Chapter 5 - Conversions of Reciprocity

Summary

When two human categories [catégories humaines] find themselves in each other's presence [se trouvent en présence], each aspires to impose its sovereignty upon the other. If both are able to sustain this claim, a reciprocal relation is created between them. Whether it is in enmity, or in amity, it is always in a state of tension. If one of the two is privileged, has some advantage, this one prevails over the other and undertakes to keep the other in subjection.

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. mod.

RECIPROCITY AS THE REVERSAL OF ALTERITY

Although in America Day by Day Beauvoir does consider the constant consciousness one might have in a racist context of being black (“he can never forget that he is black, and that makes him conscious every minute of the whole white world from which the word ‘black’ takes its meaning),” her account of race relations in America would nonetheless provide the context for one of her less felicitous conversions. The depiction of a disturbing being-for-others in the context of hostile race relations is hijacked by a reversal of perspective: Beauvoir's sudden consciousness of being white. Beauvoir describes encounters with the supposedly “unfriendly” faces of African Americans living in “poverty and hatred” (la misère et la haine): “we felt the bite [la morsure] of those looks … in these hostile streets.”