Since the Civil Rights movement, Black existentialism has been expanded upon by notable activists such as Malcolm X and Cornel West.
Black people, he argued, often faced double standards in their efforts to achieve equality in the wake of enslavement, colonialism, and racial apartheid.
That form of double consciousness involves seeing the injustice of a social system that limits possibilities for some groups and creates advantages for others while expecting both to perform equally.
That Black people were imprisoned for challenging the injustices of a social system born on the memorable phrase, "All men are created equal...," is a case in point, and the subsequent criticism of whether "men" meant "women too" pushes this point further, as Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and other earlier 19th-century black critical thinkers contended.
Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.
But Jean-Paul Sartre's criticism in his essay "Orphée Noir" ("Black Orpheus") led Fanon into "changing his tune" by realizing that such a path was still relative to a white one and faced being overcome in expectations of a "universal" humanity, which for Sartre was a revolutionary working class.
At the end of Black Skin, White Masks, he asked his body to make of him a man who questions.
In The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1963; original French 1961), he returned to this question at the historical level by demanding the transformation of material circumstances and the development of new symbols with which to set afoot a new humanity.
In I Write What I Like, Biko continues Fanon's project of thinking through alternative conceptions of humanity and offers his theory of Black Consciousness.
Black consciousness applies to anyone who is involved in anti-racist struggle and is marked as the enemy of an anti-black, racist state.
South African philosophers influenced by Biko's existentialism include Noël Chabani Manganyi.
Black existential philosophy came to the academy in the 1970s in the work of William R. Jones, who argued for a humanistic response to black suffering through facing the absurd as found in the thought of Albert Camus and dealing with the contradictions of theological beliefs pointed out by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Instead of relying on God, black people should take their lives and history into their own hands and build a better future for human kind.
A philosopher heavily influenced by Du Bois, Fanon, and Jones is Lewis Gordon, who argues that black existential philosophy "is marked by a centering of what is often known as the 'situation' of questioning or inquiry itself.
[7] Gordon later argues in Existentia Africana that such a concern leads to a focus in black existential philosophy on problems of philosophical anthropology, liberation, and critical reflection on the justification of thought itself.
He argues that concerns with liberation make sense for people who have been enslaved, colonized, and racially oppressed.
A philosopher influenced by Gordon is Nelson Maldonado-Torres, whose Against War (Duke University Press, 2008) offers a "decolonial reduction" of the forms of knowledge used to rationalize slavery, colonialism, and racism.
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the archetype of black existentialist literature, is one of the most revered and reviewed novels written by an African-American writer.
[citation needed] It presents examples of absurdism, anxiety and alienation in relation to the experience of the black male in mid-1900s America.
The namelessness of the main character of the novel, a figure based on Ellison's own life [citation needed], points to the trauma of black people receiving names that were forced on them from the violence of slavery.
That renaming was meant to inaugurate a loss of memory, and that process of dismemberment is explored in the novel as the protagonist moves from one abusive father figure to another—white and black—to a culminating reflection on living as an invisible leech off of the system that produces light.
In France, he was heavily influenced by Les Temps modernes members Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty.
The existential novels that he wrote after leaving the United States, such as The Outsider, never received the high critical acclaim of Native Son.
In his famous introduction to Native Son, Wright made concrete some of the themes raised by Du Bois.
He pointed to the injustice of a system in which police officers randomly arrested young black men for crimes they did not commit and prosecutors who were able to secure convictions in such cases.
In retrospect, James Baldwin has been considered by others as a black existentialist writer; however he was quite critical of Richard Wright and suspicious of his relationship with French intellectuals.
Her famous novel Beloved (1987) raises the question of the trauma that haunts black existence from slavery.
Black people, he argued, often faced double standards in their efforts to achieve equality in the wake of enslavement, colonialism, and racial apartheid.
That form of double consciousness involves seeing the injustice of a social system that limits possibilities for some groups and creates advantages for others while expecting both to perform equally.
That Black people were imprisoned for challenging the injustices of a social system born on the memorable phrase, "All men are created equal...," is a case in point, and the subsequent criticism of whether "men" meant "women too" pushes this point further, as Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and other earlier nineteenth-century Black critical thinkers contended.