ABSTRACT
Although the biological conception of race, and associated racialist thinking, should be rejected, our situations are nevertheless racialised. Existentialists offer accounts of life in a world in which racial status, and asymmetrical power relations, plays an important role. Certain groups (whites, not blacks; gentiles, not Jews) set up a series of racialised social roles with in-built evaluative features. But, just as with de Beauvoir’s work on gender, Fanon’s and Sartre’s descriptions serve the practical goal of liberating us from these oppressive and unhealthy ways of thinking and acting.
