Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism [Paperback]

Lewis R. Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1995

Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of anti-black 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. Anti-black 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 anti-black racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human.

Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: Humanity Books (February 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573925349
• ISBN-13: 978-1573925341
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,128,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lewis Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker,and musician. He is the founder and co-director, with his wife Jane Anna Gordon, of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, a research center dedicated to developing reliable sources of information on Afro-Jews and Jewish diversity. He is also a research affiliate of the Institute for Jewish Research and Community in San Francisco and the Be'chol Lashon ("In Every Tongue") think tank. His formal academic appointments are as the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, with affiliations in African American Studies and Religion at Temple University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He has also taught at Brown University (where he was the founding chair of the Department of Africana Studies and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Contemporary Religious Thought), Yale University (in African American Studies and in Philosophy), and Purdue University (in Philosophy, African American Studies, and the Doctoral Program in English and Philosophy). Gordon achieved his PhD in Philosophy with distinction from Yale University and his B.A., with multiple honors, through the Lehman Scholars Program at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York. He had taught as a Social Studies teacher in the Bronx, where he was also founder of the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School. He has received many accolades for his writings and teaching, including the Gustavus Myer's award for outstanding work on human rights in North America, for Her Majesty's Other Children, the netLibrary's eBook of the month in February 2007 for his co-edited A Companion to African-American Studies, the Purdue African American Studies Book Award for Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, and, more recently, the James and Helen Merritt Distinguished Service Award for Contributions to the Philosophy of Education. He has organized conferences worldwide on such themes as antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, and he lectures regularly across the globe. He is a board member of the Institute for Caribbean Thought in Jamaica, the same for the Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery in Amsterdam, and he has worked in a variety of public media, including as one of the first news analysts for the National Public Radio Program On Point. He was executive editor of the first five volumes of the journal Radical Philosophy Review, and he was president of he Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2003 till 2008. Gordon still plays drums and piano. He could be viewed discussing philosophy of music and playing drums for the Philosophical Installations series--"Lewis R. Gordon--Philosophy at home": http://philinstall.uoregon.edu/#independent-videos.

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5.0 out of 5 stars THE FIRST BOOK OF A PROMINENT BLACK EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER, December 10, 2010

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This review is from: Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Paperback)

Lewis Ricardo Gordon (born 1962) is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, and an Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He has also written/edited An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (The Radical Imagination Series), Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (Africana Thought), and Black Texts and Textuality: Constructing and De-Constructing Blackness.

He states in the Preface of this 1999 book, "It is truly absurd, to attempt a philosophical work on a timely topic. My purpose in writing this work is to raise the question in the study of racism, specifically antiblack racism, and to see how the situation that constitutes antiblack racism is informative of the complexities involved in the study of human reality."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"Examining racism from the standpoint of Sartrean philosophy of existence isn't a new idea. Jean-Paul Sartre has explored racial concerns in some of his work of the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, Notebooks for an Ethics, The Respectful Prostitute, Black Orpheus, and Black Presence." (Pg 3)
"For reasons that will become evident, I take a highly critical stand at the outset toward 'Black Orpheus,' despite some of its rather keen insights. First, the notion of negritude is problematic from the standpoint of freedom, for it is based on the presumption of necessary, intrinsic features of black people---the notion that black people are essentially black." (Pg. 4)
"Under the model of bad faith, the stubborn racist has made a choice not to admit certain uncomfortable truths about his group and choose not to challenge certain comfortable falsehoods about other people." (Pg. 75)