Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
Book grown out of his Yale dissertation: drawing on Sartre’s analysis of bad faith, Gordon describes antiblack racism as a flight from the ambiguity of human existence that treats some people as mere bodies and denies them the standing of persons.
Introduction
Lewis Gordon’s “Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism” appeared in 1995 with Humanities Press and grew out of his doctoral dissertation at Yale (1993). The book takes up Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of bad faith in Being and Nothingness – the attempt to flee the ambiguity of human existence, freedom and responsibility by treating oneself or others as mere things – and applies it to racism against Black people. Antiblack racism, Gordon argues, is a form of bad faith: it reduces Black people to their bodies and their presence to a problem, sees whiteness as the human norm, and allows racists to deny their own responsibility by appealing to nature. He works through phenomenological descriptions of the look, of embodiment and of anonymity, discusses Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and examines whether a Black person can also be in bad faith. The book founded Gordon’s programme of an Africana existential philosophy.
Connections
Builds on
- Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre
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