Episode 117 -Black Consciousness
Transcript
Ellie: 0:14
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:17
The podcast where two friends, who are also philosophy professors, put ideas in dialogue with the everyday.
Ellie: 0:24
I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:26
And I'm Dr. David Peña Guzman.
Ellie: 0:28
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David: 1:13
Especially as the holidays are coming around. You know our tote bags and our hats make for a great holiday gift. So buy one for your friends, for your loved ones, and for your neighbors. They need to be overthinkers., Ellie: Okay, so David, we're going to be speaking about his book, Fear of Black Consciousness. And we have some time now to think a little bit about some of the arguments there before we speak to him, as well as how they relate to the work of some other black philosophers. So I want to actually start by sharing with our listeners the beginning of Gordon's book, which is about his own upbringing and the development of what he calls black consciousness. Gordon was born in Jamaica in 1962, a few months before it became legally independent from the British Empire. And he says that growing up in Jamaica, once it had achieved independence, meant seeing a lot of authority figures around him who were black or brown. He didn't have this sense that to be in power meant to be white, and that to be powerless meant to be brown or black. He says, "All my childhood images of authority, beauty, and love were of people who, in the context of North America and Europe, crossed color lines". He grew up in a very diverse, multiracial family. And he says, "Family for me was colorful. It still is". He notes that, of course, Jamaica still had some problems of colorism, like many societies do, but there simply wasn't the kind of racial politics that he experienced once he came to the U. S. He came to the US in 1971, migrating with a couple of his female relatives, and moved to the Bronx. And he says that it was there, experiencing the dirt, grit, and violence of the Bronx, where I would live for nearly 20 years, that I developed a racialized black consciousness. And his first experience of this began in elementary school when he was seated next to a white boy named Tommy. He was super excited to be in school, you know, little nerd who would later grow up to be a prominent philosopher, and read everything, was eager to answer questions. And then in the second week, Tommy turned to him and said, How's it going n word? He didn't know what that meant, but he would all too quickly learn. And that was how black consciousness emerged for Gordon as a child. Not in his experience living surrounded by people of color in Jamaica, but through moving to the U.S. and experiencing white supremacy through another child in his elementary school classroom calling him a slur. I find his personal history and the story that he tells in this book really compelling. Although, I would want to clarify that when he says that that particular episode introduced him to black consciousness, he means black consciousness with a lowercase b as he specifies. Because he introduces a distinction in his writing between lowercase b, black Consciousness and Uppercase B Black Consciousness, where the former refers to the act of coming to know your condition as a racialized black person under white supremacy, so knowing that this other white kid sees you as an N word, versus Uppercase Black Consciousness, which he defines as a kind of consciousness that is explicitly political consciousness. He says "Uppercase Black Consciousness addresses the choking contradictions of anti Black societies". So it's no longer recognizing that you are seen in a particular way by those in power, but seeing through the surface of that society in order to understand its mechanics and spot its inner contradictions.
Ellie: 4:44
And I think in general, this book, Fear of Black Consciousness, despite the title, which starts with fear, is ultimately really optimistic because the idea is that capital B Black Consciousness is liberatory. But I want to tarry for a moment with the lowercase B black Consciousness. Because that provides the context out of which an uppercase Black Consciousness, which will ultimately be liberatory can emerge. One thing that really struck me about this opening to Gordon's book and this story of Tommy was how structurally similar it is to the experience that Frantz Fanon describes of being hailed as a black man by a child on a train. And there, it's a young child who points out his blackness to his mom. The child is white, just like Tommy. And Fanon says that that experience made him feel objectified. He felt sort of petrified, but also shattered by that, his subjectivity no longer having its immediate grasp upon the world. And I think something similar is happening here in the story that Gordon is telling, where he's seeing himself suddenly from the outside. And Gordon doesn't mention Fanon in the context of this story about Tommy, but Fanon is a frequent reference point in this book, as well as for Black existentialism and accounts of racial consciousness. And so I think, this sense that, okay, sure, all of us are perceived as objects by other people, but there's this particular structure which involves, a complete alienation from your consciousness, but is yet weirdly also still a consciousness that is at work.
David: 6:16
Yeah, and of course the settings in which Lewis Gordon and Frantz Fanon are writing are slightly different, actually quite different, since Fanon is writing about colonialism and the colonial colonized distinction, whereas, Lewis Gordon is writing from the perspective of somebody who lived in independent Jamaica, later in the United States, so not quite the same setting. They both share this sense that Black people's experience is shaped by the racialized relations that their environment pushes onto them. And that story of the white child interpolating Fanon and saying to his mother, look, mom, there is a black person using the pejorative French term for black, allows Fanon to zoom in on the psychic dimension of racism and colonialism and to analyze the neuroses and the pathologies that oppression produce in the colonized black subject. And in particular, he says that one of the effects of that kind of racialized interpolation is that it prevents Black individuals from developing what Fanon calls their body schemas. Black people can't inhabit their body in the way in which we normally expect to be able to because they constantly have to see themselves as white people see them in order to navigate public space. So it throws a bit of a range in the black subject's relationship to their own body, such that they can't inhabit their body comfortably.
Ellie: 7:43
Yeah, and I want to probe this because I think that this is some of the most interesting stuff that comes out in Fanon and Gordon's work, which is that there's, by virtue of white supremacy, this inhibition of consciousness and also an additional layer of consciousness that is added. So you mentioned earlier, you might have used slightly different words than this, but that there's a racializing perception that forces a black person under these conditions to develop a certain kind of consciousness, right? An d that racializing perception is happening for all people, but it's only being recognized by the people who are bearing the brunt of it. And so this is where you get W. E. B. Du Bois concept in the early 20th century of double consciousness, where Du Bois says, as a white person, you can kind of just live your consciousness and not have to see it from a distance. But as a Black person, you live your consciousness and also you live white consciousness because you also have a sense of how you are being perceived by others, what the values are of the dominant white culture, and so on and so forth. And this is something we get into more in our standpoint epistemology episode. But that in and of itself doesn't mean you have a fully conscious picture of how racism is actually affecting you, and a lot of times you might not, right? And so one of the things that Gordon mentions in his book is that Du Bois points out that being born black doesn't entail knowing what it means to be Black in a broader sense. In order to know what it means to be Black in that broader sense, you have to develop what Gordon calls capital B Black consciousness, or what the political scientist Jane Anna Gordon calls potentiated double consciousness, right? It's like the double consciousness that is unlocked in order to provide the possibility of liberation, rather than just stymieing you, preventing you from being free. And that notion of the potentiated double consciousness from Jane Anna Gordon is something that Lewis Gordon talks about in his work on bad faith, which is an existential concept that I think Lewis Gordon is the best thinker of bad faith today. As a fellow existentialist, I learned a lot from his work on bad faith. I mentioned it even in my YouTube video on bad faith. But the idea there is that bad faith is a form of lying to yourself and actually owning up to your human condition involves owning up to the fact that you're both the subject for yourself and and an object for others. But we can say, of course, that certain social circumstances can get in the way of that actualization and of the prevention of bad faith, right?
David: 10:06
Yeah, and presumably of racism and white supremacy would be one of those conditions that get in the way.
Ellie: 10:12
Yeah, exactly, precisely.
David: 10:15
Yeah, no, and to go back a little bit to Fanon, I really like the way he thinks about this as well, because he says that the effect of that system of white supremacy and colonialism on black consciousness is that it produces both a flattening and a sense of the disappearance of the other. So because white supremacy and colonialism prevent the black subject from inhabiting their body in the way in which we would under, let's say, conditions of freedom, the body of the black subject is reduced to their epidermis to their skin and to the way in which that skin is perceived by the white other. So he says "the body schema is collapsed down to the racial epidermal schema". So there's a kind of flattening of embodiment that happens. And another thing that happens is that the Black subject is looking, as we always are, for recognition from the other. But when that other is a white other, the white other refuses to grant recognition to the black subject. And so black individuals experience white ones as constantly withholding that very basic principle of social interaction. And that leads to what Fanon calls racial nausea, or a sense of trembling where you're approaching others, but you only get the sense that they're withdrawing further and further from you. So it's a combination of nausea and trembling that define the condition of black consciousness. with a lowercase b, which can then, under the right conditions, be potentiated into uppercase B, Black consciousness.
Ellie: 11:50
And I think it's really telling on this point that similarly to Gordon, who talks about developing Black consciousness only once he moved to the Bronx away from Jamaica, Fanon's experience on the train happened in France after he had moved from his homeland of Martinique to Lyon. and I think a question that I have is that if capital B Black consciousness is liberatory, but requires first the development of lowercase B back consciousness, which is not, then does capital B Black consciousness itself rely on white supremacy? And if so, is it a temporary kind of consciousness that is needed in order to overcome the current racial hierarchy that we have? or is it something that we could have without white supremacy? That's a live question for me, I'm not sure, maybe you'll have time to ask Gordon about that.
David: 12:36
Yeah, no, I hope we can touch upon that, but my sense is that you wouldn't need to be aware of the contradictions of white supremacy if white supremacy didn't exist in the first place in order to create racialized subjects.
Ellie: 12:47
exactly. Yeah, and I guess this also pertains to a broader question, philosophy of race, about whether racial distinctions are themselves products of hierarchies and inequities, or whether there would still be some role for different races in, , an ideal society. iIs the very concept of race itself hierarchical versus neutral but applied Hierarchically.
David: 13:10
Yeah, which is about whether there are something like racial essences, , right, independent of the system of oppression in which they take on
Ellie: 13:17
Oh, David, I didn't want to go there.
David: 13:19
Well, no, the reason I mentioned that,
Ellie: 13:22
Yeah, no, it's valid
David: 13:23
Yeah, it's a,valid point because just to take Fanon as an example, he was associated with the Negritude Movement, which was this movement led by a number of African writers and Caribbean writers. I'm here including African writers like Leopold Senghor, other people from the Caribbean, especially Martinique, like Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, all of whom are trying to think blackness, on its own terms and trying to figure out Ways in which black consciousness can sort of give itself the recognition that it seeks from, but cannot get from the white other. And so one of the criticisms that has been made later in the 20th century about this negritude movement is that, especially because it uses this term negritude, which is like blackness, like the condition of being black, is that in some cases it borders on a certain kind of essentialism, and one of the thinkers that I find fruitful from the movement of negritude is Edouard Glissant. And in particular, I want to pull a point from a book written by Glissant called Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, which means introduction to a poetic of the different or of the diverse, which is based on a series of lectures that he gave in the mid 1990s about blackness and language in particular. And Glissant presents a picture of black consciousness as defined by what he calls the thought of the trace. And his account really hinges on his understanding that Blackness emerged through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which is also a point that Lewis Gordon makes in his book. He says people weren't Black before slavery became an institution that gave meaning to the concept of Blackness. and so he says the first experience of the newly created black subject is of course the slaver boat, right? And one of the things that happened during the transatlantic slave trade is that individuals from very different cultural communities and geographical areas were put in the same boat, and put intentionally near other individuals who didn't share the same language as them, so they couldn't organize, they couldn't communicate. And so he says the first experience of the Black, , individual is an experience of being alienated from and denied language and community. And so what happens is that in the Americas, but all of this gets sort of filtered through the Caribbean first and foremost, you have new subjects that arrive as naked migrants who arrive without family, who arrive sometimes without literal clothes, but also without language and they are thrown into a new condition where they have to create meaning, create new bonds, create new traditions, and this is where that concept of the trace kicks in, on the basis of traces of their own cultural past that they could use in their new reality in order to connect with other people who didn't quite share their specific linguistic and cultural traditions. So what kind of Music can I use to communicate with other quote unquote black individuals in this new setting of the Americas in order to form a new identity. He gives the examples of all kinds of rituals and traditions associated with food, with music, with burial practices that ended up being forged in the Americas out of various kinds of African traditions in order to create a new mixture that became the culture of the Black person away from Africa. And so this sense of the trace of making something new out of bits of the past, he says, leads to a recomposition of the mental field for the Black subject. And that recomposition is the Black consciousness of those individuals who have been the product of the transatlantic slave trade.
Ellie: 17:50
Lewis Gordon is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Global Affairs and Department Head of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in Africana philosophy, existentialism, social and political philosophy, and more. He is the author of a number of philosophical works, including the books Bad Faith and Anti Black Racism, and Fanon and the Crisis of European Man.
David: 18:12
Hi Dr Gordon. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Gordon: 18:16
Yeah, thank you for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here.
David: 18:19
I want to begin by asking you about the idea around which your book is organized, which is the idea of Black consciousness, which you suggest is a form of consciousness that is produced by the white narcissism that is characteristic of societies that are centered around whiteness. And This suggests that white supremacy operates not just politically and economically, but also psychically. So my first question for you is, what is Black Consciousness and under what circumstances can it transform itself into what you refer to as capital B Black Consciousness, which is explicitly political and transformative?
Gordon: 19:04
Well first, I don't only talk about white supremacy as creating the negative form of Black consciousness. I also talk about anti Black racism. Now, for many listeners, that may sound like it's the same thing, but it's possible to get rid of white supremacy and still maintain anti Black racism. You see, a good example of that is, say, Latin America. You know, I mean, there are white supremacist states in Latin America, but there are some who claim they're not white supremacist states, but they're definitely anti Black countries. And, they're also, oddly enough, they're also anti Black countries. in majority Black places, in some African countries, for example. So, it's not exclusively that, but what we do know is the historical production through colonialism, the rationalization of race, all of that stuff, that is linked to what we know as the emergence of white supremacy through what we call Euro modern racism. But more to the point, the kind of Black consciousness we're talking about is racialized Black consciousness, and that comes from anti Black and white supremacist projects. There are also other kinds of consciousness of Blackness, among which are life affirming and politically active ones. Now, those are the ones I refer to with a capital B. Black Consciousness. So this has been theorized in South Africa, for example, by luminaries such as Steve Bantu kico. Just go to his book, I Write What I Like. Or Chabani Manganyi particularly his book on, for instance, well, he's a psychologist, and philosopher in South Africa and by the way, he's also this year's winner of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. But, his work on, , Black consciousness is well worth looking at. And another Lifetime Achievement Award winner from South Africa, Mabogo More. If you look in their works, they talk about Black consciousness in the ways in which I talk about them, but there are differences as well. Now, outside of the South African example, you could also see the more active, life affirming form of Black consciousness and Black power thought from El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, whom most people know as Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture, okay? And his book gets to the point, Black Power. Now, we already know that in an anti Black society, there's a fear of having the words Black and the word Power together. I mean, the whole point of racism is to make people disempowered. So, , if you're going to build an entire society about making sure certain people don't have power, then it terrifies you if they do. But here's the thing. There are people who also think about positive ways of thinking about Blackness and Black, Black categories in, for instance, Afrofuturity. This is something that's very hot right now, and you see it in movies from Black Panther to all kinds of other contexts. Now, one of the things you should bear in mind from the book is that I treat Black identity in a way that's not exclusively African or African descended. I talk about Black identities in Australasia. You may notice that I refer to the specific ethnic groups. So most people outside of Australia would say Australian Aboriginals, but that distorts the people. So I'll talk about Koori or different groups of communities there. But you will also find Blackness in Southwest Asia, particularly among certain forms of untouchable communities. And you will even find it in East Asia, for instance, among the Ainu in Japan. And also, surprise, surprise, in Eastern Europe as well, particularly if you think of Circassians. So, I talk about Blackness in a very inclusive way, although it is a fact that what has dominated the way people think about Blackness is through African descended peoples. Now, one thing also, and this is just very briefly, I also talk about double consciousness and potentiated double consciousness. Double consciousness is the construction of Black people by others. In other words, the negative images that's imposed upon the people we call Black. But potentiated double consciousness is how the people claim their agency and develop their way of seeing themselves. And of course, by definition, if they're acting and articulating life affirming practices, then they, in that sense, have potential. So, the capital B Black consciousness is a potentiated double consciousness. It's potentiated in the sense of embracing freedom and life.
Ellie: 24:28
And I think you talk about that also as Involving an act of political transformation, and so I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. Do you think that capital B, Black consciousness, this potentiated double consciousness that involves the act of political transformation of lowercase B black consciousness, would you say that that's like an essentially liberatory sort of political consciousness? Do you think it's neutral, but has the positive potential of liberation or something else?
Gordon: 24:59
It's fundamentally liberatory., this is something I share with Steve Bantu Biko, but I expand on it, and I expand on it for several reasons. The first one is, if we think about Biko, Biko identified something very profound, which is that in order to subjugate a people, to disempower them, to dehumanize them, you need to use state apparatuses. The problem, of course, is if you have free speech, if you have political activity, you're going to find that there will be people, white, black, brown, whatever color, who are saying, what's up with this? Why are we doing this? So you now need to suppress their political potential. So what Biko observed is that a commitment to a society being anti Black requires a constraint on its political potential. So yeah, so anti Black racism leads to a form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism or, as we could say today, fascism, in which you try to constrain people from acting on their political possibilities. So at the heart of all of these is an attack on politics itself and the creative humanizing potential of politics. Now that means in an effort to liberate politics, the struggle for liberation in terms of anti Black racism is a struggle for liberation of everyone. But the thing that we should bear in mind is that liberation itself is only part of a story. Because you see, you could say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're liberated. We got rid of that. But as we know, the next question is, Well, what are you going to do with it?
Ellie: 26:40
Yeah! Ha ha ha! Ha ha
Gordon: 26:42
And this is where we start the Discourse of Freedom. Freedom is about building a livable society, livable lives in which people's dignity, people's humanity are affirmed.
David: 26:55
And I want to also ask you about how we theorize that space that limits people's creative potentials and that, as you just noted, is also an attack on the political in itself, because one of the terms that we often use to talk about the cause of that problem is white privilege. And in your book, you suggest that the concept of white privilege may not be all that helpful, actually, because it might actually reinforce the idea of limited resources that are not really available to everybody, right? Like some people get privileges, other people don't, but maybe there's not enough to go around. So please tell us a little bit about the limits of this concept on your view. Is there a place for it in some contexts of resistance to injustice but not others? Or is the concept just not helpful? Because you do differentiate between privilege and centeredness.
Gordon: 28:01
Correct. Yeah, you could probably tell I go in the book, I go to town on the notion of privilege.
David: 28:07
Yeah, yes you do.
Gordon: 28:08
I absolutely can't stand it. It is so problematic. The problem I have is with the butchering of the concept of privilege in race contexts. The word privilege, it's constantly used in a way that buys into a notion that not only personalizes it, but if you think about the things that are associated with the privileges, we have to ask seriously if those are things that people shouldn't have. Everything that I've seen or heard about when people talk about, say, white privilege, refers either to something everyone should have, like clean water, education, fair treatment in courts, the list is rather long, employment, et cetera, or to something no one should have. For instance, say, the behavior of Donald Trump, or, you know, , Ku Klux Klan or whatever. I mean, So here's the thing. It strikes me that it's not productive to get into the white privilege discourse. If people are designated white, then at that moment, the only way you could say they could not have this so called privilege is to stop being white in a society that's constructed them as such. It seems to me it's more productive. to have formulations over things people can actually do and act upon. And this is one of the reasons why I prefer to address questions of license, because you see when certain people are exempt from accountability, then their actions slide into license. A good example is if we think of lynching, if you look at most lynchings that occurred, the perpetrators posed in front of all of the corpses, in front of the victims they have butchered. It's very easy to find the people who committed those actions. They're right there. They posed for it. Yet, they were immune. They went home. They were perfectly fine. That's a license. The truth is, Nobody should have that license. And there are many people who are not black, not brown, there are people who are white, who consider it an abomination to have that license and can work with other groups to make sure no one has that license. So we should make a distinction between what everyone should have and what no one should have. And that, to me, is a more productive political project in which we can be engaged.
Ellie: 30:41
And this idea that you have that we should be talking about licensing or centeredness rather than privilege, leads me to wonder just like sort of how your experience has been in recent years as a longtime philosopher of race who has witnessed a sort of change in public discourse, I would say somewhat radically since 2020. I mean, your book came out after 2020, but You have really different views about a lot of things than I think some of the more mainstream discourses in recent, not just philosophy of race, but also just like more broadly critical race theory and public discourse around this would suggest. And so I guess I'm curious like what your impressions are of like the state of anti Black racism in the U.S. today and like the problems with some of the discourses that you're witnessing following this discussion of privilege.
Gordon: 31:31
Yeah, a lot of my positions are unorthodox. For example, sometimes I would open a lecture with saying, you know, I really don't care that there are racist white people in the world. I care that we have structured systems of power that support their racism. Similarly, if we talk about non white people who are anti Black racists, the same thing. An observation that has a lot of salience since, you know, Floyd is that Look, if someone has his knee on my neck, I'd rather get rid of the conditions that enable him to have his knee on my neck. Now, once his knee is off my neck, I could work with other people to make sure nobody puts their knees on other people's neck. That's a more productive enterprise. However, if I'm going to be obsessed with the soul of that person, I'm going to try to save it. I'm going to be obsessed with trying to make that person not an anti Black racist. I'm wasting time because I'm not addressing the power structures that are in place, and this is connected to moralism. Moralism is looking for a kind of purity in people. That, I find, is a big waste of time. In other words, moralism takes you nowhere. We need to have something where that Black person and that White person could work together to say, what are we going to do to dismantle these kind of systems of unequal distributions of power and systems that are designed to degrade the humanity of people?
Ellie: 32:59
Yeah, I think this is all really compelling and you mentioned that your view is unorthodox and this is a perfect opportunity for me to ask you about, I think, the most surprising part of reading your book for me, which was your discussion of transracialism. So a number of years ago, for listeners who might not know this, there was major controversy around a philosopher named Rebecca Tuvel, who wrote an article called In Defense of Transracialism. And Tuvel, who is white, developed the argument that proponents of transracialism offer the same kinds of defense for their position as those who support trans identities premised on sex and gender. So the basic idea of the article was that you can use the same kinds of defenses that are used to legitimize trans identities in the case of gender to also legitimize transracial identities. And she focused on the case of Rachel Dolezal, who claims blackness purely on the basis of personal self identification. There's tons of controversy around this. in the world of philosophy. And you were one of the philosophers of race who was asked at the time to offer a response to Tuvel's article. And you return to this situation in your book. And you actually suggest that Dolezal can be considered as having capital B Black consciousness. So I'm curious, on what basis would you say that somebody like Rachel Dolezal could have Black consciousness, especially the capital B type? And is it right to see that claim as a defense of transracialism?
Gordon: 34:26
Ah, wonderful, wonderful question. Well, the first thing I'd like to say is one of the things about Rebecca Tuvel is that she, like me, is Jewish. And, you know, it's funny, that's not brought up in a lot of the debates around her article, but I'm bringing it up here because there's a whole complicated issue about how Jews relate to these issues. In the book, for instance, I talk about how even the concept of race in a prototypical notion of reza, many people today call it raza, was about dealing with Jews and Moors. Moors, as we know, were Afro Muslims, and Jews were definitely not people. were basically looked at in terms of brown and, you know, darker, etc. So, that's a whole other story. So, that's one thing. The second thing is, connected to the previous question, I also make a distinction between Moral Responsibility, and Political Responsibility. And as you could probably guess, a lot of Political Responsibility links to the capital B, Black Consciousness, because I talked about agency, liberation, political freedom, etc. So, I bring these up because a lot of people mistakenly think political responsibility is simply about applying moral responsibility to the political sphere, but there are unique dimensions of political responsibility that I outline and discuss in the book, connected in discussions from with people such as Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, and Iris Marion Young, among others. Now, specifically, Tuvel. I interpreted Tuvel as arguing that the objections raised against transracialism are similar, if not identical, to those placed against transgender or transsex identities or identification. I'm only using those terms now just to clarify, because today, you know, people say trans, okay? But in order to bring out the nuance of this argument, I apologize to any of the listeners, but I have to say transgender and transsex in order to do it. Okay? Now, some of the arguments that would be used against transgender or transsex would include, for instance, the notion of the absence of history for the transgender or transsex individual, or claim that their experiences are not the same as the proposed gender or sex with which they identify. Now, what Tuvel does is to examine these kind of objections, and she concluded that, transracialism is identical with transgender or transsex. Her conclusion is that better arguments may be needed for the rejection of one versus the other. You know, so there are a lot of people attributing to her arguments that she wasn't making. She's just saying if you're going to reject one and their arguments. are similar. You need to add something to it. Now, my position is radically existentialist, and you know, it's funny, there are a lot of people who are hoping that, you know, given the four decades of writings I have on this, I'm going to come out and take on the big, bad, white woman, and again, the complex thing that Rebecca Tuvel, being Jewish, knows is that she's not white everywhere. She's white in certain places, but not white everywhere. And this is something I could tell you with my relatives. I mean, you know, I'm born Jewish from a Jewish family in the Caribbean. I talk about that in the book.
Ellie: 37:58
Yeah, you have a really amazing account in your family.
Gordon: 38:01
Yeah, and I have relatives who are not the same racial identity in some places versus others. And I have relatives where people see them. They're like, yo, that's a white person. Do not call that relative a white person. They're the blackest, blackest, black, black, black. So it's one of these things where I actually know that empirically. Okay. But that doesn't really address the question still, unless we think about a radically existential position, a radically existential position rejects a prior essence or social identity. or psychic life that accompany them. In other words, it's through our actions, our lived experience, that we become our identities and our understandings. And I give examples in the chapter, for instance, of many people who actually became Black people without actually strategizing or trying to become Black people. So I don't see transracial people as passing. Except when they claim so in bad faith. There are people who could be people who are lying to themselves about being black. That's a different category. But I'm talking about people who are living their lives. And at the end of the day, it turns out that their consciousness of all their relationships and everything else is as a Black person. Now, as I said, I give examples in the book of people who are Black, but meet all the criteria of being white in other contexts. And I also give examples of people who remember having been white. So this is, it's one thing if people are like, yo man, I've always been Black. But there are people through immigration or other experiences, who have become Black through the relationships they have had. So my conclusion is actually a more radical one, which is, look, who says we, today, are the end all, be all, final word on what we'll become tomorrow? The reality is there are many possibilities of what people could be, and we're living through the transitions of that. We're living through it. Not only in terms of genders and sex, of which there may be many more to come, but we're living through this also in terms of race. And it strikes me that if we're really going to be committed to the idea of the constructivity of race, we're going to have to deal with the reality that it could be constructed in ways that we may not like, but may be more meaningful for generations to come.
David: 40:32
Yeah, that's really interesting, and I want to ask a follow up directly about this. Maybe it's me pushing a little bit on the subject because you mentioned that there can be individuals who change race simply because the structural organization of their social relations has changed independently of anything they've done on their own, right? Like the laws in their country changed. Maybe geopolitical boundaries are redrawn. There is a social change in how people talk about race, so on and so forth. In the case of Rachel Dolezal, however, it seems as if we're not talking about a social change. It's much more individualized. It's much more particular. And it now makes me think about your reference to there being individuals who might be transracial but in bad faith. And so I want you to just talk a little bit about that, about how we tell what might be signs of transracial bad faith versus, on your view, indicators that racial categories are just evolving as they frequently do. Because I think your book does a really good job at capturing that kind of sense of constant change, especially through the concept of creolization, which is very central in your book. But how do we tell when it's bad faith versus not when we're talking about a particular individual?
Gordon: 41:56
Well, one of the things about bad faith that we should pay attention to is that bad faith tries to destroy the norms of evidence because bad faith is about lying. So I'm not presuming, for instance, that Rachel Dolezal is truthful. I'm just opening the possibility for it. A sign of lying, for instance, would be to deny their past. There are people, for instance, who would say that I was born in a white family, I grew up white, and I've gone through a process where my realization of how to live through the world is such that I live through the world as a Black person. This is, would be very similar to a person if we used a transsex example or transgender example who would say, I was born anatomically male or born anatomically female. I went through certain things. I tried to live it. and I've come to the realization that how I could live as me is in a certain way. Now, I don't take that kind of person as being in bad faith, but one of the things that we should bear in mind is just like we use psychoanalysis and many other ways to look at indications of how people go through processes of denial, that is where we deal with the individual level. So, all I am arguing for is to open the possibility that there could be people who are in a form of critical good faith in which they are adhering to evidence, they're being truthful, and they're living the lives that fit them. One of the things I should say, though, is I'm really curious about why people are so threatened by this. There's this obsession of making people we consider white, at least, the center so much of these stories. It seems to me that if they're just living their lives and they're not the center of the story, they're part of a community story, I don't see anything wrong with that. what this tells us is the social world is a lot more nuanced and complex than we realize. And it's a lot more open, but as we know, An existential, I'm just saying existential for shorthand, but human reality is not a well formed formula. It's not closed. Human reality is an ongoing possibility of relationships that, at times, surprise us.
David: 44:26
And there are many ways of dealing with that. complexity, that nuance, that surprising quality of human life that you're alluding to. Obviously, some are more life affirming than others. And I want to ask you about the affirming dimension of your book, which is the totality of the book and that there is only one part of the book where that comes out. But in particular, I'm thinking here about the end of your book, where you talk about the blues, which of course is a genre of music, but it's also a lot more than that. You say that it's. It's a genre, it's a mode of being, and it's also a mood. And you argue that, unfortunately, the power of the blues has been lost. And focusing in this case on black music and its evolution, you argue that it was lost as the blues. were overtaken by rap and hip hop in more recent years, which you argue lack the seriousness and the depth of the blues, and sometimes they just are a form of entertainment. there is a point in your book where you say that these new forms of musical entertainment risk minstrelsy. And so I want you to say a little bit more about this, about what the blues offers for black liberation and what is missing in these other more recent expressions of black music.
Gordon: 45:57
Okay, so in a word, what, the blues, the way I'm using it, which transcends simply music, offers is maturity, the project of becoming adults. A fundamental aspect of the dehumanization of Black people is to treat us always as children. To treat us as a game. As something to laugh at, as something to patronize, etc. Whereas as adults, we take responsibility for our existence. For instance, blues poetry or blues lyrics tend to take responsibility for one's existence and often does so with irony. It's a very existential performance. Now, one of the things I should stress is that I don't argue that the entertainment, the minstrelsy, is intrinsic to rap and hip hop. I actually love rap and hip hop, so that's not my argument. The argument is that in a society that loves Black people in the form of minstrelsy, that happens in that genre, and it's a very successful performance. It makes a lot of money. However, there are artists who in hip hop who pose the critical possibilities, who bring the blues sensibility to hip hop and other genres. A great example is if you think about the absolutely brilliant, astounding Meshell Ndegeocello. Mshell Ndegeocello from her first album, Plantation Lullabies all the way through her Womanist Theological Reflection. She raps, she performs bass, she does all kinds of things, but there's no way to listen to Meshell Ndegeocello and not also here, the blue sensibility that's there. There are other artists that could come to mind. I see this also even in certain performances of De La Soul. I do think, however, that there is much patronizing of rap and hip hop artists, especially through the so called Black Authenticity narratives. And this is one of the things I bring up, you see, and as you can tell, I said I'm unorthodox. I'm adamantly against Black Authenticity narratives. Every time I see what so called Black Authenticity narratives, I just see stereotypes. And in fact, I remember even in the 70s when I was an adolescent, When young black kids would look at these movies that were written by white Hollywood screenwriters about Black people. They would really believe that's how Black people are. And then start walking around like this. There are people who really think that, for instance, even Black speech is a lot of this stuff we see in popular culture. I have a friend who did something really remarkable. He recorded a lot of elderly Black people. from the South, many years ago, people who were born, whose grandparents were enslaved, were from Mississippi and other places, and they don't speak the way these stereotypes of Black people are. They, you know, Black people don't ordinarily say, I is going somewhere. We actually know how to conjugate verbs. The thing is, This effort, of course, is to make a kind of exhale for white supremacy by having Black people actually begin to believe and perform these stereotypes. Now, that is one thing. There is, however, a distinction that should be made between the aesthetic qualities of a music and its political content. Now, remember, I said I love hip hop. I love listen to rap., I also love jazz, I love blues, I love all kinds of Black music. Soul, I love reggae, I love samba, I love all kinds of West African forms, I love Afrobeat. They're great music. However, they don't have to be saving the world for me to love them. I don't treat art as garnish, and what I mean by that is, we could have nutrition in our body, we could reproduce, we could do all kinds of things with no art. However, if you took art out of the human world, you'll also take meaning out of the human world. If you took art out of the lives of people, Many people would walk off of a cliff. And that is because, you see, there is no teleological explanatory force for art out in the world. Art actually emanates from us as human beings as we seek meaning. And I think that's good enough. It's good enough for us to enjoy music, and especially because existence, or rather being, doesn't give a damn about us. In having art bring meaning to our lives. it facilitates us giving a damn about ourselves, and I think that's good enough. So, in the end, my criticism is not of the form, get rid of hip hop My criticism is get rid of the minstrelsy in it, if you're thinking politically. If you like minstrelsy, however, then go enjoy it all you'd like.
Ellie: 51:09
Well, this, I think, is a nice note to end on with thinking about the beauty of art. And yeah, maybe not so much the minstrelsy, but in any case,
Gordon: 51:19
Yeah, I'll pass on the minstrelsy. Yeah.
Ellie: 51:23
We love your work. We are so grateful for your time. This has been a fascinating interview filled with so many gems,, so many pearls of wisdom. So thank you for taking the time. We really appreciate it.
Gordon: 51:34
Oh, thank you so much.
David: 51:36
And to our listeners, we recommend Dr. Gordon's book. Check it out. It's a wonderful take on race and existentialism and psychoanalysis and there are a lot of kernels of gold in there for all of us. Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly Zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time, tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast. com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair wage.
Ellie: 52:19
David, that was such a great interview. It was just like really interesting point after really interesting point.
David: 52:26
Yeah, I really enjoyed this discussion, Ellie, and there were some parts of the book that just blew my mind in terms of the connections they made between race theory, politics, ethics, the contemporary moment, even music. There's a wonderful reading in connection to cinema of Black Panther, which we didn't get to talk about. But tell me what stood out for you the most about our conversation.
Ellie: 52:49
I feel like I'm going to be mulling over his Rachel Dolezal argument for a while because that was like, that was the most surprising thing to me when I read the book and I was like, okay, we got to talk to him about this. What he said made a good amount of sense for me, especially because, like Gordon, I have existentialist commitments, but to have existentialist commitments doesn't mean what some people think it means, which is just you think that everything is a choice. We also recognize that there are deep social structures that shape our perception, and so I didn't take Gordon to be denying that and just saying you can try a race on and off at will at all, which I think is the shallow way of understanding that. But at the same time, this idea that Rachel Dolezal has capital B Black consciousness is definitely something that goes against my usual beliefs about this. And also the stuff that I read about not only her case, but also the Tuvel affair, which Gordon talked about. I mean, I was learning from a lot of Black philosophers when Rebecca Tuvel wrote this piece in defense of transracialism, saying, hey, here are all the things that are wrong with Argument and some of those things that are wrong with his argument had to do with the fact that Analogizing race and gender overlooks the way that they've been deployed differently historically, which I think Gordon kind of touched on in his answer. So yeah that's sort of where my thinking is going here. How about you? Oh,
David: 54:09
No, I agree, because like you, I was surprised initially just at the reappearance of Rachel Dolezal. I thought we, I would never have to think about her again,
Ellie: 54:17
See, me wasn't the reappearance, it was the claim. Like, Rachel, Dolezal has capital B, Black consciousness. I was wait what?
David: 54:24
So for me, the question is whether somebody can have upper B Black consciousness without having had lower B black consciousness. And so does Rachel Dolezal have lower B black consciousness, similar to the experience of Lewis Gordon reporting being called the N word when he was a child in the Bronx by a white kid, right? It's that sense of being forced or shoved into a position of inferiority and let that sort percolate through your being and shape, your mental landscape. So for me, that's one question, but I really think this has a lot to do with his genealogy of race. So I'm not surprised by his position, given that he has this account of the history of race, according to which our modern concept for race comes from this term that was used primarily in the Iberian peninsula, he says from like the eighth to the 15th centuries, Raza that at the time was used to designate Afro Muslim and Jewish individuals. So all these Christian, like modern day Spanish and Portuguese people, would refer to these other groups, Jewish and Afro Muslims, as being of different razas. And so originally it has a religious connotation.
Ellie: 55:36
Also, by the way, the term Raza comes from horse breeding.. Yes, he talks about this.
David: 55:41
But what's really interesting to me is that he says that because of the original religious context in which that concept is deployed, from its very inception, the concept of race has been haunted, that's his word, has been haunted by the politics of passing. Because of course, when you're talking about Christian versus Muslim versus Jewish politics in the 8th to the 15th century, One of the central pressures was getting Jewish and Muslim people on the Iberian Peninsula to convert to Christianity. And so there's this sense that one can cross the boundaries of a raza distinction. And so that's where I think he's getting the sense that those boundaries are porous and individuals can travel across them in various ways.
Ellie: 56:29
So, to go back to your point about whether Dolezal could be considered having capital B Black consciousness, because that would depend on her first having lowercase b black consciousness, just want to briefly recall how he describes lower b black consciousness as we close. He says, "First, there is the consciousness of being a race, which the white world produced", which I think directly relates to what you're talking about, right? I mean, even though, as we said at the beginning of the episode, race, as we understand it today, is a product of the 16th century, after this term, raza, was already used, and white supremacy in the, colonial transatlantic slave trade kind of manner didn't exist yet in that time period that you were talking about in the Middle Ages. There's still like a precursor there and there's still a way that the term raza is getting used in a way that prefigures important elements of the race system as we know it. And the second is the set of Black perspectives, often called Black experience, and understanding of that consciousness. And this is what Black people produced. Third is the everyday life of Black people when white people are not around, or at least not on Black people's minds. That is also what Black people produced. So this is really interesting to me because nothing about it actually implies anything. First off your actual physical form in the sense of DNA or blood, right? And history, the way that that physical form partakes of an intergenerational history. And second, it can be produced through community involvement. And I think that's something that Gordon touched upon in his answer to our question about this, too. You know, to have lived in this community is to be able to acquire a Black perspective, or is to have acquired a Black perspective. So, yeah, I'm not sure what I think about that. I would want to have more conversations with people, I think because I'm more familiar with the arguments of Black philosophers against this type of view, but it's interesting that Gordon is drawing it out from an existential perspective.
David: 58:20
Well, and I also think that his own Caribbean background is relevant here because Glissant is somebody that talks a lot about the concept of creolization, creolizacion, in his writings, also something that comes up to a certain extent in the writings of other writers of this movement of negritude. And the idea there is that in the Caribbean, you see this transformation of identities that happens through contact. Sometimes that contact can be brought about by grave injustices like the transatlantic slave trade and still nonetheless produce new identities and new positions that are fundamentally porous and flexible and supple in many ways. And so he's coming out of a context in which the Manichaean white versus black distinction that we tend to embrace in the U. S. just doesn't hold, right? There are many shades of being black. There are many ways of being more or less white. And so for him, that porosity entails some transmissibility of identities. And this is something that, as I just mentioned, also appears in the writings of Glissant, who says that the Caribbean, in this sense, is almost like a microcosm, not just for the Americas, but for the whole world. He says, the entire world. is in a constant state of creolization, of creating new things out of old things through all forms of contact, such that it's always in a state of motion and no identities are ever fixed.
Ellie: 59:57
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David: 1:00:07
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Ellie: 1:00:22
We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.