Politics, literature, and the arts

¶ … Psychology of the Bigot -- the Anti-Semite vs. The Racist

In "Anti-Semite and Jew," the existentialist philosopher John Paul Sartre, a gentile, analyzed the psychology of an anti-Semitic individual who hates Jews. He did so from the perspective of an outsider to the group he was examining over the course of his essay, as well as attempting to plumb the psychology of the 'insider' of this group. In "The Fire Next Time," James Baldwin examined the American racist's perspective from the point-of-view of the object of racial hatred and ostrication, namely his own perspective as a Black man in America. Both, however, attempted to relate the psychology of hatred to larger political concerns, in Sartre's case that of a biased and class-oriented French society, and in Baldwin's case that of the Cold War, which he suggested caused the fear of tragedy to intensify racial divisions in America.

At the beginning of Sartre's text "Anti-Semite and Jew," the Gallic author Sartre stated that the psychology of the bigot, specifically the anti-Semite was that of a person who attributed all or part of his own and his country's miseries to the presence of Jewish elements in the community. In other words, the ails of society were coalesced and simplified in the mind of the anti-Semitic individual in a neat and enclosed ideological fashion, and focused upon Jewish persons within the community. The 'logical' remedy for this supposed state of affairs in the mind of the anti-Semite was achieved in a simple way, namely by depriving the Jews rights or of life and liberty.

Thus, by keeping Jewish persons out of certain economic and social activities, by expelling them from the country, or at the most extreme by exterminating all of them, such anti-Semitic actions created a false sense of an achievable remedy or success in the minds of individuals who felt alienated from their goals. Baldwin similarly argued that Black men and women became totem-like beings or signifiers rather than humans in the minds of racists, who cast Blacks out of the American imaginative and literal reality.

Sartre added to his analysis that the forms anti-Semitism took provided a kind of secret delight in the hearts of haters, given its quality of linguistic discourse. It takes, he suggested, the form of taunts rather than anything remotely approaching rational political dialogue. The irrational delight of anti-Semitism provides the core of its pleasure -- its pleasure came from its lack of real, rational political debate and structure such as when the Nazi party gained power in Germany and one of the first steps it took was to prohibit Jews from using the same swimming pools as gentile. Baldwin similarly stresses the anti-rational nature of racism, however he suggests that the level of outwardly directed hatred onto such things as the 'Red Menace' were in fact a way of Americans dealing with the blatant injustices woven into their own society and constitution.