Philosophy Commons^™

The New White Moderate: Bearing Witness To The Differend Of Race, Ethan T. Ashley

Honors Theses

As Frantz Fanon demonstrates in his text, Black Skin, White Masks, Sartrean existentialism fails to account for differences in racialized existence. Quite simply, the notion that “existence precedes essence” is reversed in the case of the black subject; he/she is living in a world that has rendered the black subject subservient to a predetermined essence. Ultimately, the fact that the white subject exists and may freely determine his/her essence while the black subject may not further demonstrates this gap or a chasm between black and white subjects that calls for further examination. In the first chapter, I will use …