Sarah Setlaelo

This article suggests a convergence of three areas of scholarship, namely black feminism, black existentialism, and the concept of intersectionality, towards a “Black Feminist Transcendence Framework” that addresses antiblack-sexism or antiblack-racist-sexism. South African philosopher, Mabogo Percy More, throughout his work, interrogates the facticity and situation of “being-black-in-an-antiblack-world”, in order to challenge antiblack-racism. One of the concepts that he employs to this end, is the “Politics of Being”, which proposes a symbiosis of ontology and politics, and captures a progression from “what-is” to “what-ought-to-be” – a movement from ontology to teleology, and from alienation to transcendence. When one studies his entire oeuvre, one finds that the resources he suggests for his existential-phenomenological progression are rooted predominantly in the themes of alienation, consciousness, identity, and freedom/liberation. Together, these themes capture the components of his politics of being concept. However, it also becomes apparent that he focuses on a homogenous, or universalist account of blackness, and male-biased lived experience with antiblackness, that does not sufficiently engage the gendered nature of black embodied existence. Thus, I draw from his rich and generative account of antiblack-racism, and extend it into the domain of antiblack-racist-sexism, by employing a black feminist lens – particularly the concept of intersectionality. To describe the unique situation of the woman, I employ phenomenological concepts from existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir; and to specifically offer a black female lived experience account, I engage the work of black/African feminist scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola. More’s transcendence framework is set out in detail and underpins my own novel black feminist transcendence framework.

South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More has devoted more than four decades of his work to the problem of “being-black-in-an-antiblack-world.” This article interrogates the extent to which More homogenizes the contingencies of black2 existence and black embodiment, as I feel black existentialists do; or subsumes the phenomenology of the lived experience of blackness under a “black universalist” account that does not give an adequate account of the gendered embodied experiences with antiblack racism. By “contingency” I mean More’s concept of the contingency of existence, where he claims that human existence is without necessity, nor is it justified; and so people resort to attempting to justify their existence and to find meaning by trying to assume the status of God or superiority in relation to others. More argues that contingency is the source of antiblack racism, as white people attempt to justify their existence by dehumanizing black people. I claim that contingency does not only play out in the interracial domain, but is also one of the sources of intraracial sexism within the black community. My interrogation aims to extend the reach of More’s work by giving an existential-phenomenological account of “being-black-and-female-in-an-antiblack-antifemale-world.” To this end, I focus on two contingencies—the contingencies of biological sex and the contingency of physical strength—that More discusses in his sole article on intraracial sexism, “Black Attitudes: A Call for Personhood” (1981). I argue that within the black intraracial domain, these two contingencies are ascribed meaning that creates a binary, which elevates black men to superior status, while reducing black women to the inferior.