Racist Variations of Bad Faith: A Critical Study of Lewis Gordon’s Phenomenology of Racism

Abstract

Lewis Gordon's interpretation of racism from a Sartrean perspective is phenomenologically unconvincing. The reason is that Gordon has not taken the transformative nature of racism sufficiently into account. The perception of the other as a disturbing lack of being, as "absence", is characteristic of the motivation for racism rather than of the racist attitude itself. I will describe two alternative variations of racism as bad faith. Both include 'other reification' as a key feature. In the first variant, however, the self is reified as well, while the second variant is characterized by a self-understanding as transcendence.