Lewis Ricardo Gordon (born May 12, 1962) is an American philosopher who works in the areas of Africana philosophy,

philosophy of
human and life sciences, phenomenology, philosophy of existence, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race
and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly
extensively on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology, Africana and black existentialism, and on the works and thought of W.
E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And
Thought. [1]

Biography

Gordon graduated in 1984 from Lehman College, CUNY, through the Lehman Scholars Program, with a Bachelor of Arts degree,
magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees in
philosophy in 1991 at Yale University, and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree with distinction from the same university in
1993. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, Gordon taught at Brown University, Yale, Purdue University, and Temple
University, where he was the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy with affiliations in Religious
and Judaic Studies. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in Judaic Studies and the Caribbean,
Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He also is Visiting Euro philosophy Professor at
Toulouse University, France, and Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor in Political and International Studies at Rhodes University in
South Africa (2014–2016).

At Temple, he was Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought (ISRST), which is devoted to research on the
complexity and social dimensions of race and racism. The ISRST's many projects include developing a consortium on Afro-Latin
American Studies, a Philadelphia Blues People Project, semiological studies of indigeneity, a Black Civil Society project, symposia on
race, sexuality, and sexual health, and ongoing work in Africana philosophy. Gordon was Executive Editor of volumes I-V of Radical
Philosophy Review: Journal of the Radical Philosophy Association and co-editor of the Routledge book series on Africana philosophy.
Additionally, he is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Gordon is the founder of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, the only such research center, which focuses on developing and
providing reliable sources of information on African and African Diasporic Jewish or Hebrew-descended populations. Gordon states:
"In actuality, there is no such thing as pure Jewish blood. Jews are a creolized [mixed-race] people. It's been that way since at least
the time we left Egypt as a [culturally] mixed Egyptian and African [i.e., from other parts of Africa] people."

Gordon founded the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School in the Bronx, New York. He is married to Jane Anna Gordon.

Philosophy and work in theory

Black existentialism

Gordon is considered among the leading scholars in black existentialism.[2] He first came to prominence in this subject because of
his first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), which was an existential phenomenological study of anti-black racism, and his
anthology Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (1997). The book is written in four parts, with a series of
short chapters that at times take the form of phenomenological vignettes. Bad faith, as Gordon reads it, is a coextensive
phenomenon reflective of the metastability of the human condition. It is a denial of human reality, an effort to evade freedom, a
flight from responsibility, a choice against choice, an assertion of being the only point of view on the world, an assertion of being the
world, an effort to deny having a point of view, a flight from displeasing truths to pleasing falsehoods, a form of misanthropy, an act
of believing what one does not believe, a form of spirit of seriousness, sincerity, an effort to disarm evidence (a Gordon innovation),
a form of sedimented or institutional version of all of these, and (another Gordon innovation) a flight from and war against social
reality. Gordon rejects notions of disembodied consciousness (which he argues are forms of bad faith) and articulates a theory of the
body-in-bad-faith. Gordon also rejects authenticity discourses. He sees them as trapped in expectations of sincerity, which also is a
form of bad faith. He proposes, instead, critical good faith, which he argues requires respect for evidence and accountability in the
social world, a world of intersubjective relations.

The question of racism

Racism, Gordon argues,[citation needed] requires the rejection of another human being's humanity. Since the other human being is
a human being, such a rejection is a contradiction of reality. A racist must, then, deny reality, and since communication is possible
between a racist and the people who are the object of racial hatred, then social reality is also what is denied in racist assertions. A
racist, then, attempts to avoid social reality. Gordon argues that since people could only "appear" if embodied, then racism is an
attack on embodied realities. It is an effort to make embodied realities bodies without points of view or make points of views
without bodies. Racism is also a form of the spirit of seriousness, by which Gordon means the treatment of values as material
features of the world instead of expressions of human freedom and responsibility. Racism ascribes to so-called racially inferior
people intrinsic values that emanate from their flesh. A result of the spirit of seriousness is racist rationality. Here, Gordon, in
agreement with Frantz Fanon, argues that racists are not irrational people but instead hyper-rational expressions of racist
rationality. He rejects, in other words, theories that regard racism as a function of bad emotions or passions. Such phenomena, he
suggests, emerge as a consequence of racist thinking, not its cause. Effect emerges, in other words, to affect how one negotiates
reality. If one is not willing to deal with time, a highly emotional response squeezes all time into a single moment, which leads to the
overflow of what one prefers to believe over what one is afraid of facing.

Gordon analyzes a variety of issues in the study of anti-black racism, such as black antiblack racists, exoticism, racial “qualities,” and
theological-ethical dimensions of racism. He prefers to focus on anti-black racism instead of “white supremacy” because, he points
out, that anti-black racism could exist without white supremacy. There are many people who reject white supremacy but affirm
notions of black inferiority. A prime example is that there are black antiblack racists. Gordon analyzes this phenomenon through a
discussion of black use of the word “nigger,” which he argues is bad faith effort at black self-exceptionalism—of, in the case of the
user of the term, not being its object. Exoticism is the other extreme. It is a rejection of the humanity of black people under the
pretense of loving black people. The exoticist valorizes black people because he or she regards black people as, like animals,
incapable of valid judgment.

Theology and history-ethics

Gordon argues[citation needed] that in theological form, studies of anti-black racism reveal that a particular assumption of Western
ethical thought must be rejected – the notion of similarity as a condition of ethical obligation. That black woman could worship a
god with whom they are neither similar nor could ever be identical demonstrates that love does not require similarity. Gordon
argues that the ethical issue against anti-black racism is not one of seeing the similarity between blacks and whites but of being able,
simply, to respect and see the ethical importance of blacks as blacks. The fight against racism, in other words, does not require the
elimination of race or noticing the racial difference but instead demands to respect the humanity of the people who exemplify racial
difference. In Existence in Black, Gordon outlines themes of black existentialism in the text's introduction. He argues that black
existentialism addresses many of the same themes of European existentialism but with some key differences. For instance, although
both sets argue that the notion of a human being makes no sense outside of human communities and that individuals make no
sense without society and societies make no sense without individuals, European existentialists had to defend individuality more
because they were normative in their societies, whereas black existentialists had to focus on community more in order to
demonstrate their membership in the human community. The question of individuality for black existentialists becomes one of
showing that not all black people are the same. Themes of anguish, dread, freedom, absurdity, and death are examined, as well,
through the historical reality of anti-black racism and colonialism and, along with it, the meaning of black suffering and the
legitimacy of black existence. The logic of anti-black racism demands blacks offering justifications for their existence that are not
posed for whites.

Gordon points[citation needed] these dynamics out through discussions of W. E. B. Du Bois's observation that black people are often
treated as problems instead of people who face problems in the world and Frantz Fanon's call for black people to become actional
through transcending the dialectics of seeking white recognition. Gordon also argues that black existential philosophy is an area of
thought, which means that contributions to its development can come from anyone who understands its problematics. In other
words, one does not have to be black to contribute to this area of thought. Existence in Black reflects his point since it has articles by
other authors from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds discussing themes ranging from African and Afro-Caribbean existential
struggles with beliefs in predestination to black feminist struggles with postmodern anti-essentialist thought. Gordon's chapter in
the book focuses on the problem of black invisibility, which he points out is paradoxical since it is a function of black people being
hyper-visible. Gordon's place in this area of thought was solidified in 2000 with the publication of his book Existentia Africana:
Understanding Africana Existential Thought. That book explores themes of existence—which he points out, from its Latin etymology,
means to stand out or to appear—over the course of examining a set of new philosophical themes that emerge from their
convergence with realities faced by African diasporic peoples. Gordon argues that traditional philosophical questions are not the
only ones that philosophers should look at. Gordon examines, as a matter of philosophical interest, topics ranging from the
stratification of blacks in biographical discourses to the difficulty of studying black people as human beings. He rejects the notion
that existential philosophy is incompatible with religious thought. To support his position, he examines how religion poses not only
unique questions of paths to be taken in struggles for liberation, but also of the conditions that make religious practices such as
worship possible. He ends that work with a reflection on writing, in which he advances his own commitment to transcendental
philosophical approaches, those, in other words, that explore the conditions by which and through which certain phenomena are
able to manifest themselves or become possible. Crucial here is that Gordon does not pit existential philosophy against
transcendental philosophy but, instead, argues for both.

Phenomenology and colonialism

Gordon is also known[by whom?] as the founder of postcolonial phenomenology and the leading proponent of Africana
phenomenology which has enabled him to make a mark in Fanon Studies. Gordon was able to develop postcolonial phenomenology,
which he sometimes refers to as Africana phenomenology or de-colonial phenomenology, through making a series of important
innovations to Husserlian and Sartrian phenomenologies. The first, and perhaps most important, is his transformation of
parenthesizing and bracketing of the natural attitude into what he calls "ontological suspension". Although Husserl called for a
suspension of the natural attitude, his goal was primarily epistemological. Gordon's interest is, however, primarily concerned with
errors that occur from inappropriate ontological assertions. He is also concerned with metaphysics, which he, unlike many
contemporary thinkers, does not reject. Instead, he sees the continuation of Aristotelian metaphysics, which advances a notion of
substance that is governed by the essence that leads to the definition in the form of essential being, as a problem. Gordon wants to
talk about the social world and the meanings constructed by it without reducing it to a physicalist ontology. The notion of
ontological suspension, which he claims is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology, advances this effort. He also advances
phenomenology as a form of radically self-reflective thought, which means that it must question even its methodological
assumptions. Because of this, it must resist epistemological colonization, and it is in this sense that phenomenology is itself
postcolonial or decolonizing. Because of this, Gordon refused for some time in his career to refer to his work as “philosophy,” for
that would mean colonizing it with a disciplinary set of assumptions. He preferred to call his work “radical thought,” which for him
meant being willing to go to the roots of reality in a critical way. From these moves, Gordon was able to generate a set of theoretical
concepts that have become useful to those who have adopted his theoretical lexicon: his unique formulation of crisis; his theory of
epistemic closure; his theory of disciplinary decadence and teleological suspension of disciplinarity; and his analysis of maturation
and tragedy.

Most of these ideas first emerged in the work that gave Gordon a reputation in Fanon studies—namely, Fanon and the Crisis of
European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995). Gordon introduced a new stage in Fanon studies by
announcing that he was not interested in writing on Fanon but instead working with Fanon on the advancement of his (Gordon's)
own intellectual project. Fanon was thus an occasion or point of departure but not the main object of the study. The work is, then, a
statement more of Gordon's philosophy than that of Fanon, who, in this text, is more a major influence. The book offers several
innovations to the question of colonialism and the human sciences. First, Gordon argues that crises are really human communities
refusing to make the choices necessary for the transformation of realities created by human agency. In short, they are forms of
choices against choice or choosing not to choose, which amounts to bad faith. History, he argued, must transcend the imposition of
world history (and thus become structured as a crisis) and move toward an existential-historical understanding of human
communities on the basis of critical good faith. Phenomena such as racism and colonialism, because they attempt to erase the
humanity of the colonized and object of racism, place challenges on whether it is possible to study human communities without
collapsing into acts of discursive, imperial practices.

Gordon has also made an important contribution to the understanding around the work of Steve Biko by way of a new introduction
to Biko's classic text I Write What I Like.[3]

Essentialism and race

For some scholars,[who?] essentialism means that one cannot study race and racism and colonialism properly because of they, in
effect, lack essences. Gordon argues that although human beings are incomplete, are without laws of nature, it does not follow that
they cannot be studied and understood with reasonable accuracy. Drawing upon the thought of Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Alfred
Schutz, and Frantz Fanon, Gordon argued that the task is to develop accurate portrayals or to thematize everyday life. He argues
that racism and colonialism are everyday phenomena and, as such, are lived as "normal" aspects of modern life. Even under severe
conditions, human beings find ways to live as though under ordinary conditions. This ordinariness can get to a point of distorting
reality. In the case of racism, one group of people are allowed to live an ordinary life under ordinary conditions while another group
or other groups are expected to do so under extraordinary conditions. Institutional bad faith renders those extraordinary conditions
invisible and advances as a norm the false notion a shared ordinary set of conditions. This is the meaning behind the colloquial
notion of "double standards". Gordon here also advances a theory that provides an answer to social constructivists in the study of
race. What they fail to understand, Gordon argues, is that sociality is also constructed, which makes social constructivism redundant.

Many social constructivists[who?] also treat the identification of constructive as the conclusion of the argument instead of its
beginning. For Gordon, identifying that something is constructed does not mean showing that the phenomenon is false or fictional.
Human beings construct many "real" things, such as language and meaning and the forms of life generated by such activities and
concepts. Many people are able, for instance, to act on race concepts (not racist ones) with a fair degree of accuracy. What this
means is simply that they know how to read the social world and the bodies through which that world is manifested. The error that
many critics make is that they demand the false criterion of universality and infallibility to the practice of racial identification.
Gordon argues that such a demand would not work for the identification of most social phenomena. What is required is not
universality nor infallibility but generality. Gordon defends this claim by making the distinction between a law and a principle. Law is
absolute, without exceptions, categorical. A principle is general and has exceptions. For things human, principles are more
appropriate ascriptions than laws. Gordon argues that these ideas emerged through his reading of Fanon's notions of sociogenesis.

Other ideas he borrows from Fanon are his rejection of the dialectics of recognition and his unique view on racism's impact on ethics
and the concept of the Other. Like Fanon, Gordon argues that to seek white recognition leads to dependency on whites. It also
means to make whites the standard of value. Yet Gordon rejects the thesis that racism is about a Self–Other dialectic. Antiblack
racists do not see blacks as the Other or others, in Gordon's view. Such relations only exist between whites and whomever else they
see as human beings or genuine others. Thus, the struggle against anti-black racism is ironically for blacks to become others. This
displacement of otherness means that the fight against racism is governed not by moral laws but by tragic ones in which innocence
becomes irrelevant. Gordon concludes the work with a look at how two scholars read Fanon's importance: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
argued that only Fanon's biography is of any contemporary interest, and that is as good literature. Cedric Robinson argued that
Gates failed to see the political dimensions of Fanon's thought and that he should be read as a Marxist-oriented revolutionary.
Gordon points out that both scholars were committing acts of disciplinary decadence by, in effect, condemning other disciplines for
not being theirs. It was at the end of that book that the concept of disciplinary decadence was introduced. He returned to the
concept most recently in his book Disciplinary Decadence (2006). Gordon's reputation in Fanon Studies grew through his co-edited
anthology, Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996), and his many articles over the past decade on various dimensions of Fanon's thought. In
those works, he introduced what he calls “five stages of Fanon’s studies,” and he offers a variety of unique readings of Fanon's work.
He has shown connections between Du Bois and Fanon on double consciousness; he has written on how Fanon's critique of white
normativity leads to the question of whether modern society has any notion of a normal black person; Fanon, he argues, seeks a
coherent notion of how it is possible.

Gordon's writings have continued expansion of his and related philosophical approaches and lexicon. In his book of social criticism,
Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (1997), he explored problems in critical race theory and
philosophy and introduced one of his most famous thought experiments. In the chapter "Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire", Gordon
purports to have created a racial-gender-sex-sexuality matrix and used it to challenge our assumptions of the mixture. A white
woman in that matrix, for instance, is mixed because her whiteness makes her masculine but her womanness makes her black. Or
certain relationships are transformed, where same-sex interracial relationships are not necessarily homosexual or lesbian ones.
What is striking about the book is a theme that some of his critics noticed in his earlier books, and that is the role of music in his
prose and analysis. Gordon here builds on his argument about the everyday in his earlier work to argue that danger of most theories
of social transformation is that they fail to take seriously the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. Moral and political thought and
economy are good at constructing contexts in which people could sustain biological and social life, but they are terrible at
articulating what it means to live in a livable world. Gordon argues that a genuinely emancipatory society creates spaces for the
ordinary celebration of everyday pleasure. In his more recent work, Gordon has been arguing about the geography of reason and the
importance of contingency in social life. However, it needs to be noted that the legitimacy of his "mixture-matrix" is largely
dependent upon his controversial applications of semiotics to race and gender.

Reason and rationality

A problem of Western thought, Gordon argues, is that it has yoked reason to instrumental rationality and created an antiblack
notion of reason's geographical landscape. Shifting the geography of reason, he argues, would entail a war on the kinds of
decadence that treat any human community as incapable of manifesting reason. But more, Gordon argues that reason is broader
than rationality since it must be used to assess rationality. Rationality could only attempt to impose consistency on reason, but the
reason could point out that maximum consistency, although rational, may be unreasonable. Gordon's recent work has been a
development of these issues. His co-edited books with Jane Anna Gordon, Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in
Theory and Practice (2005) and A Companion to African-American Studies (2006), offer some important new concepts in the ongoing
development of his thought. In the first, he offers a comprehensive treatment of African-American philosophy and the importance of
Africana existential phenomenological thought through a critique of Audre Lorde's admonition of using the master's tools. The two
Gordons' response is that (1) tools should not only be used to tear down houses but also to build them up; (2) the master's tools are
not the only tools available; and (3) the construction of alternative houses (theoretical models, philosophies) could decenter the
value of the master's house, denuding it of mastery. In his essay "African-American Philosophy, Race, and Racism", which is his main
contribution in that volume, he provides a comprehensive and concise statement of his work to date. In the introduction to the
Companion, he and Jane Gordon formulate a theory of African-American Studies as a form of double consciousness. But the key
here is the introduction of their concept "the pedagogical imperative". This imperative refers to a teacher's duty to learn and keep
learning the broadest and most accurate picture of reality available to humankind. The editors also advance a theory of
internationalism, localism, and market nihilism in the face of the rise of an independent managerial class to describe the dynamics of
the contemporary academy.

Classification of Gordon's contributions to sociology and philosophy

Gordon considers all of his works to be part of a humanist tradition. The role of intellectuals, in his view, is to challenge the limits of
human knowledge and, in so doing, achieve some advancement in what he calls "the Geist war". For him, the importance of
intellectual work could be summarized by his claim that one "achieves" as a human being for humanity but one always fails alone.
Gordon's work has also been characterized as a form of existential sociology. The sociological dimensions of his writings have
received much attention, and the readers of his most recent book, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (2006),
have described it as a work that is not only in philosophy (of disciplinarity) but also in education and the sociology of the formations
of disciplines themselves. Gordon, however, describes what he is attempting to do as a teleological suspension of disciplinarity.

Published works

Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). Winner of Gustavus
Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

In this exploration of race and racism, noted scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a critique of recent scholarship in postcolonial
Africana philosophy and critical race theory, and su ggests alternative models that respond to what he calls our
contemporary neocolonial age_an age in which cultural, intellectual, and economic forms of colonial domination persist.
Through essays that address popular culture, the academy, literature, and po litics, Gordon unsettles the notion of race
and exposes the complexity of antiblack racism. An important book for philosophers, political theorists, sociologists,
cultural critics, and anyone concerned with the overt and subtle ways of injustice.

Her Majesty's Children reveals not only a deeply personal account of the experience of racism but is also a revolutionary work that
asks us to reconsider our ordinary practices and lives to recognize and resist the traces of a colonial age of racism that so many claim
is only part of our past.

Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, (ed.) (Routledge, 1997)

Drawing upon resources in Africana philosophy and literature, this study explores some of the central themes of existentialism as
posed by the context of what Franz Fanon has identified as "the lived-experience of the black".

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of
Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major
productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in
these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany
and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing
elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors
that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these
essays for the first time.

"Existence in Black" is the first collective statement on the subject of Africana Philosophy of Existence. Drawing upon resources in
Africana philosophy and literature, the contributors explore some of the central themes of Existentialism as posed by the context of
what Frantz Fanon has identified as "the lived-experience of the black."
Among questions posed and explored in the volume are: What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if
not universal hatred of, black folk?; What is black suffering?; What is the meaning (if any) of black existence? The introduction
argues that a response to these questions requires a journey through the resources of identity questions in critical race theory and
the teleological dimensions of liberation theory.
The contributors address these questions through an analysis of nearly every dimension of Africana phiosophy. In the first half of the
book, they address Black Philosophies of Existence in terms of Traditional African Philosophy, the Harlem Renaissance, Du Boisian
Double-Consciousness, and Fanonian and Sartrean Philosophies of Existence. In the second half of the book, contributors consider
racial identity through examinations of such concepts as equality, death, mimesis, property, embodiment, technology,
disappointment, and dread. Part II is an exploration of postmodern challenges to "black existence" through discussions of
postmodern conservatism, Nietzsche's thoughts on blacks, Richard Wright and fragmented consciousness, and feminist critiques of
race. And Part IV is an examination of problems of historical responsibility and constructing black liberation theories.
Contributors are: Ernest Allen, Jr., Robert Birt, Bernard Boxill, George Carew, Bobby Dixon, G.M. James Gonzales, Lewis R. Gordon,
Leonard Harris, Floyd Hayes, III, Paget Henry, Patricia Huntington, Joy Ann James, Clarence Shole Johnson, Bill E. Lawson, Howard
McGary, Roy D. Morrison, William Preston, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gary Schwartz, Robert Westley, and
Naomi Zack.

What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought (Fordham University Press, 2015)

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to
this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon
as an exemplar of “living thought” against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of
the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to
philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon’s writings on gender and
sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist
geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that
exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond
colonial paradigms.

Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (Routledge, 2000)

This work both introduces and discusses Africana existential thought, covering a range of both classic and contemporary thinkers -
from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois to Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis and Naomi Zack.

Excerpt

The intellectual history of the last quarter of the twentieth century has been marked by, among many developments, a growing
influence of Africana thought in the U.S. academy. Africana thought, as I will be using it in this book, refers to an area of thought that
focuses on theoretical questions raised by struggles over ideas in African cultures and their hybrid and creolized forms in Europe,
North America, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Africana thought also refers to the set of questions raised by the
historical project of conquest and colonization that has emerged since 1492 and the subsequent struggles for emancipation that
continue to this day. These latter questions and struggles have been characterized by Enrique Dussel, the Latin American
philosopher, historian, and theologian, as those that reflect modernity’s “underside.” They are marked by the contrast between how
the modern is often characterized in the Western academy— through, say, philosophical treatment of ideas, from René Descartes to
Immanuel Kant, or perhaps Michel Foucault’s locating of modernity in nineteenth-century European thought—and how it has been

Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanity Books, 1995/1999)

Bad faith is defined as the attempt to hide from ourselves as free and responsible agents. Antiblack racism is shown to be the self-
deceiving choice to believe that black people are inferior to all other races and that black people are not fully human beings; as such,
it is shown to be not only a form of denial, but also a form of self-denial. The possibility of self-denial is developed through an
examination of Sartre's theory of pre-reflective consciousness, the imagination, and the contradictory and ironic "nature" of human
reality. Using Sartre's interpretive method of existential psychoanalysis--where human reality is guided by an "original choice" to
achieve what Sartre calls the "in-itself-for-itself," the self-contradictory object of all desire--I provide a description of a number of
antiblack attitudes, among which is the notion of white supremacy out of which the ascription of an identity relation of blackness
with absence and hunger is shown. I argue that the interpretation of blackness as absence and hunger in an antiblack world entails
the convergence and conflation of race and gender since femininity is also traditionally interpreted as absence and hunger. I further
argue that the existential-theological problem of whether human reality can exist without the desire to be the in-itself-for-itself is
transformed in an antiblack world into the question of whether blacks and whites are human in virtue of a white object of desire. An
antiblack world calls for blacks to justify their right to exist, which suggests a group--whites--whose existence is self-justified, which
is tantamount to whites being the in-itself-for-itself. ;I then discuss the various challenges posed by a Sartrean treatment of antiblack
racism, among which are that Sartre does not have a social philosophy in Being and Nothingness and that Sartre's categories of
subject and object militate against the egalitarian goal of a world in which both blacks and whites are subjects

Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad
faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility
of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally
inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the
concept of bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis
of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.