"This is the 30th Anniversary Edition of Lewis R. Gordon's classic existential phenomenological inaugural work, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. It is the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of bad faith-the attitude and effort of human beings attempting to escape freedom and responsibility. Gordon examines bad faith as an ever-present possibility of human existence, a condition that haunts freedom"-- Provided by publisher.

As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological of human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the bad faith of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of truth is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity--a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis of European Man. In his examination of the roots of this crisis, Gordon explores the problems of historical salvation and the dynamics of oppression, the motivation behind contemporary European obstruction of the advancement of a racially just world, the forms of anonymity that pervade racist theorizing and contribute to seen invisibility, and the reasons behind the impossibility of a nonviolent transition from colonialism and neocolonialism to postcolonialism.