"Lewis Gordon's expansive philosophical engagement with the current moment--its histories and globalities, its politics and protests, its visual and sonic cultures--reminds us that the ultimate aim of Black freedom quests is, indeed, universal liberation." -- Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz "In Fear of Black Consciousness , Lewis Gordon brings together the strong threads of thought that have established him as a thinker whose reflections on race have produced singular illuminations on our times. Refining our conceptual understanding of how race consciousness is made and lived, Gordon lays out the traumatic character of race, and shows how reflection and survival are intertwined for all those who suffer from anti-Black racism. At the same time that he brings Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Fanon into his trenchant analysis of the present, he draws on a wide range of colonial histories, African popular culture, aboriginal histories, contemporary films and stories, to show the critical powers of creativity in dismantling racism by the making of Black consciousness, the making of a world where breath and love and existence become possible." --Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence " Reading Fear of Black Consciousness had me nodding so often and so vigorously, I got a mild case of whiplash. Perhaps it is to be expected when one of the premiere philosophers of race decides to take stock of our world in such a deeply critical and unabashedly personal manner. With surgical precision, laser sharp wit, and the eye of an artist, Lewis Gordon doesn't just dissect race, racism, and racial thinking but offers a clarion call to embrace Black Consciousness, to take political responsibility for decolonizing and transforming the world as it is.

" -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original "Occasioned by the author's own journey through Covid-19, this striking text offers the first systematic examination that I've seen of the epistemic dimensions of the universal illness that encompasses neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. We learn the differences between a first-level, naïve black consciousness, which Gordon defines as one's 'rude awakening' to the world of anti-blackness and a revised and refined 'Black consciousness,' which critically reflects on this world and is capable of radically transforming it. You will want Lewis Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness among your primary intellectual road supplies for the future." -- Hortense Spillers, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Emerita, at Vanderbilt University "In Fear of Black Consciousness , we are invited to think through the deep racial contours of philosophical thought and notice how black ways of being animate new modes of living together. As atrocity, injury, white supremacy, and racial violence loom, Gordon holds steady a Fanonian outlook, theorizing black consciousness as the realization of possibility--that is, a sustained political commitment that recalculates the stakes of freedom." -- Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds and Dear Science.