US racism profoundly shocked French existentialist visitors

Evidence

One element of American life unequivocally horrified Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus: its racial inequalities, and not only in the South. After his first trip, Sartre wrote in Le Figaro of how black ‘untouchables’ and ‘unseeables’ haunted the streets, never meeting your gaze; it was as if they saw no one, and you were not supposed to see them either. A later visit inspired him to write a play about US racism, The Respectful Prostitute, based on a real-life case in which two black men were convicted of raping two white prostitutes and executed, despite an insufficiency of evidence against them. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 547

Categorization

• XREF: Sartre’s ‘untouchables and unseeables’ framing is a gaze-based phenomenology of racism, linking his philosophy to concrete US injustice. Connects to existentialist bad faith concepts.