He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B.
It's been that way since at least the time we left Egypt as a [culturally] mixed Egyptian and African [i.e., from other parts of Africa] people.
"[full citation needed] Gordon founded the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School in the Bronx, New York.
It is a denial of human reality, an effort to evade freedom, a flight from responsibility, a choice against choice, an assertion of being the only point of view on the world, an assertion of being the world, an effort to deny having a point of view, a flight from displeasing truths to pleasing falsehoods, a form of misanthropy, an act of believing what one does not believe, a form of spirit of seriousness, sincerity, an effort to disarm evidence (a Gordon innovation), a form of sedimented or institutional version of all of these, and (another Gordon innovation) a flight from and war against social reality.
Gordon rejects notions of disembodied consciousness (which he argues are forms of bad faith) and articulates a theory of the body-in-bad-faith.
Racism is also a form of the spirit of seriousness, by which Gordon means the treatment of values as material features of the world instead of expressions of human freedom and responsibility.
The logic of anti-black racism demands blacks offering justifications for their existence that are not posed for whites.
Gordon 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.
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.
Instead, he sees the continuation of Aristotelian metaphysics, which advances a notion of substance that is governed by the essence that leads to the definition in the form of essential being, as a problem.
He also advances phenomenology as a form of radically self-reflective thought, which means that it must question even its methodological assumptions.
Because of this, Gordon refused for some time in his career to refer to his work as "philosophy," for that would mean colonizing it with a disciplinary set of assumptions.
He preferred to call his work "radical thought," which for him meant being willing to go to the roots of reality in a critical way.
essentialism means that one cannot study race and racism and colonialism properly because they, in effect, lack essences.
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.
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 the mixture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".