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. That black women could worship a god with whom they are neither similar nor could ever be identical demonstrates that love does not require similarity. Gordon argues that the ethical issue against anti-black racism is not one of seeing the similarity between blacks and whites but of being able, buy viagra over the counter simply, to respect and see the ethical importance of blacks as blacks. The fight against racism, in other words, does not require the elimination of race or noticing racial difference but instead demands respecting the humanity of the people who exemplify racial difference. In Existence in Black, Gordon outlines themes of black existentialism in the text’s introduction. He argues that black existentialism addresses many of the same themes of European existentialism but with some key differences.
Gordon points these dynamics out through discussions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation that black people are often treated as problems instead of people who face problems in the world and Frantz Fanon’s call for black people to become actional through transcending the dialectics of seeking white recognition. Gordon also argues that black existential philosophy is an area of thought, which means that contributions to its development can come from anyone who understands its problematics.
In other words, one does not have to be black to contribute to this area of thought. Existence in Black reflects his point since it has articles by other authors from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds discussing themes ranging from African and Afro-Caribbean existential struggles with beliefs in predestination to black feminist struggles with postmodern anti-essentialist thought. Gordon’s chapter in the book focuses on the problem of black invisibility, which he points out is paradoxical since it is a function of black people being hyper-visible.
For some scholars, essentialism means that one cannot study race and racism and colonialism properly because they, in effect, lack essences. Gordon argues that although human beings are incomplete, are without laws of nature, it does not follow that they cannot be studied and understood with reasonable accuracy. Drawing upon the thought of Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, and Frantz Fanon, Gordon argued that the task is to develop accurate portrayals or to thematize everyday life. He argues that racism and colonialism are everyday phenomena and, as such, are lived as “normal” aspects of modern life.
Even under severe conditions, human beings find ways to live as though under ordinary conditions. This ordinariness can get to a point of distorting reality. In the case of racism, one group of people are allowed to live an ordinary life under ordinary conditions while another group or other groups are expected to do so under extraordinary conditions. Institutional bad faith renders those extraordinary conditions invisible and advances as a norm the false notion a shared ordinary set of conditions. This is the meaning behind the colloquial notion of “double standards.” Gordon here also advances a theory that provides an answer to social constructivists in the study of race. What they fail to understand, Gordon argues, is that sociability is also constructed, which makes social constructivism redundant.
Gordon’s writings have continued an expansion of his and related philosophical approaches and lexicon. In his book of social criticism, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (1997), he explored problems in critical race theory and philosophy and introduced one of his most famous thought experiments. In the chapter “Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire”, Gordon purports to have created a racial-gender-sex-sexuality matrix and used it to challenge our assumptions of mixture.
A white woman in that matrix, for instance, is mixed because her whiteness makes her masculine but her womanness makes her black. Or certain relationships are transformed, where same-sex interracial relationships are not necessarily homosexual or lesbian ones. What is striking about the book is a theme that some of his critics noticed in his earlier books, and that is the role of music in his prose and analysis. Gordon here builds on his argument about the everyday in his earlier work to argue that a danger of most theories of social transformation is that they fail to take seriously the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.
Moral and political thought and economy are good at constructing contexts in which people could sustain biological and social life, but they are terrible at articulating what it means to live in a livable world. Gordon argues that a genuinely emancipatory society creates spaces for the ordinary celebration of everyday pleasure. In his more recent work, Gordon has been arguing about the geography of reason and the importance of contingency in social life. However, it needs to be noted that the legitimacy of his “mixture-matrix” is largely dependent upon his controversial applications of semiotics to race and gender.
A problem of Western thought, Gordon argues, is that it has yoked reason to instrumental rationality and created an antiblack notion of reason’s geographical landscape. Shifting the geography of reason, he argues, would entail a war on the kinds of decadence that treat any human community as incapable of manifesting reason. But more, Gordon argues that reason is broader than rationality since it must be used to assess rationality. Rationality could only attempt to impose consistency on reason, but reason could point out that maximum consistency, although rational, may be unreasonable. Gordon’s recent work has been a development of these issues. His co-edited books with Jane Anna Gordon, Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (2005) and A Companion to African-American Studies(2006), offer some important new concepts in the ongoing development of his thought. In the first, he offers a comprehensive treatment of African-American philosophy and the importance of Africana existential phenomenological thought through a critique of Audre Lorde’s admonition of using the master’s tools. The two Gordons’ response is that (1) tools should not only be used to tear down houses but also to build them up; (2) the master’s tools are not the only tools available; and (3) the construction of alternative houses (theoretical models, philosophies) could decenter the value of the master’s house, denuding it of mastery. In his essay “African-American Philosophy, Race, and Racism”, which is his main contribution in that volume, he provides a comprehensive and concise statement of his work to date. In the introduction to the Companion, he and Jane Gordon formulate a theory of African-American Studies as a form of double consciousness. But key here is the introduction of their concept “the pedagogical imperative.” This imperative refers to a teacher’s duty to learn and keep learning the broadest and most accurate picture of reality available to human kind. The editors also advance a theory of internationalism, localism, and market nihilism in the face of the rise of an independent managerial class to describe the dynamics of the contemporary academy.
Gordon considers all of his works to be part of a humanist tradition. The role of intellectuals, in his view, is to challenge the limits of human knowledge and, in so doing, achieve some advancement in what he calls “the Geist war.” For him, the importance of intellectual work could be summarized by his claim that one “achieves” as a human being for humanity but one always fails alone. Gordon’s work has also been characterized as a form of existential sociology.