Fear of Black Consciousness

The Freedom Dreams team is hard at work on a new season of the show. It’ll come to you this fall. But in the meantime, we want to share a conversation Amanda recently had with the incredibly brilliant and tender-hearted philosopher, Lewis Gordon. Their talk was hosted by Source Booksellers in Detroit’s Cass Corridor this past winter.

Gordon's new book is Fear of Black Consciousness and in it he peaks precisely to the moment that we're in. He helps us to understand the COVID 19 pandemic, police violence, and this latest wave of social movements and repression, in the context of the past five years and the past five centuries–and longer. His book weaves in history, linguistics, film interpretation (with an incredible reading of Jordan Peele’s Get Out), music, memory, mythology, and more.

His sources and frameworks are so wide-ranging because his task is so ambitious: to understand the contours of society and how we make meaning, to tell the history of anti-black racism, and, always, to orient us toward liberation. In that orientation, his book belongs to the radical visionary organizing tradition, which James Boggs furthered so powerfully in his lifetime.

Gordon offers us tools to ask better questions of ourselves, like ‘how might we become agents of change?’ ‘How can we expand our options,’ and, as he puts it, ‘build productive and life-affirming institutions of empowerment?” If Lewis Gordon isn’t a Freedom Dreamer, we don’t know who is!