Foucault claims that the repression of sexuality causes it to be the most discussed issue, America has always observed race.  The error has been the denial of such observation.  To hear people say  I do not see color  is the same as  I see color,  for they only say it to Black people.  I cannot be a great student who graduated from Georgetown College in 1998 with the President s Award, the college s highest graduation honor.  I am the great black student who graduated with the President s Award.  I am the exception to what would otherwise be a completely White state of affairs.  Due to this massively negative use of relation, there needs to be a better method of Other-ness.

Racial Metanoia

Like Levinas, we quickly see that mere relation is not enough.  We must have a relation that carries with it a resistance, an ethical resistance, a resistance that is not imposed by the Other but somehow manifested within the observer.  The relation that causes this is what Levinas calls the ethical relation, or the relation sans relation.

 Is it possible?  Can we have relations with other races without the relation of race that does not simply mean ignoring the Other or attempting to assimilate the Other?  Can Black people in America coexist in harmony with Whites without losing Black-ness?  Can Whites live with Blacks and stay White?  I think so.  What is required is a kind of metanoia, a repentance unto the Other which stand beyond me in an ethical relation without relation, or as Buber would state it, in a state of radical intersubjectivity.

 First of all we can return to a Deweyan view of American thought.  In order to make America its very best, we must act in an American way.  The American way is a way such that we can celebrate being American and be completely different otherwise.  The immediate objection to my claim is that in the origins of American thought, Blacks were not human nor were women equals.  My response is that although the founding fathers can be viewed as bigoted chauvinists, the documents show a different perspective.  Although Blacks and women originally were not thought of when Jefferson wrote the words  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights . . . life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,  there is nothing in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution that denies the possibility of them ever being included.  This inclusion happens on paper with the thirteenth, fourteenth and nineteenth amendments.  We are quite capable to share the wonder of America if we choose to.

 What is it about choice that forms a phenomenology of racism?  In order for the Civil Rights Movement to have been successful, it was necessary that Whites choose to witness the horrors of segregation, something that the generation before had not chosen to do.  And, as time progresses in America and Americans  iron out  American democracy more and more, we will see that we as Americans will choose to acknowledge more groups that are  included  on paper but are  excluded  in our hearts.

 This issue does not require a grand logical, epistemological, or metaphysical solution.  We must return to the two issues that King challenges us all to think about.  (1) We who claim that we are Christians must follow Jesus s commandments, which definitely includes loving your neighbor.  We have a moral obligation to the other, and, as Levinas claims, a responsability to and for the Other. (2) We who claim that we believe in American democracy and liberty must follow the words of the Declaration, that all men are created equal and must have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as they are endowed by their creator.  It is on the second point that thinkers like Richard Rorty, although not often heralded as a great  Philosopher  in the academic sense, truly shine.  The impact of the American project includes the inclusion of all people.  We must work toward that mark.  When all Americans can find Face with each other, and every American can participate in the struggle of the Gaze, we will become closer to the American enterprise called  freedom and justice for all. 

Addendum: The Invention of Gay Culture

History often offers lessons by viewing past events.  Historically we find several examples of oppression and their aftermaths, be it the results of the Spanish Inquisition, the Civil Rights Movement or the Nazi Holocaust.  We discuss these events objectively, for we claim that they are  historical events,  which often means  they are said and done with. 

 But what about contemporary events?  What can be learned from them?  With the hopes of bridging Black and White culture together basically defeated due to the complete formation of a Black culture independently from White culture, we turn to another group that is still fighting for self-definition: the homosexual diaspora.  I use the term  diaspora  to suggest that the dispersion of gays in America has not been completely unified yet.  The danger, taken from the viewpoint of the invention of Black culture, is that gays will form their own culture soon, and America will be divided again; not be race, class or gender--by sexual orientation.

 I lack space here to do a similar deconstruction of the treatment of Gays as I attempted with Blacks.  However I shall leave this paper with this open question: How is it that Gays have Face among themselves?  It is not as obvious as color to detect, but the Gay community has  invented,  or rather, has been forced to  invent,  special characteristics that spell out their orientation ( Gaydar ).  How can we grant Face on the more general spectrum before we as Americans sin twice (thrice, four times, five times -- depending on who has been oppressed and when) and force separate cultures to form and all of the consequences thereof?