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Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience

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Bad Faith, Blacks, and Disenfranchisement
A Commentary on a News Report in the Light of Lewis Gordon’s Book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

Kumi Ansah-Koi
University of Ghana

The News Report

I came across the news report while surfing the Internet on October 23, 1998. My boredom and tiredness vanished immediately as the import of that news report’s headline registered on my senses: "Report: 1.4 Million Black Men in U.S. Cannot Vote because of Felony Convictions."¹ The import of that headline took no time to sink in. Most significant to me was the fact of disenfranchisement; the high number of blacks involved; and the reason for disenfranchisement (criminality or roguery). I was yet to read the posted news item! What I had seen was only the headline! Of course, with alacrity I read the detailed news item for all it was worth.

Later that day I was to read a more detailed report in the same vein carried by The Christian Science Monitor. This one was entitled "Black Men Hit Hard by Voting Ban for Convicts." Further investigations I carried out revealed that all the major U.S. news agencies and mass media outlets carried, in varying degrees of elaboration and analysis, that report regarding large numbers of disenfranchised African Americans who lost their suffrage on account of their criminality. The Internet report revealed, inter alia, that

• Thirteen percent of black men cannot vote in this year’s elections because they are convicted felons.

According to another report recently released:

• Some of those 1.4 million black men are in prison, but others are on probation or parole or have served their sentences.

Reports by Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project concluded:

• Nation-wide, 3.9 million people—or one in 50 adults—are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised because of a felony conviction, the research and advocacy groups concluded.

• Their state-by-state survey of voting laws for felons shows the greatest percentages of disenfranchised black men are in Alabama and Florida, where one in three cannot vote.

The Christian Science Monitor’s report, (subtitled "In Some States, One-Quarter Have Lost—For Good—The Right to Vote, New Study Shows") was much more detailed with rather crisp observations such as:

• Close to 4 million Americans will be excluded from the political process this year, including roughly 13 percent of the country’s black adult men.

• In seven states, 25 percent of African-American men are permanently barred from casting a ballot.

• In two states—Florida and Alabama—nearly one-third of all African-American men can’t vote.

These are among the findings of a report released recently by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch. They call on lawmakers to repeal felon-disenfranchisement laws, which in some states date back to Colonial times, and are supported in large part because they are seen as another way to punish criminals, beyond fining them and locking them up.

Some analysts believe the large-scale disenfranchisement under way in the African American community (in particular) violates the Voting Rights Act and the equal-protection clauses of the Constitution. But few elected officials are willing to take on a cause that would likely be portrayed by political opponents as an effort to empower convicted murderers, rapists, and drug dealers."²

Background to the Study

As a middle-aged African who has lived much of my life in my native Africa but who has a long-standing keen professional interest in studying Africa and the Black Diaspora, it was with both great expectations and considerable trepidation that I enrolled in a class on Race and Philosophy. I held great expectations because the course offered prospects of helping me come to greater understanding of the complex challenges and realities of the Black Diaspora. I had great expectations also because the course held the prospect of introducing me to the philosophical dimensions and ramifications of race relations in a society in which race was certainly an important and consequential mode of social stratification. But I also had some trepidation when I first enrolled for the course.

I was not really totally new to philosophy as a discipline. Long ago, as a young freshman in university, I had been offered (and did indeed take) philosophy, history and political science. It subsequently became self-evident that try as I did, I simply could not follow the intricacies and complexities of Formal Logic (which was a prerequisite for further studies in Philosophy at my university). So, much to my chagrin and my love for the discipline notwithstanding, I simply had to abandon the subject at the earliest opportunity—after the first year.³ Could I cope with philosophy now? That was the source of my trepidation. It was with great expectations, but mixed emotions then, that I embarked on the course.

Lewis R. Gordon’s Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism⁴ and various incidental and consequential issues it raises, constituted a main focus of the course. It was while the class was at the terminal stages of such engagement that the American media, in the countdown to the November 3, 1998 U.S. elections, carried the news report which constitutes the focal point of the present study. That news report, cited above, was very interesting and remarkable in my estimation. To me it was very illustrative, in important respects, of Gordon’s frame of analysis, his concepts, and indeed the very thrust of that work of his, which a good part of the semester had been devoted to dissecting. On first coming across the news report in question, I decided to follow through on its pertinence and topicality and to review it against a backdrop of Gordon’s analysis and frames of reference in his work in question. Therein lies the genesis of the present study.

Why undertake such assignment? In my opinion, the timing and high-profile prominence given in that news report was very telling; very reflective of the "condition of relative lack of black power to represent themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by white supremacist ideologies."⁵ Such was the background, or context, of the news report in question.

The social context was one which "often associates blackness with bodily energy, visceral vitality, and sexual vibrancy."⁶ But more of that later; in the main body of the present work. In my estimation, that news report (its innocuous appearance notwithstanding) was itself par excellence an example of "bad faith" in the Gordonian sense of the term.

Research Objectives

There is the need to succinctly and concisely state the objectives and concerns animating the present work. In brief articulation, the work’s objectives are as follows: to examine and review the news report stated above in the light of the analysis, conceptual moulds, and frames of reference offered in Lewis R. Gordon’s Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism cited above. The point of such analysis would be to test the practicality, pertinence, import, and the utilitarian value of Gordon’s work as it may be incorporated to throw light on the issues in question. Towards engagement with those concerns, the veracity or otherwise of the allegations of fact contained in the news report would not be in question. It would be an axiomatic assumption in the present work that: a) the statistics and assertions of fact made in the news report are true I (though not necessarily valid ); and that b) the study upon which the news report is based was really undertaken and actually carried out scientifically and in "good faith." Further to that, the assumption would be made in the present work that the news report in question fairly and accurately represents the findings and conclusions conveyed by the study.

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework

Towards a better appreciation of the issues and perspectives thematically focused on in the present work, the point needs to be made that Gordon’s work in question conceptually falls within the Existentialist school of philosophical thought.⁷ It, therefore, falls within the philosophical scope of phenomenology, as opposed to any other rival school of philosophical orientation.⁸ Also, it needs to be stated that the matrix of existentialism within which Gordon’s work is carried out, did not start with him. It has a longstanding history. Strictly, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is generally recognized to be, as it were, "the father of Existentialism." Gordon keeps faith with him; but his existentialism is mediated by; reacts to, and is greatly influenced by the life and writings of twentieth-century French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).

Theoretical schemes apart, there is the fundamental issue as to just what is race. Is race biological? Or is it, rather, largely a political and social construct? Is it instead a historical construct? or a sociological construct? Answering that question concisely is not easy, and my answer would be manifested in the work. Suffice it to say now that elements of each of those contribute to the making of the notion and reality of race.⁹

The News Report in the Light of Gordon’s Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism

First, just what is "bad faith"? For, as Lewis Gordon himself notes, exploring "antiblack racism from the standpoint of bad faith has received relatively cursory and quite inadequate attention."¹⁰ From (the Sartrean, and following from him) the Gordonian sense of usage, "we can tentatively define bad faith as the effort to hide from responsibility for ourselves as freedom."¹¹ It involves the denial of choice and responsibility in a situation where one is really confronted with the freedom to choose, and one’s being as freedom is manifest transcendence. In Gordon’s words,

bad faith is an effort on the part of consciousness in the flesh to hide from the anguish of its living as desire, as an unfulfilled, empty being, as a being subject to continuous confrontation with freedom.¹²

Bad faith, for Gordon, is acquired either through transcendence or through facticity; but, however acquired, it involves a lie to one’s self : an erroneous but self-serving (although, indirectly other-serving) assumption of objectism, or complete freedom. Racism, specifically antiblack racism, is presented by Gordon as bad faith par excellence. He distinguishes between "strong" and "weak" senses of bad faith. In his words,

strong bad faith signifies an individual hiding from his own freedom. Weak bad faith signifies the web of beliefs and artifices that constitute the general spirit of seriousness that enables the individual to hide from his and others freedom with great facility; it infects the realm of the social by congealing human reality with a prevailing, institutional condition of unfreedom, of the self-denial and discouragement of freedom. Hence we shall also call this "institutional bad faith."¹³

In sum, "weak bad faith is a convenient context-group denial for individuals to hide from themselves."¹⁴ A major contention of the present work is that the news report under scrutiny constitutes a perfect example of institutional bad faith (in the Gordonian sense of usage of that term) in American society. A glance at the trajectory of American electoral history is enough to make the point clear.

Following the forced termination of black slavery in America, institutionalized racism lived on in the U.S. in the form of Jim Crow laws and various Southern mores. The Color Bar was real, even though America was touted as a land of immigrants and a "melting pot." For a long while the Color Bar was enough to ensure the disenfranchisement of American blacks. Later, when that tide could no longer hold, the Literacy Bar was used as the practical means to disenfranchise the mass of American blacks. Protracted civil rights struggles which sometimes turned violent, ultimately ensured legal desegregation and the full enfranchisement of the black. Now, however, through the criminal law and the back door as it were, the goal of black exclusion from the center point of American politics was being realized. What statutory laws and literacy tests could not achieve on an enduring scale was now being realized through the laws of felony; by "demonizing" the African American. It is all part of a process geared at perpetuating an ontological situation in the U.S.A. in which "blacks serve as Absence and whites as Presence."¹⁵ In the antiblack racist setting that constitutes the contemporary U.S.A., "the white’s existence is justified, whereas the black’s existence needs justification. The blacks’ existence lacks something."¹⁶

In Gordonian terms, "the white’s facticity becomes his transcendence, and the black’s transcendence becomes his facticity."¹⁷ Hence the churning and wide dissemination of such facts as those carried by the news report; and on the heated eve of important and decisive elections.

The timing of the report is not without significance as far as attrition of bad faith to it is concerned. It is instructive, in that regard, that the news report under consideration nowhere concerns itself with the sociological and other empirical realities which induce and/or explain the admittedly high levels of black criminality. Neither does it focus, even in the slightest degree, on how to address an obviously regrettable complex reality. It is content to merely reduce blackness to "absence" in the Gordonian sense by merely brandishing statistics which confirm and rationalize black marginality and exclusion in American politics on grounds of their criminality or roguery. Given the crucial importance of the franchise and the electoral system in liberal-democratic politics, such disenfranchisement and attendant political exclusion cannot be said to be insignificant issues.

Since, as it is in the U.S., "in an antiblack world the white is superior to the black . . . that whiteness must be regarded as self-justified in such a world. This leads to the corollary that blackness must be unjustified."¹⁸ Such "unjustification of blacks" is just what, in practical terms, the news report as an instance of Gordonian bad faith, does really achieve!

Bad as the figures and statistical data offered in the news report are in terms of their negative articulation of the image of the black male, one is still struck that corresponding figures for other social groups are not offered. What pertains, for example, for the Latinos, Indians, and the like? One also needs to note the fact that the presented statistics do not take due cognizance of whatever extenuating or justifying circumstances may account for that level of criminality from a social group generally accepted to be the worst-placed in the American social fabric.

In short, both the statistics and the news report of which it forms an integral part, constitute instances of institutional, or weak, bad faith in American society. They rationalize the "interpretation of blacks as Absence and whites as Presence."¹⁹ They constitute instances of Gordonian bad faith; the absence of "good faith."²⁰ As Gordon remarks, "to remain in good faith requires realizing the possibility of being in bad faith."²¹ A demonstration of the bad faith nature of the news report is the fact that it shows neither awareness nor sympathy for the black’s "being or ontological limitation of human reality in an antiblack world."²²

A comment needs to be made about the research and advocacy groups which undertook the study. The same observation holds for the media which gave their report the high-profile attention it did. The comment is that while not imputing ill motives to them or questioning their bona fide intentions, they still stand guilty of bad faith in the Gordonian sense of that term.

Why not focus on disenfranchisement and criminality, pure and simple, and leave it at that to the exclusion of racial issues? Why give a report on criminality and disenfranchisement with the racial coloring and an antiblack racist tinge at that? Why feed the antiblack racist stereotypes of black male irresponsibility and roguery by irresponsibly and perhaps inadvertently supplying supposedly objective statistical evidence which, in the event, can really be accounted for on sociological grounds? For those reasons alone, they stand indicted of weak bad faith in the Gordonian sense of the term; that is, if they acted without any conscious antiblack malicious racist intent.²³ Weak bad faith is also known as institutional bad faith. However, if they acted with malicious racist intent, then they are guilty of strong bad faith. Other observations may be made about the news report in question. Notions of black criminality are rather widespread and common — particularly in the U.S.’s brand of antiblack racism. Some are very subtly put. The news report in question is a case in point. Reports like those, their supposed objectivity and innocuous appearance notwithstanding, provide the statistical data to feed such stereotypes and to ground them on some seeming basis of realism and hard evidence. They are in bad faith. They disguise and/or rationalize antiblack racism. For, as stated above, there are sound sociological reasons which explain the truly high incidence of criminality in black America, which are neither captured nor indicated in such reports.

It must be stated that antiblack racism does not, as it were, afflict whites only! As Gordon points out, "blackness is regarded, even by the black, as the antithesis of fulfillment in an antiblack world."²⁴ What better antithesis of fulfillment is there than the resort to roguery and criminality? Thereby the stereotypes are offered some confirmation in fact. I might add here that I wish neither to excuse nor to justify criminality and roguery!

Conclusion

It is indeed true that "ontological significance of consciousness precedes the epistemological question of self-recognition."²⁵ In other words, existential phenomenology is a realistic perspective. In this work, the Gordonian concept of bad faith, itself derived from a wider existential phenomenology, has been used to analyze a seemingly innocuous presentation of facts in the form of a news report. Beyond such innocuous presentation of supposed facts has been noted the perpetuation of antiblack racism in an antiblack U.S. What is the point of it all?

We must again draw on Gordon for the answer:

The critical ontological role of the concept of bad faith in the study of human phenomena is that of a hermeneutical scheme in which to understand human beings in the face of the rejection of human nature and a reductive view of history."²⁶

The concept of bad faith, it has been noted, is derived from existential phenomenology. In the words of Gordon, "what existential phenomenology has to offer anyone concerned with the study of race, then, are explanations²⁷ of three aspects of antiblack racism."²⁸ Those three aspects are identified and discussed by Gordon.²⁹ But since they do not fall within the thematic purview of the present work, we shall not dilate or discuss them. It only remains to add that hermeneutics, clarification, and a perception based on the twin pillars of a realistic identification of the issues and the formulation of workable remedies, seem to be sine qua non for the resolution of the reality of antiblack racism in the U.S.A.

Notes

1. http://www.cnn.com/US/9810/23/felony.no.vote.ap/

2. The Christian Science Monitor, Friday, October 23 1998, 4.

3. Lewis R Gordon’s work under focus in the present work has, as one of two quotes preceding the work, Fyodor Destoyevsky’s assertion in his Notes From Underground that "I live in spite of logic." I am almost tempted to scream that out loud to that university’s Philosophy Department.

4. Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1995.

5. Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (Routledge: New York, London 1993), 16.

6. Ibid., 61.

7. See the writings of Kierkeergard and Sartre for the writings of the two main pillars of existentialist thought. They offer an articulation of the essential tenets, outlook, and the philosophical ramifications of Existentialism.

8. Examples of rival outlooks, categorically rejected by Gordon, include pragmatism and postmodernism.

9. For helpful discussions of the notion and reality of race (admittedly largely from the perspective of antiblack racism), see Anthony Kwame Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, Grove Press, 1967); Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 1997); and Cornel West, Race Matters, op. cit.

10. Gordon; op. cit., 3

11. Ibid.,.8

12. Ibid.,.45

13. Ibid.,..45

14. Ibid.,. 48

15. Ibid.,.103

16. Ibid.,.100

17. Ibid.,.101

18. Ibid.,.104.

19. Ibid.,.103

20. For a discussion of the notion of good faith, which really is the absence of bad faith, see ibid., 56

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.,.105

23. See chapter 8 for definition and discussions of the notions of weak and strong bad faith.

24. Ibid.,.105

25. Ibid.,.l13

26. Ibid.,.136

27. Italics added.

28. Ibid.,.137

29. See 136–37.

Course Syllabus

Selected Topics: Race and Philosophy Fall 1998

P/R 3531 Dr. J. Taylor

Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-black Racism, New Jersey: Humanities Press. 1995.

Cornel West. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, New York: Routledge, 1993.

Course Description: This course is a survey of philosophical ramifications and perspectives relating to the question of "race."

Course Objectives:

• To acquire a perspective of race as a matter of philosophical construction.

• To throw light on the distinction between ‘race’ and ‘racism’.

• To characterize race ontologically.

• To assess relations of racial identity and human worth.

• To undermine racist ideologies.

• To explore possible bridges across racist impediments

Assignments:

1. Business meeting and general introduction.

From Race and the Enlightenment

2. Von Linne, "The God-given Order of Nature" and "The Geographical and Cultural Distribution of Mankind," pp. 10–28.

3. Beattie (B) and Kant (K), "Of National Characters: A Response to Hume (B)" and "On the Different Races of Man," pp. 29–64.

4. Kant and Herder (H), "The Kant-Herder Controversy,". pp. 65–78.

5. Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia," pp. 95–103.

6. Hegel, "The Geographical Basis of World History," pp. 110–49.

From Bad Faith and Anti-black Racism

Part I: Bad Faith

7. "A Determined Attitude," "The Irony of Belief," "Anguish," and "The Elusiveness of Transcendence," pp. 8–18.

8. "What Am I to Me?" "Taking Ourselves Too Seriously," and "The Body in Bad Faith," pp. 19–44.

9. "‘Strong’ and ‘Weak’ Bad Faith," "Some Critical Remarks," "How is Bad Faith Possible?" and "The Question of Authenticity," pp. 45–65.

Part II: Logic of Racism, Racist Logic

10. "A Recent Theory," "Racialism, Racism, Racialists, and Racists," and "The Affective Dimensions of Racism and Race," pp. 66–93.

Part III: Antiblack Racism

11. "White and Black Bodies in Bad Faith," "Black Antiblackness in an Antiblack World," and "Exoticism: Antiblackness Under the Guise of Love," pp. 94–123.

12. "Effeminacy: The Quality of Black Beings," and "Antiblack Racism and Ontology," pp. 124–39.

Part V: Critical Encounters

13. "Ethical Concerns" and "Deconstruction," pp. 163–75.

14. "Marxism" and "The Living Dead," pp. 176–84.

From Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America

Cultural Criticism and Race

15. "The new Cultural Politics of Difference," pp. 3–32.

16. "Black Critics and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation," pp. 33–44.

17. "A Note on Race and Architecture," pp. 45–54.

18. "Horace Pippin’s Challenge to Art Criticism," pp. 55–66.

19. "The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual," pp. 67–85.

Philosophy and Political Enlightenment

20. "Theory, Pragmatisms and Politics," pp. 89–106.

21. "Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic," pp. 107–18.

22. "The Limits on Neopragmatism," pp. 135–42.

23. "On Georg Lukacs," pp. 143–64.

Explaining Race

24. "Race and Social Theory," pp. 251–70.

25. "The Paradox of the African American Rebellion," pp. 271–92.

Requirements: Term paper, presentation, exams, attendance, and class participation. The term paper is 10–12 pages (type-written) in length, on a topic of theoretical aspects of race as covered in class. An outline must be approved prior to the start of your work on that paper. Groups will be formed to give a presentation on syllabus topics. There will be three in-class exams, essay. The last of the three will be a comprehensive final.
5% of your grade will be determined by attendance and class participation.

The first two exams are worth 20% each; the final is worth 25%. Term papers are 20%, with presentations at 10%, and again, the 5% for participation and attendance.

Office Hours: By Appointment

Office Location: Rm. 114, I. G. Greer. Phone: 262-3089

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APA Newsletters Fall 1999 Volume 99, Number 1

APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1