Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Race in America Day by Day [excerpt]
Simone de Beauvoir's first speaking tour throughout the United States leads to a dramatic encounter in Savannah, Georgia.
For International Women's Day, I thought I would republish a section called "Witnessing Segregation in the South" from my essay on Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of “Race” in America Day By Day. Published in French just one year prior to The Second Sex (1949), this account of her first speaking tour throughout the United States shows just how she was thinking about the problem of racial Otherness in America. This section describes a dramatic encounter in the state of Georgia in the American South. [Read Essay In Full Here]
Witnessing Segregation in the South
Beauvoir’s experiences in the South will prove more difficult. No longer alone, she is traveling with N., Natalie (Natasha) Sorokine Mouffat, a good friend married to a Hollywood scriptwriter (Ivan Mouffat). On March 25, Beauvoir marks their arrival at the outskirts of San Antonio (Texas):
In the middle of the desert, the state line was invisible. But when we leave the bus, we understand that we’ve crossed a frontier. On the doors of the restrooms we read on one side, “White Ladies” and “White Gentlemen,” and on the other side, “Colored Women” and “Colored Men.” . . . Next to the spacious restaurant reserved for whites, the minuscule lunchroom for “colored people” can accommodate only four customers at a time. This is the first time we’re seeing with our own eyes the segregation that we’ve heard so much about. And although we’d been warned, something fell onto our shoulders that would not lift all through the South; it was our skin that became heavy and stifling, its color making us burn. (Beauvoir 1999, 202–03)
Similar to the experience of going into Harlem, Beauvoir expresses a sense of having traveled to a world that seems (at least initially) beyond comprehension. But unlike in Harlem, where fear dominates her experience, more of an internal, psychological feeling, here her experience is externalized: her white skin burns. Because of stares that sting? Because of its brightness? With shame, because she is made aware, for the first time, of what it means to be white in a racist context? Guilty! Something unseen and hard to describe descends and envelops her, and it is no longer only a borrowed fear: “From the time we entered Texas, everywhere we go there’s the smell of hatred in the air—the arrogant hatred of whites, the silent hatred of blacks” 94 (Beauvoir 1999, 233). Guilt weighs heavy on her conscience, and calls her to witness the inescapable, “heavy and stifling,” hatred in the air.
The difference between Harlem in the North and her experiences in the South is that whereas in Harlem blacks seemed indifferent to her presence,19 here in the South, she is not ignored but openly stared at. She is made aware of her skin, and the privileges that being white carry in America. The culmination of this comes in Georgia:
Savannah is deader than Sacramento and seems older than the Middle Ages. . . . But around this dead Savannah, there’s another, living city where the grandchildren of slaves live in inglorious lives of poverty and hatred: a black belt around the white city. For miles and miles, the bus followed avenues lines with wretched shacks, where unfriendly dark faces turned towards us; we felt the bite of those looks. But the black belt fascinates us; we decide to try to walk in these hostile streets. Children playing in the road look at us with surprise; the men standing on the porches, the women leaning out of the windows and staring at us, are frighteningly impassive. This is not Lenox Avenue or Harlem; there is hatred and rage in the air. . . . As we go by, voices drop, gestures stop, smiles die: all life is suspended in the depths of those angry eyes. The silence is so stifling, the menace so oppressive that it’s almost a relief when something finally explodes. An old woman glares at us and spits twice, majestically, once for N., once for me. At the same moment, a tiny girl runs off crying, “Enemies!, Enemies! (Beauvoir 1999, 235–36)
Beauvoir’s fascination, her voyeuristic, exoticizing gaze, is put back in its place by the resisting stares of angry eyes. This antagonism, characterized by still time—where nothing moves, and everything seems as old as time itself and as quiet as eternity—explodes in the expression of an old woman’s disgust. As if on cue, the innocent figure of “a tiny girl” decries their excursion as act of aggression. This experience in Savannah’s black belt makes real the fear of a place on the outskirts of town, alien and impenetrable territory, where they are considered the enemy, and are dehumanized in kind. When they realize that they are surrounded and outnumbered, Beauvoir and N. head back to the city center with some urgency, noting that it seemed like a long way back (Beauvoir 1999, 236).
Strangely, it is at this point that Beauvoir becomes grounded in the reality of being white in black America, and not just in a fantasy of American heterogeneity. Before her experiences in the South, she describes her presence in America in disembodied terms, in terms of projecting a ghostly appearance: “I’m no longer in Paris, but I’m not here either. My presence is a borrowed presence. . . . This crowd I’m jostling, I’m not part of it; I feel invisible to every gaze. I am traveling incognito, like a phantom. Will I manage to reincarnate myself?” And just below this, “No one here is concerned with my presence; I’m still a ghost, and I slip through the city without disturbing anything” (Beauvoir 1999, 7–8).20 But here, in the South, she is called to presence in her body, and to witness something both beyond her own experience, and a part of it; she feels compelled to give an account, in spite of her relative lack of experience, and contrary to Professor R.’s exhortations.
Beauvoir says that she presents these episodes as she experienced them, neither adding nor leaving anything out.21 She does not draw any lessons or offer any conclusions about her own relation to “race” or “racism”; that task is left up to us, her readers. The first thing to say is that there is a displacement of the phenomena of racist oppression onto the United States of America, and then a further displacement onto the Southern states. In this sense, Beauvoir clearly imports a European and Northern sensibility, finding racism only where she most expects to find it—the segregated South—despite Richard Wright’s attempt to portray the North and South as two sides of the same coin of racist ideology. Second, there is, indeed, something interesting happening in terms of the spatio-temporal relations: Beauvoir is always in motion, moving through the United States of America, while these black populations are portrayed as frozen in their places. In her account, time slows down whenever she enters these forbidden and foreign places; and it speeds up as she leaves them. This also contributes to the feeling of an emphasis on race, upon reading the text. There is a certain gravity about the topic of “race” that weighs down Beauvoir’s otherwise gay account.
Finally, in spite of Beauvoir’s best efforts to sustain her outsider perspective, she is increasingly drawn into the experience of being white in a racist context, and this experience itself becomes physically manifest, concrete for her. What becomes absolutely clear is the power of racism to make manifest what it imagines as being a threat; i.e., the way in which white, racist fear can make appear as “real” a social context in which the racist’s fears are “true.” This social “reality” is based on what Charles Mills describes as an “epistemology of ignorance,” a self-serving and willful ignorance necessary to maintaining “the racial contract,” the consequences of which include the inability of “whites” to understand the world in which they find themselves, but which they nonetheless create. In what I believe is her moment of epiphany, Beauvoir comes very close to making a similar observation:
Their ignorance helps them; they claim to “know” the black man, just as French colonials believe they “know” the native, because their servants are blacks. In fact, their relations with them are utterly false, and they don’t try to inform themselves about the real conditions of their servant’s lives. But this ignorance could never be great enough to allow them peace of mind. They need other defenses. There’s an entire system of rationalization engendered in the South, which is also more or less wide-spread in the North, and its whole purpose is to escape the American dilemma. (Beauvoir 1999, 238)
No longer able to maintain her posture as an outsider, we begin to see Beauvoir recognize the connection between the American experience of slavery and that of French colonialism, and further, the necessary complicity between the South and the North. And it is at this point that Beauvoir begins to see herself as embodied and as belonging to a “race,” as opposed to an unmarked outsider. It is also at this point that Beauvoir feels compelled to bear witness to racist oppression, as something that she cannot fully understand, even while immersed in the experience of it. In becoming a witness to the hatred generated by racial oppression, in coming to see “race” and “racial oppression” beyond the fantasy of heterogeneity, Beauvoir readies herself for making visible the oppression suffered by women in The Second Sex.
[Re-reading this now, that last sentence really bothers me, but there you have it, already in print, so I’ll leave it as is.]
@anneboydrioux Have you per chance read Beauvoir's America Day By Day? Here is an excerpt from a piece I published in Philosophy Today about her US-American adventures. Enjoy!