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Article Excerpt
1. Introduction
Within the relatively specialized field of philosophy of racism--a field that is particularly well developed in the Anglo-American world--the work of the African-American philosopher Lewis Gordon is well known. This is especially the case for his work on the interpretation of the existential structures of racism on the basis of the early Jean-Paul Sartre. (1) He is not the first, however, to find in Sartre's existential phenomenology a fertile ground for discussing themes concerning oppression, racism, and human conflict. Yet what makes his contribution unique is that he focuses on a particular brand of racism, namely "antiblack racism," and that he explores the meaning of racism as bad faith not so much from the receiving side (the oppressed)--as for instance Franz Fanon and to a lesser extent Albert Memmi have done--but mainly from the perspective of the racist worldview itself (the oppressors). Especially in his earlier book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Gordon sets himself the goal of phenomenologically analyzing what it means to look through the eyes of hatred.
Before I proceed, a short methodological remark is called for. Given what Gordon refers to as the standpoint epistemological approach--that is, writing with a sense that one has only limited knowledge of any group of which one is not a member (2)--I would feel somewhat inhibited as a white European in speaking about the phenomenon of antiblack racism from the receiving side, that is, from the lived experience of the victims of antiblack racist hatred. According to Gordon, the risk of such a project would be epistemic colonization, that is, white theorists interpreting the experience of "colored folks." In this article, however, I will mainly focus on Gordon' s claims concerning the existential sources of racism. My ethnic location does not appear to be particularly problematic from that perspective, especially for describing a typical white variant of racism. To talk about a "privileged" epistemic position in this regard, however, would be unfortunate, and not merely because of the ambiguity of the word "privileged." Generally, every human being, no matter what his or her ethnic identifications, can succumb to ethnic hatred. In fact, this is precisely what the idea of racism as bad faith conveys--that racism should be understood as a permanent possibility (or even a permanent temptation) that is interwoven with the dynamics of human existence itself. In this regard, the standpoint logic could lead to the incorrect conclusion that a phenomenology of racism is only possible if one is part of an oppressive social group.
After a reconstruction of Gordon's early phenomenology of antiblack racism (section 2), I will argue that Gordon's interpretation of racist hatred from a Sartrean perspective has not taken the transformative nature of racism sufficiently into account. The interpretation of racism as a type of bad faith ought to acknowledge the distinction between the racist motivation and the racist attitude itself. By not making this crucial distinction, Gordon's analysis of racism is phenomenologically unconvincing. (3) According to Gordon, the racist perceives himself as "presence" while the racial other is construed as "absence" or "emptiness." This claim fails to do justice to the other-reification that is central to all variants of racism. The perception of the other as a disturbing lack of being, as absence, is characteristic of the racist's motivation rather than of his or her attitude itself, or so I will argue. A social relation characterized by racism must not be understood in terms of "presence of being" versus "absence of being," as Gordon argues, but in terms of "presence of good being" versus "presence of evil/lesser being." Racism involves a double flight from transcendence and thus a double reification, of both self and other (section 3).
I will argue next that there is one variant of racism that does not fit this model. That is the type of racism recently described by Robert Birt as "the bad faith of whiteness." This refers to the racist supposition that the white perspective is neutral, universal, and raceless, while "the others" are ethnically structured and attached to particular social groups with shared characteristics (e.g., culture, ethnicity, traditions). In contrast to the type of racism that I refer to as the double flight from transcendence, in this case the racist existential dynamic should be interpreted as a denial of (or flight from) facticity. The facticity that is being denied here is that of the self, while the outgroup is identified with inferior, reified being (section 4). Hence, other-reification is characteristic of this second variant of racism, too. For that reason, Gordon' s theory of racism does not fit this second variant either. I will argue that both these alternative models cover most existing manifestations of racism.
2. Gordon's Phenomenology of Racism as Bad Faith
In his treatment of the concept of bad faith, Gordon interprets Sartre's original idea of bad faith as a flight from a "displeasing truth" to a "pleasing falsehood" (BF 8). The truth that is at stake here is not about a particular state of affairs, but about the general human condition itself. This condition is fundamentally characterized by freedom and responsibility. In line with Sartrean existentialism, Gordon argues that the confrontation with one's freedom leads to anguish, because freedom---or in Sartre's terms "transcendence"--involves the sense that the self is not a stable given, a fixed substance. Rather, what constitutes my freedom is the fact that I always face my own possibilities. This is a situation "without comfort," as Gordon puts it, because mental comfort implies a condition of rest, while the human condition is characterized by a constitutive lack of fixed qualities (BF 14). (4)
At the same time, human freedom should not be understood as a bundle of free-floating possibilities. Freedom is always "freedom-in-situation," that is, it is always bound by a particular set of circumstances that is not the direct result of choice itself. (5) This means that human reality is characterized by both freedom and facticity. Facticity refers to those aspects of our situation that are factual and that we somehow have to come to grips with, such as the color of our skin, being born in an unjust society, having a handicap, and so one. At the same time, however, we are free to imagine possible ways of dealing with these facts, like interpreting them in a certain way and choosing certain life plans accordingly.
Bad faith is the evasion of this freedom-facticity ambiguity. It refers to the affirmation of one' s facticity at the expense of one' s transcendence or to the affirmation of one's transcendence at the expense of one's facticity. Hence, bad faith can refer to both a flight from human freedom and a flight from facticity. The flight from freedom, however, seems to be not only more common in a general sense, (6) but also in the more specific case of racism as bad faith.
Racism tends to manifest itself as a flight from human ambiguity toward the extreme of facticity. (7) Generally, the racist essentializes his or her own "race," ethnicity, culture, or national belonging in terms of rigid qualities and innate abilities. Gordon tries to make this clear by using certain root metaphors. For instance, he describes bad faith in this context as an attempt to "identify ourselves as 'full' and others as 'empty' or existing in the condition of lack" (BF 6). Instead of the unsettling openness and indeterminacy that comes with the sense of one's own freedom, the racist perceives himself as "full." But while the racist is in the grip of self-reifying tendencies, the racial other, according to Gordon, is perceived in terms of "emptiness" or "lack."
Elsewhere, Gordon introduces a similar oppositional pair of concepts, namely that of "presence" versus "absence" (BF chap. 14). Here, Gordon associates absence with Sartre's vocabulary of transcendence (or freedom), while presence is interpreted as a modus of facticity (BF 98). But instead of valuing absence of being as typically human, the racist values it as inferior. Gordon refers to this as a "deep or ontological denial of human reality" (BF 98). Although Gordon considers the notion that the dominant group in an antiblack world might want to understand itself in terms of absence of being, in order to affirm its own freedom, he is quick to point out that what a racist really wants is to avoid anguish and responsibility. Hence, it is precisely freedom that the racist is running away from. So it is the antiblack racist who develops a sense of him--or herself in terms of presence (or "thingness"). In contrast, the racist constructs the outgroup as an instance of absence, sometimes referred to as a "form of nothing" (BF 105), a "black hole" (BF 99), or a "hole in being" (BF 124). The presence of a black person in an antiblack world signifies the presence of absence. In such a world, Gordon stipulates, there is always something absent whenever blacks are present. "The more present a black is, the more absent is this 'something'. And the more absent a black is, the more present is this something" (BF 98).
One of the problems with Gordon's phenomenology of racism is that this "something" that is absent whenever blacks are present--given the antiblack world--has different meanings throughout his work, meanings that are not clearly differentiated and that cannot always be...
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