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.

Author Biography

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, Visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa, European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Universite Toulouse Jean Jaures, France, and Writer-in-Residence at Birkbeck School of Law. His most recent book is What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (2015). Mabogo Percy More is a former professor of philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and is currently professor of philosophy at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. He is the author of many journal articles and his latest book is Steve Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation (HSRC Press, 2017). He was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015.