Lewis Gordon

Lewis Ricardo Gordon (born May 12, 1962) is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, 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 Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon.

His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness.

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 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.

Racism, Gordon argues, 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 argues 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.

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, Gordon 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.

Gordon is considered among the leading scholars in black existentialism.