Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

This is the 30th Anniversary Edition of Lewis R. Gordon’s classic existential phenomenological inaugural work, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Gordon argues that antiblack racism is an effort to evade the responsibilities of building a human and humane world. He explores how bad faith is manifested across race, gender, and class, among varieties of other human phenomena. The new edition contains a foreword by Mabogo P. More and afterwords by Jacqueline M. Martinez and Paget Henry.

In this contemporary classic, Lewis Gordon presents his iconic, 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 involves 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.

A foundational text in black existentialism, this 30th anniversary edition includes a substantial introduction by Mabogo Moreto address the ongoing importance of Gordon’s thought in critiquing and resisting racist bad faith in our contemporary moment.