© UKSS and NASS Sartre Studies International Volume 27, Issue 2, 2021: 87–100 doi:10.3167/ssi.2021.270210 ISSN 1357-1559 (Print) • ISSN 1558-5476 (Online) The Poverty and Richness of the Imaginary Sartre on (Anti-)racist Ways of Seeing LAURA MCMAHON Abstract: There is an ambiguity in Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary (1940). On the one hand, Sartre describes mental images as impover- ished in contrast to the fullness and depth of the world of perception. On the other hand, Sartre identifies the imagination with human free- dom, and in this sense the imaginary can be seen as an enrichment of the real. This paper explores this ambiguity and its import for under- standing both racist and antiracist ways of relating to others. Part One explores Sartre’s argument for the “essential poverty” of the image through examples of racist images. Part Two discusses the enriching power of the imaginary for cultivating more just social and political arrangements in the context of racial oppression. Part Three argues that bad faith can take the form either of fleeing from reality into the impoverished world of the imaginary, or of failing to see the imaginary possibilities implicitly enriching the real. Keywords: authenticity, bad faith, Jean-Paul Sartre, the imaginary, racism, Richard Wright There is a central ambiguity in Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary (1940). On the one hand, while imagination and perception “repre- sent the two great irreducible attitudes of consciousness,” 1 Sartre de- scribes mental images as impoverished in contrast to the fullness and depth of the world of perception. On the other hand, in the book’s conclusion Sartre effectively identifies the imagination with human freedom, or the power of “surpassing the real,” such that the imag- inary can be seen not as an impoverishment but an enrichment of