Race, Truth, and Meaning: Sartre on the Psychology of Prejudice, and the Legacy of Trump
Race, Truth, and Meaning: Sartre on the Psychology of Prejudice, and the Legacy of Trump
The first of a five-part series on the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre about racism, how racism isn’t just a bad opinion, but an entire choice of the kind of self that a person will be — and how this gives us insight on the worldview of the followers of Donald Trump’s racialized politics.
Part I: Introduction
In the wake of World War II, the great existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre looked into the question of how so many of his fellow French people could have collaborated with the Nazis, cooperating with the occupiers of their country to enable the genocide of the Jewish people who had been their neighbors. In a 1946 work called Anti-Semite and Jew, he came to some conclusions about the kind of mind-set, the kind of orientation toward the world, that allowed a person to become a racist. Donald Trump, from his racially-charged 2016 presidential campaign, to the blitzkrieg of policies unleashed in his presidential term, to his threat to create a new political party in the aftermath of his defeat, has brought to the surface a new wave of racialized politics that had seemed for many people to have lain dormant in American life for years. During his administration, the number of hate crimes rose 20%, according to FBI reports. This included hate-motivated murders, mostly committed by white nationalists, which were at their highest in 28 years.[1] Following his election, there was a very visible and very public resurgence of white nationalism, in the form of the revamped so-called “alt-right”.[2] Like Sartre, many of us Americans looked around at people that we knew, who had supported Trump, and asked, “How could this have happened?” During that time of dormancy, when it had seemed like very few people would admit to racist beliefs, anti-racist activists had focused their analysis on the unconscious structures of society, which maintained inequalities of power despite what anybody thought of felt about those structures. That kind of analysis remains as necessary as it ever was, because this kind of unconscious, silent complicity is something that makes the most brutal consequences of racism possible. But the resurgence of open, conscious, politicized racism in the public sphere makes it necessary to also look at the sources of racist positions and worldviews. Sartre argued that this kind of racism isn’t just the result of ignorance, or misinformation, or rampant hatred. It is enabled by an entire orientation toward reality itself. This orientation is also at the root of things like conspiracy theories and science-denial. This means that it’s not about having a bad opinion, but about an overall existential choice of the kind of person one will be. And that, in turn, has to do with a certain way of trying to be certain of one’s identity which means, of the meaning of one’s own life. Thus, Sartre gives us important tools for comprehending the type of person who was attracted to Trump, and is continuing to be active in the post-Trump world. In what follows, I will be analyzing the three strands that make up the world-view that coincides with this personality type: racism, a disregard for truth, and the proneness to conspiracy theories which combines the two.
Trump left the White House on January 20th, 2021. The majority of the nation breathed a sigh of relief. But we shouldn’t be fooled, or rest easy. He continued to lie to the very end, and his lies continued to have serious effects — culminating in many of his followers storming the national and state capitols on January 6th to dispute the results of an election that he fraudulently claimed had been fraudulent. And the untruth didn’t stop there, as the motivation for this rioting was permeated with QAnon’s conspiracy theories, as well as peppered with symbols of antisemitism — like, infamously, a t-shirt that said “Camp Auschwitz”, with the phrase “work brings freedom”, which is an English translation of Auschwitz’s motto, “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Nor are these two things I bring up, the racism and the lies, incidental to each other: “Q”, the anonymous leader of QAnon, has retweeted anti-Semitic images, and his followers regularly traffic in them. [3] What’s more, what happened in the aftermath of the insurrection also shows the racial power structure on which Trump’s movement thrives: if the insurrectionists had been black, or any other people of color, the police would have handled them much differently. In many cases, they were handled fairly gently, in some cases, the police took their pictures with the rioters. Also, unsurprisingly, police officers from around the country took part in the insurrection.[4] In fact, there is evidence that, like certain Republican lawmakers, the capital police were complicit in the occupation, by virtue of the light security that was provided to Congress that day.[5]
And even if Trump himself is hardly in the news anymore, in the aftermath of this revolt we can see that there are still legions of people who supported him, and will continue to support the kind of world-view and political agenda that he had. Thus, what we say here is not going to be so much about Trump himself as it is about the dynamic between Trump and his followers, his base of support. The army of supporters that Trump has built up — and the combination of racism and disregard of truth which define them — represents a trend in American political life that will not go away any time soon, and with which we will have to deal for some time to come.
I should also say right at the beginning that one of the aspects of this phenomenon in which I’m interested is the way in which the world-view of the Trump supporter goes beyond just the attempt to preserve material advantages. “White panic” (which we’ll come back to later) has been much-discussed in recent years, as the fear and reaction of white people who fear that in a new and just order, they will lose their racial privileges. But what also needs to be answered is why this mentality, this orientation on the world, would appeal to those white people who have the least to lose from the overthrown of the current system. There was a great deal of speculation about why so many working class white people supported Trump — even though it turns out that there weren’t nearly as many of the media had led us to believe.[6] Still, it’s a question that needs to be answered. And I believe that it needs a more complex answer than what has been given for decades: that people on a low rung of society get invested in a system that gives them somebody in a lower place for them to feel superior to. That answer is certainly not wrong — but it’s the beginning of an answer, not the end of one.
So what is this overall way of thinking that we’re trying to identify? As I read it, in Anti-Semite and Jew[7], Sartre identifies three aspects that distinguish an anti-Semitic orientation: racism, conspiracy theories, and a disregard for the truth. Today, the story of antisemitism and QAnon, insurrection and the false charges that inspired it, tie together the three main strands of that story. To see the connection between these even more clearly, let’s review a couple of examples of some of the noteworthy disturbing things that happened during Trump’s administration. All of these examples embody themes that will be central here: racism, indifference to truth, and conspiracy theories. And we should keep in mind throughout that all these traits hang together in terms of the desire for certainty about one’s identity (both individual and collective).
On October 27th, 2018, Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, yelled “All Jews must die”, and opened fire on the congregation. He killed 11 people. Earlier that day, he had tweeted against the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people…I’m going in.” HIAS is a humanitarian Jewish organization that provides aid and assistance to refugees. Bowers was apparently incensed by the idea that a caravan of people then on their way from Honduras to the United States border to seek asylum there were a kind of “invasion”, and that their numbers included terrorists that sought to infiltrate the United States. Furthermore, in the social network Gab, he often promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including ones saying that the caravan was being financed by Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros. And in fact, this same claim had been publicly made by Trump, without offering a single bit of evidence for it — as he has made so many inflammatory claims with absolutely no evidence. Two of the salient features that have marked Trump’s entire presidential campaign and administration are blatant appeals to racial fears, and an at-best cavalier attitude toward truth. These two things are not incidental to each other, but are intimately tied together. I want to show how the racism and the implicit theory about knowledge that Trump shares with his most ardent followers reinforce each other in on overall world view. The movement that Trump has started has made this world-view into a social force to be reckoned with.
We can see this same merging, of views of race and of knowledge, manifesting even more recently in the way that, while mostly not mentioning Jews, the wildly far-fetched QAnon conspiracy movement builds on very old anti-Semitic tropes for the resonance it holds with some people.[8] As The Guardian reports, “The idea of the all-powerful, world-ruling cabal comes straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document purporting to expose a Jewish plot to control the world that was used throughout the 20th century to justify antisemitism. Another QAnon canard — the idea that members of the cabal extract the chemical adrenochrome from the blood of their child victims and ingest it to extend their lives — is a modern remix of the age-old antisemitic blood libel.”[9] (The blood libel is the collective name for a series of false stories about Jewish people that were a mainstay of European antisemitism for centuries. At the center was the charge that Jewish people killed Christian children in order to use their blood in religious rituals. These stories resulted in the arrest, torture, and murder of Jewish people.)
This world-view of the Trump movement is even shown in how Trump deals with real threats from the natural world. As Covid-19 spread in 2020, his response was defined by a dismissal of the views of experts — including literal dismissals, in the firing of people whom he perceived as disloyal to him, and in the time leading up to the crisis, in the elimination of positions that could have spotted the impending harm early. At the same time, Trump’s response, like his response to virtually everything else, had racial overtones. His Twitter entries called Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”; this was only part of a narrative of blaming China for the pandemic, a discourse which resulted in a wave of attacks on Chinese-Americans in different parts of the United States,[10] (including the murder of eight people at three spas in Atlanta, six of whom were women of Asian descent[11]) as well as Trump putting pressure on intelligence officers to “find” information that would demonstrate that the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory.[12] He also enacted a ban on immigration, ostensibly in the interest of fighting Covid-19. And although Trump has not participated in this, I don’t think that it is any coincidence that anti-Semitic sentiments have been manifested at demonstrations opposed to the quarantine measures taken by many states, as well as on internet forums around the world.[13] In the midst of the furor surrounding the contagion, conspiracy theories have proliferated, and are believed by a disturbing number of people. In his daily briefings on the response to the crisis, Trump’s consistently incoherent remarks manifested what seemed to be a central underlying belief: that one’s own (uninformed) gut feelings and prejudices are better sources of truth than scientific expertise. The term “anti-intellectualism” gets us part of the way; it’s certainly there, and has been a mainstay of conservatism for some time.[14] But it’s more than simply a rejection of sophistication, complexity, and education — all this reflects distinct views of truth itself, especially on the parts of Trump, and of his followers. We’ll discuss those as we go along.
Trump’s own apparent view of truth is fairly easily explained, although for his followers, the situation is a little more complex, which we’ll discuss in a moment. He is, to use a technical philosophical term, a bullshitter. And indeed, this is a technical philosophical term, as introduced by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Frankfurt distinguishes among three types of relationship to reality: truth, lies, and bullshit. The truth is when you know what reality is, and you say it. Lies happen when you know what reality is, but for whatever reason, say something else. Bullshit is when you don’t know, or care, what the truth is — you only know what you want, and you’ll say anything you need to say to get what you want. It comprises a lax, cavalier attitude toward truth.[15]
It’s fairly easy to see why somebody who is committed to fulfilling their own desires for wealth and power would employ bullshit. But there is the risk that “adopting faux populism and anti-intellectualism for purely political purposes eventually leads practitioners to take their own rhetoric literally and denigrate expertise as something to be distrusted per se.” (Bartlett, New Republic) And that is exactly what has happened with the Trump administration. And maybe more importantly, it doesn’t explain the mindset of people who are following that person. That’s what we have to examine.
In what follows, I will outline both the mentality and its material conditions that contribute to the problems we’ve just discussed. My points will include the relationship to truth that enables racism and the various kinds of self-deception that emanate from that, the relationship to language that this entails, and along the way, some mention of what kind of mentality/orientation to reality we should seek to foster instead. But what will lie at the heart of all of this is the legitimate yearning for meaning, for understanding yourself, the world, and your place in it — and how that can go terribly wrong, when you buy into answers that end up supporting terrible social systems.
A Few Caveats: What I’m NOT Talking About
As philosophers often do, I want to sketch out a few caveats, to be clear about what I’m going to cover and not cover, and how I’m going approach certain topics.
First, I want to anticipate a kind of objection, which would say, you’re treating anti-Semitism as being able to tell us something about racism, but Judaism is a religion, not a race. On the other hand, many non-religious Jewish people still observe (at least some) Jewish traditions — they consider being Jewish to be a culture, and consider themselves as “culturally Jewish”. Or maybe Jewishness is even an ethnicity — but not a race. Which one of these definitions is true is a vexed question, even within the Jewish community, and I can’t hope to answer it here. My purpose here is to examine aspects of the prejudiced mind. And indeed, to many anti-Semites, especially in Sartre’s day, Jewish people were a kind of “race”, a people set apart from the French or the Germans or other Europeans. So, to do the kind of philosophical psychology that I’m attempting here, I will examine what racists think, not what reality is — including their ideas about the Jewish “race.”
Second, in suggesting that Anti-Semite and Jew can provide us with insights into prejudice in general, I do not mean to suggest that all oppressed peoples have similar histories, and that an analysis of anti-Semitism can tell us everything we need to know about racism. This is clearly not true. But if I’m right, I think we can draw, in broad strokes, some characteristics of the mind-set that is common to many histories of racial and ethnic oppression.
Third, what follows will be an exercise in applied philosophy. I’m not advancing any new propositions. What I am doing is looking at a couple of classic texts, to see if there’s something we can learn from them to apply to the political situation with which we are confronted today.
Finally, what I won’t be specifically examining is the less conscious racism with which people get imbued through living in a racist social structure, although some of what I say will apply to that. (Sartre also deals with this in other places.) I’m more immediately concerned with the more conscious, politicized racism that we have seen emerging with the specific tactics of Trump and his supporters, as well as in the increased visibility of the so-called alt-right.
Racism is an Orientation toward the World, Not an “Opinion”
After the Holocaust, Sartre reflected on the way that racism is tied up with a certain approach to truth. In Anti-Semite and Jew, and in his lecture “Reflections on the Jewish Question”[16], he emphasized the idea that racism isn’t just a matter of having wrong opinions: if it were just that, then those opinions could be corrected by good information. But to be a racist, Sartre says, you not only have to have certain views, but fundamentally a certain relationship to truth. Ultimately, what’s at stake in racism is not the truth about what the world is like, but a certainty about one’s identity and one’s role in the world — in short, about the meaning of one’s life. If we’re going to understand how Trump’s discourse and racist violence play into and feed off of each other, we have to understand the (philosophical) psychology of racism, its relationship to truth, and why somebody like Trump appeals to this kind of worldview. I’ll discuss this in terms of epistemology, or theory of knowledge — and then offer some comments about how that, in turn, affects the use of language.
I want to focus on the first part of Sartre’s book, which is called “Portrait of an Anti-Semite.” The second and third parts are also of interest, but they’re also problematic, in ways we don’t have the room to discuss here. In the first part, he shows how racists have an inauthentic relationship with reality: they live in “bad faith”. Then, in the second part, he goes on to ask what defines somebody as Jewish — a complex question — and thus, what an authentic relationship to the social/historical reality of being Jewish would be. The fact that he, who wasn’t Jewish, was presuming to tell Jewish people who was “authentically” Jewish and who wasn’t, was met by a great deal of anger. Nevertheless, the first part of the work still stands, and gives us important insights about racism to this day.
As we go on, I’ll be referring to racist positions as “attitudes” or “orientations” — not as “opinions” or “ideas” or even “beliefs”. The word “attitude” is often used to mean an opinion, but in aviation, it also means the way something is oriented to its center of gravity. Thus, in the way I’ll be using the term, an attitude isn’t just an observation of the world, but is a kind of engagement with the world. This is how we should understand racism: not just a belief that people have among many, but an entire way of being in the world.
Being racist is not like saying, “I believe in more funding for infrastructure, and that loan rates are too high… and that there are too many Mexicans in the country.” Or like saying, “I like strawberry ice cream… and I don’t like black people.” Sartre argued in Anti-Semite and Jew that it’s not that kind of a thing. (ASJ 8) In fact, Sartre says, it’s not an opinion at all. It’s an entire choice of self. It’s more like a passion: a commitment that orients the entire person. (ASJ 10) A passion is something that envelops the whole personality. (ASJ 21–22) It is in this commitment that Trump’s connections with the White Supremacist movement, his playing to racial resentments, and his cavalier attitude toward the truth are all connected and come together.
Active, Conscious Racist Ideology is Enabled by a Certain Relationship to Truth
Thus, in this book Sartre describes what this overall choice of a self entails. One of his major points of departure is epistemology. If racism is more than just a set of beliefs which happen to be false, then holding these false beliefs is enabled by a specific relationship to truth. Racism is made possible by a disregard for the process of seeking truth. There is an important distinction to be made between a disregard for what is actually true and a disregard for trying to find out what the truth is. This is a key point. People who have embraced racism are looking for a sense of identity — because of that, they’re not concerned with the facts. What they want is a sense of certainty about who they are, and what their place in society is. In this choice of self, they want a sense of identity that will address their fears. Therefore, they’re not as concerned about what objective reality is as they are about the sense of meaning that their lives have.[17] This is a perversity of this whole phenomenon: whereas in the noblest human endeavors, reflective people have tried to grasp the meaning of life by discovering its truth, in this case, people who are invested in a certain social system try to preserve their sense of the meaning of life by systematically jettisoning truth.
This is why, while it’s necessary for scientists to continue to argue that “race” as we understand it is unreal, or at least utterly insignificant, this kind of argument is largely beside the point for the kind of orientation we’re talking about. Bill Nye, for example, is completely right when he tells us that “And it turns out that everybody on Earth is descended from people that live here, in Africa…And then as groups of us move around the world, the color of our skin had to change… And that’s it, everybody. That’s why we have different colored skin. But we’re all one species…But we’re not treating each other fairly. Not everybody is getting an even shake. So it’s time to change things.”[18] However, this true statement is not likely to deter a politically committed racist. They are probably not racists because they learned bad science. They are looking for something else than science, true or false, can give.
So, if racism isn’t an opinion, and it isn’t a factual claim, then what is it? It is actually an overall choice of self. It is an overall choice of the kind of person one will be.
Racists are unconcerned about the facts of the world because the point is for them to have a worldview that secures their own identities and addresses their own fears. This is why Sartre modifies Voltaire’s famous pronouncement about God, and says instead, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” (ASJ 13) And indeed, anti-Semites do create “the Jew” if by that we mean, not actually existing Jewish people of course, but rather the phantasm that anti-Semites try to project onto Jewish people. They accomplish this “creation” by projecting their worldview onto reality. They don’t get their worldview from what they observe about reality. There is nothing external that can make a person be an anti-Semite. Sartre gives the example of a woman he talked to who said that she didn’t like Jews because a Jewish furrier had once ruined her fur. But why should she choose to dislike Jews, rather than furriers or shopkeepers? It wasn’t empirical experience that made her an anti-Semite, but rather an orientation that interpreted her experiences in a certain way. Nothing made her adopt it. Therefore: “Anti-Semitism is a free and total choice of oneself…” (ASJ 17)
This basic disregard for truth ends up committing the racist to self-deception in three ways: deception about the racial other, about the self, and about society and history. This is the profound and systematic self-deception which Sartre refers to as “bad faith.”[19] But while I do make the case that racism is enabled by an overall psychology that we have to understand, I do not argue that racism is a psychological problem. As Sartre acknowledges, it is a social problem that arises out of certain social conditions, and serves the needs of certain people and classes within those conditions. So while I outline the psychological/epistemic features of a racist mindset, I will also attempt to outline at least some of the material conditions out of which these grow.
In addressing this psycho-social problem, I will not focus on the strategies or the methods of the Trump administration pertaining to their concept of truth. The powerful always have an incentive to lie. Beyond that, authoritarian governments have an interest in cultivating a world-view that is impervious to truth; Hannah Arendt has powerfully described that in Origins of Totalitarianism, so I’m not going to pursue that topic here. Instead, I’m going to focus on the question of why his supporters would accept such flagrant abuses of truth. Thus, my interest is in a psychology, which is specifically a political psychology; we want to know something about the racist mind.
To do that, let’s look at each of the forms of racist self-deception that we just mentioned: about themselves, about other races, and about society and history (this last one will tell us something about conspiracy theories.) That will be the topic of the next section.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/hate-crimes-under-trump-surged-nearly-20-percent-says-fbi-report-1547870
[2] Hosking, Taylor. “The Rise of the Alt-Right”, The Atlantic, Dec. 28th, 2017
[3] Sarna, Jonathan D. “The symbols of antisemitism in the Capitol Riot”, Brandeis Now, 1/11/2021. https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2021/january/anti-semitism-capitol-riot-sarna.html
[4] https://www.theroot.com/surprise-surprise-off-duty-cops-from-all-over-the-cou-1846029959?fbclid=IwAR1y-WwEqFC8kYvKqGKW5pKfwO8gpnTNbmqjCG-rKn-hmf3eaiJneJo-bBE
[5] There’s also something that should be said about the demographics of the rioters. Research done for The Atlantic showed that they tended not to be members of known any militant groups — which is usually the case with far Right violence. And, similarly, they tended to be middle-aged and middle class — in other words, they didn’t fit the demographic profile of young, desperate people who would traditionally be recruited into extremist groups. They were not people whose desperation would have driven them to a kind of “nihilism” in regard to current society, as dockworker-philosopher Eric Hoffer once described in his classic work of political sociology/psychology The True Believer.[5] One important thing that this tells us is that the potential for right wing, racist, authoritarian violence is not limited to organized white supremacist groups, or to the type of disaffected people typically drawn to such groups. This shows that the support for such actions goes deeper into the “mainstream” than many people had suspected, and that there are a whole lot of supporters, who are not themselves militants, that militants can draw on when the time for certain actions https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/the-capitol-rioters-arent-like-other-extremists/617895/
[6] Carnes, Nicholas and Noam Lupu. “It’s time to bust the myth: most Trump Voters were not working class.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?fbclid=IwAR0x-x0nIpbjm-ulmFWOdWGX8QE6n1ZpbiNCZmA_D71ZnX8mugqXuqLMcHw
[7] Hereafter abbreviated “ASJ”.
[8] See, for example, “QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded” by Gregory Stanton. https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
[9] “QAnon explained: the antisemitic conspiracy theory gaining traction around the world”, Julia Carrie Wong, 8/25/2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/25/qanon-conspiracy-theory-explained-trump-what-is)
[10] https://www.thecut.com/2021/02/the-us-is-seeing-a-massive-spike-in-anti-asian-hate-crimes.html?fbclid=IwAR3g4Dt1_heiL3OQGyvhMf74NXEnRCbh6n60l5XkesCRTlLhGqGFImZ2pMw
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shooting-atlanta-acworth
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html?fbclid=IwAR0zCbdvmnjx1scyHshjJOLz5fcInv5siJLZ1auvVjmhNrsScYOWhj1BJQ8
[13] Reuters, 4/20/2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-israel-antisemitis/coronavirus-crisis-stoking-anti-semitism-worldwide-report-idUKKBN222198.), “Covid-19 fueling worldwide wave of antisemitism, researchers find”, Stuart Winer, Times of Israel, 6/23/2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/covid-19-fueling-worldwide-wave-of-anti-semitism-researchers-find/
[14] Bruce Bartlett, “The GOP’s Murderous Anti-Intellectualism”, New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/158436/republican-murderous-anti-intellectualism
[15] Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005)
[16] Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Reflections on the Jewish Question: a Lecture”, Tr. Rosalind Kraus and Denis Hollier, October, Vol. 87, (winter, 1999), pp. 32–46. Hereafter referred to as “Refl.”.
[17] In the last 20 years, that has been some very good work, initiated by Charles Mills, in the field of the epistemology of ignorance — the systematic evasion of basic facts about reality that allows white people to maintain the belief that racism is not a problem, and thus maintain a good conscience about themselves and their society. What I’m doing here is a little different from that. I’m investigating the meeting ground between epistemology and ontology — what happens when a person makes a basic existential choice about their relationship to reality which entails an epistemology of ignorance, and what existential need would be fulfilled by doing so. In other words, this is not about the particular systems and strategies by which people evade reality, but rather what kind of existence is entailed by opting to live outside of reality.
[18] https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/bill-nye-gives-racism-a-science-guy-breakdown-we-re-all-one-species-1.5032978
[19] I would be remiss if I made the glaring omission of leaving out any mention of Lewis Gordon’s landmark work Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995). It examines racism in terms of Sartre’s ontology overall, especially the concept of bad faith. The present essay is already too long to include anything near to a suitable treatment of these important ideas — but I enthusiastically direct the reader to that book.
