 Welcome everyone. I think quite a number have been admitted in now, beginning in about 60 seconds while others join. So welcome everyone to a lecture and well as well a book launch as a way of Professor Lewis Gordon. And we are very excited to have him here with us and we are really looking forward to his talk this evening. Well, this evening yet in UK and what could be money after the wherever you are. So I'll just begin by saying a few words about guest speaker this evening at this time. Professor Lewis Gordon is an Afro Jewish public intellectual is an academic. He is a musician loves jazz blues rock reggae hip hop. I'm sure Afro beats is there as well. And he teaches philosophy and is a professor of philosophy as well at the philosophy department at University of Connecticut, and he has several affiliations in many academic units, including that of Caribbean studies, Jewish studies and others. He's a lecturer. His lectures involve. Sorry, he lectures and is involved in political and artistic project across the globe and holds appointment in South Africa, Jamaica, India and France is the author of many books for which he has received accolades, which includes the Gustavus mayors outstanding book for outstanding work on human rights in North America. One of his most recent books is freedom justice and decolonization published last year, 2021. But there are several order of his works, which include what Fanon said, existential Africana, bad faith and anti black racism. In addition to Africana philosophy and many others, as well as many edited books. Earlier this year in January 2022. Professor Gordon spoke fear of black consciousness was published, both in the US and in the UK, and the audio book was published as well by Macmillan audio book. Not in January. Just a couple of weeks ago. This book has been listed by literary hope as the as one of the most anticipated books of 2022. And since that book was published. Lewis Goddard has been busy. You know, he has had several interviews, the book itself has had several reviews. And so we are very pleased, very excited and we feel very honored that he had the time and created the time to join us this evening to also speak a bit about the book and sort of familiarize us with its contents. Lewis Goddard is, is not just a guest speaker is, in a sense, part of the source community because he was here in 2016 as a writer in residence in the school of law. And then then he gave some very important talks on the student movements and call for decolonization on black as densialism on France funnel and a number of other topics. Goddard is this year's recipient of the Eminence scholar award from the Global Development Studies Division of the International Studies Association. So we are really, really pleased to have you with us. We are looking forward to your talk, which you've titled wife hearing black consciousness is a form of bad faith. Take your time and educate and enlighten us and when you're done will have some discussions as well. So you have our full attention. Well, thank you Elvis. Thank you very much. And I'll begin by saying one of the keys. One of the keys because I'm in New England and Elvis here in England and the viewers are in many places. One of the keys is how one greets someone in the Wampanoag language. The Black people were the people who greeted the pilgrims when they arrived. And I have often mentioned when I've given talks, but fortunately, the pilgrims did not return the same courtesy. To that I'll add hotep, which is from the ancient East African language of Meroneter. Many of you know that Hebrew Assalamu alaikum. Jambo, which is, you know, it's from Swahili. And of course, as you are in UK, which is a very, as we could say, diverse, very diverse country, although there are people who would like to make it otherwise. I'll add Vanikam, which is how you say hello in Tamil. And of course, there is Djagwitch. And for that's Gaelic, that's Irish, for the same thing. And as we're talking about so as I could say a co-assan in Yoruba. And I could add to that, we could have Misawa in Luo. So Bona, you know, you see Zulu, the Mela or the Melanga in Swada. And as you could imagine, I could keep going. You may wonder why I go through this exercise. And even though we would translate a lot of these as ways saying hello, they're very different, their actual content is very different. And the way people say hello says a lot about the history of their communities and communities with histories of war, for instance, people greet each other with peace. They say peace, I'm not here to hurt you. In countries where there are climactic, you know, difficulties, one may wish a sunny day. And the list goes on. Basically, welcome. And saying welcome today is difficult, of course, because although humanity is always faced travails, challenges. We're living in times right now where the challenges are of a different order. And I say this because I grew up as many of you may be aware given my age in the Cold War. So nuclear devastation was on our minds. But even, but today what's on all of our minds is not only nuclear devastation. There's the climate situation. There are situations that are connected to a convergence of pandemics. Not only the novel Coronavirus and COVID-19, but social pandemics that produced the vulnerabilities that enabled these pandemics these other pandemics to flourish. In other words, all is interconnected. So I say to all of you, simply put, we're in this together. I also say I appreciate, despite all of that, that you've taken the time for us to meet this morning. And this is one of the things that's always striking when we think about this. The Talking Heads has a great song called Life Doing Wartime, and we are in wartime, even without the situation in Ukraine. You know, Russia invading Ukraine, their war is going on all over the place. And in fact, our battle with the pandemic is war. But one of the things that the Talking Heads brings up, and not only the Talking Heads, you'll find it's all throughout Black music. You'll find it in musical failure, Coté. Yes, Elvis. Yes. It's not a week without me listening to at least one failure Coté recording. And the thing that the inside, the philosophical insight from that music is that it's always amazing that even in the midst of wartime, people find moments to build a bit of the everyday, whether it's eating some peanut butter, holding each other, right, putting each other, each other's arms. Or something like what Sam Bach told me, Sam Bach, if you don't know who he is, was a famous, is a famous artist who was a survivor of Shoah, which is the Holocaust. And he was eight years old at the time when his community was besieged and put in these death camps. But before that they were put into a form of enslaved ghetto, and, you know, or stettle. And one of the amazing things that happened while these people are being enslaved, brutalized, killed, one of the poets discovered this little boy was a gifted artist. Would you believe, would you believe those people, right, those people in the midst of Shoah or Holocaust, put on an art show. They did whatever they could with to look as best they could with dignity and put whatever drawings he had and put on an art show. And Sam showed me a picture of him as a little boy with that poet holding him, and that's the picture and right after that, the poet was killed. I'll return to this kind of theme. But for now, I'm going to go into the book. And if you're wondering why I began with this theme is because of themes like that permeate what I talk about in the book fear of black consciousness. I'm going to talk about these themes, frankly, because it's connected to one of the reasons I wrote this book. There were practical reasons, which connected to more than 20 years ago when I was asked to write it, but didn't write it then. And then there are existential political committed reasons of why now. It's because you see, there's so many ways people talk about these issues. But they talk about issues of oppression, dehumanization colonization, anti black racism, they're all connected in ways that are highly problematic in that they erase a fundamental element. That is also erased by those phenomena. And what that is, you'll see me return to over and over is the humanity, the humanity that's under assault. And right now, they're exoticized commodified ways of talking about these issues that actually assert outrageous anti humanistic anti human claims. And in the midst of it, a form of irresponsible thinking occurs. So, let me go straight to at least a theme today I'm not going to talk about the whole book I decided I'm just going to talk about a simple theme and our conversation different elements could pop up. And you we could see from there. So the element I'm going to focus on is why faring black consciousness is a form of bad faith. Now to begin with, even before I wrote this book. Many, many years ago when I was a student, when I was a student of philosophy and by the way, I must announce full disclosure. I am not a philosophy nationalist. In fact, I'm against all nationalisms. And you may say, why does he say this. Well, for many years, the way I do work is I see anything you study anything whether it's philosophy, history, literature, whether it's medicine, whether it's physics. And by the way, I do work in all those areas. One of the things I've learned is that anything you study is like a key that opens a door to a world. And that key opens your door to a world in which you find other keys and those other keys are those other disciplines. And the idea that there is one discipline that's to supervene over all other disciplines is imperial. So what I say is I'm also a philosopher. But nevertheless, when I was acquiring one of my keys, because I didn't only study philosophy I studied classics and many other areas as well. But when I was acquiring one of my keys which was philosophy I remembered. I remember a few years ago having a conversation with a community activists, and she didn't know that I did a lot of political work myself but the thing was, I'm very critical of people who commodify their political activism. So we were just talking and she said, what are you studying. I said, philosophy. And she said, oh, philosophy. What what she said, uh, to extract. I study the concrete. And I looked at her and I said, um, you know, the concrete is an abstraction. And we she paused and we start to crack up. Anyway, we're great friends all the way to this day. But this is a very important point. You see, even sometimes when we're thinking we're addressing an issue concretely, we don't realize we're imposing abstractions on to our actual engagements. And there are many kinds of abstractions for instance one of the abstractions that's doing much damage in the world is the abstraction called the individual. And there's another one also called the community all of these the abstractions. One of the reasons they're able to do damage is because in their effort to be concrete when you say the community, the individual and so forth, even though they're abstractions. They lead to a situation that put people outside of their relationships with reality in the world. And this happens also the way, not only people outside but people inside talk about their communities. So to begin with, one of the things I would like to put on the table is if you look at a title called fear of black consciousness, of course we'd have to talk about what black is what consciousness is and what the fear is. Well, we start with black. This concrete story is that many people think that their blacks are the blacks. And this is what creates a lot of confusion. There are people for instance the United States who think to talk about blacks is to talk about exclusively. And in fact, almost to the point of saying that only the blacks in the United States properly count as the blacks. There are people who do talk about their blacks in Australia, in such a way that there is a way of failing to understand that there are many blacks across the world and many ways of talking about blacks. And but the confusion is that their blacks or our blacks as the blacks, it lies the reality and the historical specificity and the complexity of the lives of black people all over the planet. This is done not only to black people, because the unique ways people talk about their black people or our black people affects how they talk about their indigenous peoples, their brown peoples their white peoples their list goes on. So one of the things we have to deal with is that there's already embedded in this notion, this notion, a form of bad faith. And you may wonder what I mean by bad faith. Well, I'm talking about bad faith right now in a very specific way. I'm not talking about the way people talk about it in law, when someone signs a contract in bad faith, for instance, that is just a liar or dishonest person. The bad faith, the way I'm talking about bad faith is the flight from a pleasing falsehood. In other words, you don't want to deal. I'm sorry, it's a flight into a pleasing falsehood to avoid a displeasing truth. In other words, there are times when reality and truth are very displeasing. And this effort to fly to flee to get away from the displeasing truths. This is one of the edifices. Okay, of how oppression is constructed. Now, when I say this. It means that we have to talk about a variety of issues. But one of the things to bear in mind is that this flight into pleasing falsehoods. It takes the form of that goes across disciplines, ranging from history to economics, in fact, all the disciplines and permeate as well everyday practice of institutions of images of the society of popular culture, etc. Now, I don't need you don't need me to tell you that talking about racism and race is very uncomfortable for many people. From birth to grave in many races societies. What you encounter is a neurotic situation, because what you learn to do is how to avoid talking about race and racism. And that avoidance that evasion actually plays a role in maintaining those systems. And this leads to also a neurotic situation. Obviously because it not only personalizes the issue, but it personalizes it in such a way that obscures truth and reality. So already you could see why fearing, fearing talking about these issues is a form of bad faith, because ultimately, at the heart of doing so is a fear of truth and reality. And this already says something, because you see if embedded in blackness, if embedded in black consciousness is truth and reality. Then ultimately, what's embedded in the rage against it what's embedded in the society in fact that maintains it is a whole system of lies of edifice right it's a whole edifice of denying reality. And at a basic level we know this is truth. Right, we know this is true. Okay. Because you see, if the struggle for black liberation, if the struggle for racial justice, if the struggle for the transformation of the inequities and the inequalities imposed upon the global south if all of that. If that were a lie. Then we would have to just lay our arms down and concede the idea that it is true that we're inferior. It is true that everything that has been done in the Euro modern world to the people of the global south, and also to the people in the north, who are the disadvantaged that all of that is legitimate. Now, deep down we know that's false. So what we have to address is basically the basic fact that what is going on when we're talking about anti black racism. We're talking about colonialism. If we're talking about the many forms of oppression degradation on humankind from misogyny, all the way through to the forms of class crushing. We need to address that these are efforts to disempower a group of people through supposedly empowering another group of people. But the logic of that empowering is symbiotically connected to global disempowerment. And in today's language we call that privatization. And so, if we think about that, we need to address them certain facts certain realities. For instance, if we talk about notions of white supremacy. The very even notion of supremacy on the human world is hokey. It's silly. It's weird. Because one of the things we know deep down is there is no intrinsic notion of superiority or inferiority. If we were to think in terms of physical reality, biological reality, etc. We are no more superior than the body, the bacteria, the viruses that infect us. We are no more superior than a grain of sand. The superiority inferiority nonsense is actually outside of the sphere of dealing with reality. Where it comes from is a different kind of conception of reality. And it's that conception of reality that many people try to avoid. And that is the reality constituted by the human world. And the scientist called this socially constructed reality. But some people make the mistake of thinking socially constructed reality means false reality. But what we have to understand is that we human beings live in a world of meaning. We do not live in a world a nice cold world of bear things. If I pick up this cup to drink. It's a physical object, but it's not just a cup. If I throw it and hit someone, it's a weapon. If I give it as a gift to someone, it's a gift. We live in a world of meaning. But we can produce meanings that are demeaning. In other words, they degrade others and we could produce meanings that are uplifting and build the dignity of others. White supremacy is a construction of meaning to push certain groups of human beings above the category of human beings. And that is why white supremacy is often premised upon constructing the notion of white beings. But the thing to bear in mind right now is that white supremacy and anti black racism are not the same thing. Many people construct them as if they're symmetrical. But actually the logic of making people superior is different from the logic of making certain people inferior. You can see the way my hands move. One props some people up, another one pushes certain people down. And of course, if we have the human being in the middle, then what happens is what France Fanon pointed out. Here's some people above humanity and some people below humanity. What you're going to have is the murder of humanity. Of course, what's tricky is that the segregating logic, the segregating logic. Actually, in constructing one group as being full and also full of themselves. I talk about the narcissism of whiteness. It actually creates the notion that there's a group of people who are supposedly empty. But one of the things we have to bear in mind is that the human world is actually not a world of fullness. A human world is a world that steps out from the realm of what it is to be completed full and actually go moves into the world of possibility of freedom. That requires always the possibility of more. That means then, if we understand this several things that would be ironic. The first thing is you can get rid of white supremacy, and you can still have anti black racism, if you're still pushing black people down. The second thing is if you construct white supremacy as the fullness of being. Actually, what white supremacy is is an attack on humanity, because anywhere there are human beings. There's always the idea of something that will negate this notion of fullness. And if we understand this if we understand this process, then we can understand then, then that what is actually under attack. Because the people who are defined as non white is a form of narcissistic rage against what they remind those who claim they're better than human. And that is, at the end of the day, all are only human and human with the imperfections as CLR James pointed out human beings with our affective life, our hopes our desires. Our joys, our sufferings, our sorrow, our commitments. Now, the point at which blacks are created as a category, we are this is something many of you already know. There's no reason for humanity, a species now it's being argued we're about 400,000 years old. The bottom line is, we're only talking about several hundred years in which the concept of Reza, which referred to Jews and Mors was around, and only about five or 400 years of talking about people in the racialized form we call black. The trickier is the very history that led to black is even more complicated, because there are some groups who try today to point about it as a kind of US or American thing. When in fact it was Europeans who constructed this first in the Mediterranean with the Spanish and Portuguese. And, and, and even in that term, a lot of that is connected on false histories. The false histories is the so called meeting of Europeans in meeting of Africans, which is complete crap is complete crap because you've always been Africans in Europe and always been Europeans going to Africa. And the reason is, because all human beings are ultimately decided not only from Africans, but even the light morphological human beings are recent developments, how recent 68,000 years. So, what we're really talking about is what happens when people begin the practices of rewriting people to meet the exploitating commitments of a particular society. The transition then into Portuguese speaking world and the Spanish speaking world in the construction of Negro is an example. The French speaking world, although the French has la noire for the color black. It's striking that instead of just saying la noire, and then le noire as an abstract concept. The French at first went to linear to bring in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking term and then francophone is it. And this is of course a linguistic act of creating radical distancing. And it was a similar thing done in the English speaking world at first, but also because of the Scottish pronunciation of the French linear her is why the n word in English popped up. And this becomes odd of course because English also has a word for black and it's called black. So the very effort to create these distances tell you a lot about the history of racialization. But if we come into this history of racialization. One of the things we should bear in mind is that blacks are human beings and live the realization of what it is to be constructed as problems. And this constructing of black people into problems leads to a form of double consciousness in which black people see ourselves as black through how a world that's anti black imposes blackness on us. Before that, we could be close out, you know, we could be, you know, swada, we could be wall of we could be low with the list is long your body, boo, etc. But then once black comes in, that is imposed upon us in a way that is negative. However, because we're human beings we don't live our blackness exclusively as negative. And there's a certain point we realize that not only are we conscious of what is imposed upon us, and the way those impose upon us think about us about us. But there's a certain point we realize there's a problem in being constructed as a problem. And the point at which you realize you're being constructed as a problem is a movement in which you realize the countries that make you segregated apartheid structure. Right, the that structure is an effort to keep apart the humanity that is dialectical. And at that moment when you say there's something wrong with a society that makes human beings into problems. Instead of dressing the problems they face, which is what WB the boys pointed out. So let's move into what Jane Anna Gordon calls potentiated double consciousness and potentiated double consciousness is when you reintroduce potential, the human activity of agency into the world. And that activity of agency is where you have the transition from lowercase black consciousness into uppercase black consciousness. And that is where you begin to understand what it is actually to construct a future. Because you see part of the damage that's done by colonialism by racism, and other practices of dehumanization is basically to create the easier logic you can actually dominate a people better. If instead of using the weapons and the mechanisms which you would eventually exhaust is if you can have a whole ideological framework, a whole logic of everyday speech and activities, in which they police themselves through the belief in their own inferiority. So if you do this, then you have to construct an entire false history and this is part of the fear of black consciousness, because when you become uppercase black consciousness. You now begin to unveil the lies and the contradictions of the Euro modern age. And there's so many lies that will take this entire lecture to point them out. Not among them for instance is even the term modern. Many people and they use the word modern they think modern is to be European, and then they think to be European is to be white, when they've always been non white Europeans. But if you understand that all modern means is to be of the present, and all being of the present means is to be connected to what's to come. The moment you become an agent of history, you're connected to what's to come, and you are modern, which means throughout history, there have been all kinds of people who have been modern. And right now, there are many of us who are creating new ways of being human that will connect to other communities to come, and that would make us modern. So if we begin to understand the implications of what it is to take responsibility for history to take responsibility for our political life, we begin now to become this uppercase black consciousness. Now one of the things I like to say is when I talk about this in this talk right now I'm outlining a variety of concepts. But when I say this I talk about this and I mean it in every aspect of life from the food we eat. I mean it from the music we listen to. I mean this from the everyday conversations we have in pubs that we have among friends. What I'm saying is that ultimately the disclosure of all reality is the world we live in as a human world, and we collectively participate in how it's constructed and how it's transformed. So this means then if we're dealing with the openness of possibility, and I'm going to now move to close there are several things we should consider. Clearly I'm talking about the decolonizing right of the practices imposed upon humankind colonization as dehumanization and as disempowerment requires practices of empowerment, which require practices of humanization, which require practices of ultimately the transformation of power. Colonization is the coercive conception of power decolonization moving into what's called decoloniality, moving into what I call a teleological suspension of the imposition of the way we think of disciplines. And that requires a conception of power that serves as conditions of possibility for other people to be able to live with dignity and freedom. And that understanding, then means that we need to rethink power, and we also need to rethink, and we need to practice and we need to build on how we deal with the mechanisms of coloniality. Another version to think about this is that all decolonization is, is to change the players. But the practice of decoloniality, the practice of revolution, the practice of transforming the world is a practice of trying to change the game. And this requires thinking about human beings in a different way. The old model that I hinted of, imagine you can change players and keep the game, because it imagines people as separate and isolated things. But if we understand people as relationships of activities, if we think about the paradox of being a human being which is your born human, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to become one. The engagements in our social reality. That is actually our humanizing practices. And if we can understand that, that kind of a practice. Then we can understand that you can't just, you don't really just put someone into a game and keep the game, because that game is what's producing them. That's like imagine you could put women in a game that's designed to make people into men, and she would remain a woman. And all you would have done is to just make her an atomical female that's a male. But, and it's the same logic done on to blackness. But if you understand that for her to participate, you have to now change the game. You have to create a different kind of game. You have to have a game in which you can live as a human being. And that game, that practice, that becomes a task in which new kinds of human beings emerge. In other words, if you're going to deal with misogyny, you have to produce different conceptions of men new kinds of men. If you're going to deal with anti black racism, you're going to have to produce new kinds of people, people who can live in a relationship with people who are designated black, without it being designated as inferior. But if you're going to do something that requires producing a reality that may even mean it transcends what we call blackness. And this requires also understanding that notions of purity tend to fail. And notions of purity, which are isolated. One of them are notions of actual interaction and communication, which can be called the realizing practice of dealing with reality as relational. And this requires even going further to rethink even the way we construct thinking. And in my writings I call that shifting the geography of reason. In other words, shifting from the idea of real thinking is in the north, applied to the south. And as form thinking on our tiny planet, we can understand that we globally think together. And this requires also transformation of our norms in other words they require also the decolonizing of normative life. Now this becomes crucial as well, because you see on the liberalism neoliberalism conservatism and neoconservatism. It's a form of reductionism in which we try to look at these issues morally, and we try to deal with a kind of moralism in which we isolate ourselves, and we think it's only about us individually. But the problem is, I just outlined the dynamics of power. If we understand that colonialism. If we understand that racism, if we understand that misogyny, and the whole edifice of dehumanizing practices are political. Then it means we require political action and political action always transcends the me. And then you enter the world of the us and the world of those to come, and a sense of obligation to those in the past, whom we may not even know. Now, as I talk about these, eventually someone could say, these are a whole lot of ideas. Are they possible. Can we actually do these things. Well, as you could already see the way I'm talking about what it is that's involved in being human. Is already linked to agency to freedom and action. The fact to the matter is, we do it all the time. And there's so many examples I could give, but I'm going to close with an example of somebody who had to act on the conditions of seeming impossibility. And I'm bringing up this example, because my argument is that you see we have the task of building different houses. We have the task of getting rid of a world premised upon colonization conquest and mastery. We have a world that we face to build that transcends what you see in the movie The Black Panther. Where Kilmonger says to Chisholm, and by the way, Chisholm is actually a transformation of the name Hala, and Hala is the braided bread and Judaism. And it's already an allegory of the community being connected. Kilmonger said it's about either you conquer or you are conquered. But there's another way. You see the false dilemma. What is to say you can only conquer be conquered. You could also fight to get rid of a world of conquest, a world of conquerors and conquering. But the imagined version is always with the grandiose generals and the superheroes and powerful and all of that stuff. And we fail to understand the power of everyday life, everyday life. And this is one of the reasons why everyday life, including what we look at a popular culture or what we look at in our communities, how we talk to our grandmothers, our uncles or aunts, our best friends. That is, that is also power. And so I'm going to come to this example. The example I am trying to bring up is of a woman by the name of Harriet Bailey. Harriet Bailey was an enslaved woman in the early 18th century, early 19th century. And slave women were defined as property, they saved men too. And if you're property, it means the master has absolute control over you. And in the United States, the masters often impregnated the enslaved women, because a lot of the issues of enslavement and racism were also connected to who can reproduce, who can procreate. And I talk about what this is one of the reasons why up until the late 19th century, up to about 90%, 96% of the male line of people in the Americas were attributed to European men. So Harriet Bailey was impregnated in multiple times. And one of them was a child, a little boy who when he was around six or seven was put on a plantation about 12 miles away from where she was working in the fields. Now, again, we think about enslaved people in often reductionistic ways but enslaved people were creative. The enslaved people brought skills from Africa. The enslaved people brought their knowledge, they brought their value systems, they brought all kinds of ways that actually contributed to transforming the world we live in. For a lot of the good we have, in fact. Well, this woman learning about this child being enslaved 12 miles away. What she would work from dawn to dusk would walk 12 miles with the little food she had to spend time with this child. And what she did was to share her food which meant she would go home by the next day starving. This woman would go through a very dangerous terrain there were animals along the way that could attack her. There were people looking for escaped enslaved people who could attack her. They could accuse her of all kinds of things they could rape her they could do all kinds of things. But somehow this woman face this. And one of the things I got to tell you is it doesn't really matter. If you were to tell a child that your mother was an enslaved person is just like today it doesn't matter if you tell children that you're poor and your mother has to do three or four jobs, just to put food on the table. To this point of view the absence of a parent is treated as abandonment. And although this child was aware that the master who would whip him and so forth may have been his father. There was a form of abandonment a sense of profound loss with regard to the mother. So the fact that this woman would show up and do this with this child did something profound. And this child's life, a conception of value that that child thought could never be. The world told that child that he was only valuable as a commodity as an object to be sold, or as an object to labor for the benefit of those who own him. The interactions demonstrate to this child a different value. The value of somebody who loved him so much that she would face great dangers to be with him. And that child now acquired an understanding of a unique value. Sure, it is human world that produced the value of property. But the child learned that human world could also produce the value of love. And that woman, after six months of doing this died. Now that child could have become full of himself, he could have said, unlike you all are the slaves. I'm loved. He could have become a person who just felt superior to others. But something else happened. The child eventually fought against a slave breaker escaped. And when he escaped, he could have just say yo, I have my liberty. But this child understood now a man that liberty and freedom are not the same. As a fugitive you may have his liberty. He fights fights for the dignity and the freedom of his fellow human being and against the institution of enslavement. That is going to be the responsible political act for freedom. And so if we come to this the question is why did he do this. You go back. You see, the world he was living in was a world that told him that being loved by an enslaved woman was worthless. That a piece of property could not be a source of love, which means that he himself could not be a source of love. But the fact that this woman loved him. And the fact that he now valued her love, met he valued being valued by someone from whom France Fanon called the Dagné de la Terre, the damned of the earth. And the moment in which he could see the value. In other words, the humanity of those people called property. Is the point at which he begins to develop a revolutionary consciousness, a black consciousness as a commitment to revolutionary change. And that boy, when he became a man and escaped, he did change his name from Bailey. And today many of you in the world know him as Frederick Douglass. And the point about it is that this story is not about really Frederick Douglass is about Harriet Bailey. Because you see Harriet Bailey had no reason to think that this child could love her no reason to think that he become Frederick Douglass. But what this child, what her love interactions produced is what I call radical love as an embodiment of political commitment. And so the issue, when you're thinking about transformation is that it's not about you. The issue of radical love is not narcissistic love where you say you're fighting for those who look like you. Because you see the ancestors have become anonymous. And had I not mentioned to Harriet Bailey's name and told the story many of you wouldn't even know she is. What we do know is that people like Harriet Bailey, whether they are white, black or brown, I'd introduced, I'd said hello, for instance in Irish. Whether it's the people who are among the enslaved, who are forgotten. The fact of the matter is, we are able to be here today and act and do things in the way we do them, because those people acted. It means that the onus on us today. And I use the word onus and purpose because in the book I talk about that word. There's a unique history. It's actually from Greek for donkey. But it means beast of burden, the burden on us is that we too, we too face the question of a form of radical political commitment radical love. And that's based on building a world for people we will never meet, we will never know. But through that love and that commitment, we should understand matter. And this means then, just like black lives matter. This consciousness is a fight for the unleashing of freedom and real democracy, real democracy, which is, which involves those whose lives through our actions are ultimately anonymous. But at the end of the day, if we do our work right, the dignity and freedom with which such people could live. To live in a way that may even be very different from us is one for which they look back at us. And they say those simple proverbial words. Thank you. And with that, I end. Thank you very much noise. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, very sobering, because it gives, it gives us a lot to think about. Particularly, in terms of what we, we will call the political action, because usually conventionally, it's almost fight for the self. But you've emphasized a lot about building relationships. Might be of Ubuntu as a concept. And how we all depend on each other to build humanity person is a person through other persons. A lot of interesting concepts, which of course anyone who picks up. We have more, more context to be able to learn more about a lot of the things you spoke about today. You began by speaking about, you know, greeting in a number of languages. Hello, and, and then you, you mentioned how contextual those terms are, you know, within within the linguistic space in which they are used. They are not just hello and I really thought about Sabah on a Zulu word which sounds which everyone takes to be hello, but actually it means I see you. It's a recognition of the other. And, and I think that's how you also beautifully began your book. When I read the prologue, you talked about how you became aware of blackness, your black consciousness, how it happened when you were in elementary school. And I, I, there's a lot going on, as you said, there's war, there's anti-black racism, fight against anti-black racism and the very idea that blackness itself is a constructed concept that has had very damning consequences for those represented by it. And that those who bear that, that word blackness as it were, and I'll turn it table around as it were. I wanted to, yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts about this in particular. Blackness is often spoken about in terms of couple realities in terms of bodies in terms of visibility in terms of color. You use the phrase nicely in your prologue is a crossing color lines, and then becoming very aware of your black consciousness because when I'm in Nigeria, to be very honest, these are not issues you bother yourself with. Not because you are you are home, basically, in the space where color is beautiful and everyone has shades of blackness. But the moment you cross that color lines to a place of whiteness, I would call it, and it becomes very obvious. But there are situations where blackness is not so visible, not so obvious. There are there are persons who ancestry, heritage, make them authentic and completely black, but it will strike you as very obvious when you see the person. Is it possible to reconstruct the concept of blackness to make such persons more included into the discourse beyond the way it is currently very tied to the body and visibility and color. Okay. Well, thanks for bringing that up Elvis. One of the reasons I opened up we're talking about people think their blacks or the blacks is some people, especially when they haven't grown up in a black country. You know majority black environment. Don't understand that the logic could be very different. And what's even striking is if you think about a country like Jamaica, for instance, there are people who in different countries would have different racial designations. But in the Jamaican context or black. And in addition to that their people even could be looked at as East Asian. Right. We're black. But one of the things we should bear in mind. There are two things one of the things where I do talk about the bodies. I am very critical of the way we talk about the body today. Because a lot of people talk about the body in a way that's a form of thing of vacation. It's a form of corporate reality. But actually embodiment, the way I talk about is relational. And that's linked into what consciousness is about that ultimately, as you brought up the Zulu phrase and I like that phrase a lot I see you and in fact to many languages, the way we talk about our humanity is connected. But you can't see another person of the other person isn't is not embodied. In embodiment is actually a good thing. What is bad is to denude the body right to take away from the body it's relationality. And I'm also critical of the way people misrepres I don't like the way people talk about black bodies today, because they talk about in a way that seems to forget black people. And ultimately, embodiment in people should be connected. The richness of what we are of course, is that if we understand that human beings make meaning. Then we could make the meaning of our identities, such that they are life affirming. And this means then that we should understand that we're not I'm using this to represent clothes we're not closed formulas. And like the capital B black consciousness is open. Then there's now relationships through which others can belong. And belongings are very important concepts some people take it lightly, but freedom requires belonging, because belonging takes many forms whether it's your discipline or your house or your relationships. Whether it's your wife, your husband, your mother, your father, your partner, whatever language you use. Those are expressions of belonging through which you're able to flourish and grow. And so, the practices that I was outlining require us to think of ourselves with humility as open. Other than to have the kind of protective locked up closeness that blocks away reality in the world. And this is why fear of black consciousness then is actually an effort to close off reality. But if we understand opening that up at particular rising that closeness, then we understand that communicating is kind of not universal but universalizing in the sense that we're constantly building dialectically, our sense with each other. And I think a simple point, and we can go I guess the question. You know what I mean that contrast between narcissistic love and radical love. Well, embedded in narcissistic love is that those who are outside of the reproduction of the self are those you can hate. Love is easier. Love is harder, radical love, because that one requires coming out beyond yourself and building. It's always more difficult to build other houses than to just tear down the house of somebody you don't like. But you know what happens when you build other houses and different kinds of houses, you make the house you don't like irrelevant. And if there are barriers of oppression upon just systems is there eventual irrelevance. So our task is to go do the political work to make oppressive forces irrelevant. Excuse me, I got a cough, cough done. We'll now open up to the audience to ask a few questions and have their comments. You're free to speak directly or put your question in the chat. I already see a few questions there. Okay, I think. Yeah, I see it. Ishma, do you want to read? So ask your question. Yeah, I'd be happy to. Can you hear me? Yeah, thank you so much for your talk. I'm so happy I managed to listen to it. It's been very inspiring. My question relates to kind of another what seems like parallel strain or strand of like modern thought in specifically taking place in America at the moment. Good after pessimism, which kind of like by people like Franklin B world and female sharp, which seems to so frame itself in contradiction to your idea of kind of developing of social reality as a humanizing practice and kind of developing this kind of radical love to kind of reclaim the idea of the human by presenting blacks as essentially non human essentially non human. And I was wondering so what you're if you have any opinions about this kind of modern friend in academia, and if you saw any value in this these writings. Thank you very much. And there's a second question. I just want to make sure the questions come in so could the other person also ask the question. I think it's Judy Richards. Yes, hello. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. No camera but you've got a picture. I just wanted to use the term anti black racism. I'm part of global African Congress and I wonder whether, like we do in our organization. We stop using anti black racism because black can mean Asian and Chinese and other communities when we're talking specifically about Africans and use the term Afrifobia, which is the prejudice discrimination fear hatred and bigotry towards African heritage of things African, which is a very distinct form of racism that would get lost in some countries, when they look at, as you would say, who they count as their blacks. Thank you for that question Judy I'll answer in reverse order. And not only in this book but actually my first book to I point this out. The black and the African are not identical. You're absolutely correct Judy. You don't mind me saying Judy. And the thing to bear in mind is that many African people that's why I pointed out were actually made into black people. But their everyday lives are much more. But the thing is, the thing to bear in mind. Is that when I'm talking about anti black racism. I'm not talking about exclusively African people. When I am talking about exclusively African people I actually do use Afro phobia or Afrifobia, because some are also concerned about the more masculine oriented Afro term. I was a lived and I in the book I do talk about, for instance, what goes on in Australia and New Zealand, whether it's the Maori, or the curry people and varieties of other indigenous peoples were designated black. A lot of us don't realize that the term black used pejoratively was used on the not not only in terms of the effort to respond to it in a black consciousness movement in South Africa with people like Bico and when they pointed out the political significance of black. But it was also used by the oppressors early on against Native American peoples and South Asians peoples were also called black. And then there's within their framework. For instance, the Dalits, the untouchables of South Asia, their relationship as some people as people to not touch to avoid. To go through anti blackness. And there are many other examples so this is to address, honor, and acknowledge their reality. In other words, these are people dealing with the humanization. So, what I'm saying is that it's not I don't know the task is to stop using anti black and use the other one. It's the, I think the task is to use both. And we're referring to those who are specifically afraid of Africans and distort African history, and those who ultimately are invested in the ongoing exploitation of Africans. That's when I think it's very important to be dealing with within the framework of Africana thought African diaspora thought and African thought, those kinds of phobia. This is one of the reasons why in my writings I make a distinction between Africana existentialism and black existentialism. They're not the same thing. And it's also their times when I talk about African existentialism versus say African American existentialism again they're not the same thing, although they're related. So, thank you for the question that it gave me an opportunity to clarify that point. In terms of the first question. There's a lot there. I find after pessimism highly problematic. White people love after pessimism. And they love it for a very good reason. It's nothing that would make. It taps into, first of all white narcissism, because ultimately, cool. At the end of the day, you let whites actually be the ones who control everything and be the agents and source of all value. Second, it taps into a logic that depends so much on white recognition that, again, that makes the master sleep well at night. But there are, but there are intellectual reasons. And let me get to the intellectual reasons and political reasons. First of all, early Afro pessimists built a lot of their stuff out of writings from people like myself that were highly distorted and also writings by people like Horton Spillers that they completely distort so I'm very critical of it at the level of scholarship. And what I mean by if you pick my book bad faith and anti black racism. I pointed out that the project of anti black racism is to create an anti black world. I never argued that the world is anti black. Now this is very crucial. Because if the project is to create an anti black world, but the world is an anti black. That is because we have to understand that black people and also other people are not black fought against that project. In other words, it's precisely because of the agency I mentioned that we could be in this meeting, and also many of you who are participating and maybe looking in through other auspices can gather together because our ancestors fought against it. And also people who are not our immediate designated racial ancestors, people who are not black who fought against it. So that's the first part. The second part is that at almost at every level of scholarship. It exemplifies a profound level of dishonesty. Now what do I mean. Well let's start with the idea that the black was created in the middle passage. That's just historically false. I mean, the term was being used in before the middle passage. So just doesn't matter just basic history is off. Second, if you took the position, but this is also part of connected something deeper. It's connected to an effort for a kind of intellectual capital in the academy in which one sells a product. So it's designed to create a kind of uniqueness and a radical peculiarity of the US black experience. I'm not accurate about the US black experience. It's about a large majority of it, but not all of it. But if you take that logic, it means people who are designated black, who are not descended from people who went through the middle passage, have no way to account for the fact, for instance, if you pick apartheid South Africa. Yes, there were forms of enslavement in apartheid in South Africa even before the 1940s. But it fails even to bring out what happened in the Congo. I'm talking about Leopold Congo. Okay. It fails to deal with the complexity and the actual history of how, for instance, when I told the story of the terminology of blackness is produced. It's completely elided in that portrait. So that is already a scholarly and historically false. And remember what I, I've already started with the problem of bad faith that when part of bad faith is to give people false histories, false realities. So and that is a false reality. When you deal with the many revolts on in the middle passage, it fails to deal with the history and the very language of a lot of the people who became designated black. For instance, when I would visit certain West African countries, because I was born in Jamaica in the 60s, and the Jamaican pathway is a very creolized mixture of African languages, and European languages and some indigenous languages. But I was shocked at how many central West African words. I knew and the grammatic structure. And sometimes there are people be people who meet me. And they don't want the whites to hear what we're saying they asked me if I could speak in a kind of mixed African language. And I said, I don't know, let's try and we turns that I can. And this is where people, for instance, like Mulefea Santé and others are right. I'm talking about now, the africologists, right, some people call them Afro centrists. Which is, it is just not true that that the people, the African peoples were enslaved were passive. The African people were enslaved were not only active, but the actual history showed that there were even African communities who were able to repatriate. I'm talking about during the period of the slave trade. And I don't like to say slavery, but they say kidnappings. Right, the enslavement of people. There are people from Brazil who went back to play parts of Africa. And the history is actually more fluid. So these are reductionistic histories that are designed in for such a way that taps into a bizarre logic to sell a commodity to a predominantly white world. And if we get even further to the philosophical problem. They claim that the black is ontological, the white is ontological, and then simply claim the white is human. And thus the black as all the white is not is not human. That, first of all, if you listen to the earlier argument I made. The fact of the matter is, and they use Phenon for this and completely distort Phenon's argument. Phenon argued that whiteness is an attachment to being that constructs whites as so full that they're ultimately constructed in their own logic of the self as not human. And that means then the zone of non being is actually human reality. And as you saw in my argument the problem with black people is we're constantly reminding reality of human. It is human to have not only the intellectual life of what we are as a species but the affective life and the kind of binary logic that puts black people into a kind of social death, which is also a distortion, although all under Patterson is also problematic in certain ways but the idea of saying black people are socially dead does not at all respect the fact that black people live highly social lives. I don't get up in the morning and most black people don't get in the morning and look at ourselves and mirror and say oh God still black. And actually, in fact, in if you look pick South Africa as an example there's a joke I was hanging on so wait a one time and a lot of the black folks there say the black people who ran out of the black neighborhoods to live in mostly white neighborhoods run home, because they call them on township refugees, because they're looking for some humanity. They want to live with people who actually are able to show and communicate life. So, what's going on here is that this logic. It's simple, it's packageable. But it completely, it completely surrenders all agency. All reality and all relationship to humanity to white folks. The fact of the matter is, we have to bear in mind, and this is why I told the Harriet Bailey story is that there are black people who go through a kind of black exceptionalism, which is based on the logic that racism is perfectly fine as long as it's not done to me. And when they finally is done to them, they want to apologize it to say it's only being done to me because it's absolute. But that is complete nonsense. The fact of the matter is that ultimately, if we're going to deal with a political response, political responses are about what we can actually do. And what we can actually do is actually work together and work with those who can work with us to build different institutions. If I really really really really really really believed that I was not a human being that I wouldn't even bother write books, I wouldn't even bother to do anything. If I really really believe there's nothing I could do. And that all power has to be white. Then what's the point of me doing political work. The fact of the matter is that and this is the political part of the argument. The fact of the matter is that those kind of reductive binary ontological notions are not connected to reality. And one of the insights not only from a lot of black writings, whether it's from the boys to Anthony FM in Haiti, all the way through to people like Phenon or Anna Julia Cooper, all the way through to the writing from people like Mary Secoe, all the way through to the writings you could have from Bico to Mancani to Mabokho More, all the way through to Nigerians like Oya Yumi or Ninjera. I'm sorry, in Kieran Zegwu. I could go all the way through Asian writers whether we're talking about Sierra Robindo all the way through Kaiji Nishitani. I could even go to even earlier writers, people like for instance, Zara Yakov that teachers heroes writes along a lot about all the way through to antiquity. All the way through to ancient East African writers whether it's Antef, all the way through, I could go on and on. What you find in a lot of African thought, and this comes back to Judy's point but it also connects to a lot of East Asian thought. The insight is that ontological claims and for those in the audience who are not familiar with that. It's the study of being being Nishitani pointed out. The problem with being is that it covers over reality. You notice I didn't say that the fear of black consciousness. Right, is a fear of being or be right. I argue it's a fear of reality. Reality is greater than being. And our relationship to reality means that there is a form of imposition of being honest that changes us into things. The logic of ontology works very well with the logic of colonialism, because colonialism is about commodification and making things into property even affects language. The colonial languages are more noun based languages instead of verb based languages. A lot of African languages are more verb based languages. Even the English language, a lot of European languages used to be more verb based language, because they were about the relationship with reality. So once we begin to understand them. That's not about being the one after pessimists I think was really creative as a fellow by the name of his last name is Warren, I'm trying to remember first name I think it may have been Kelvin but when you talk about ontological terror. The formulation is very good so when I say some of this I'm not saying dismiss everything I profess miss have to say, because even if we disagree with people, there could be intellectual insight. And I do think there's an intellectual insight in the concept of ontological terror, because ontological terror is the imposition of being onto humanity. But we need to remember that humanity is not being. I argue that because we're not being we're not human is false. It's precisely because we're not being that we have the creative potential to build all the kinds of reality. And so yes, black people capital B, and the many people who are not designated white are human beings, and my mom whites who say yo, I'm not down with this. This white supremacy stuff stop my back. And that's because they realize that there's more going on, and they're reasserting human to their humanity and reasserting our humanity requires our global connection, rather than this problematic conception of pushing ourselves into silos, and saying all kinds of things like burn it all down. Fine. Fine you burn it all down then you make everybody homeless. And the other matter is, when we talk about even as I said earlier houses. Masters don't build houses in slave people and workers do. And we could use our tools, use our tools, and start using them to build better houses. And if we build better houses, then those empty houses because nobody wants to go there could call themselves masters all they're like, they'll suffer the historical outcome of obsolescence. Irrelevance. Very extensive and rich response as well. So, would you like to ask your question directly as well. Thank you. Yeah, I'd like that. First of all, thank you so much for your really incisive and comprehensive presentation. And is around curriculum development. So I'm really curious to ask you as decolonial activists in the diaspora, I'm very interested to know what your thoughts are on maybe three practical actions that we, we might generate we might initiate in terms of developing decolonial activities and practice. Thank you for that question. And also, I apologize for the earlier, I didn't mention the name Ishmael, who had asked the question by for pessimism so thank you Ishmael for that question. And that was a very important question to ask and also as I said to Judy Judy Richards, her question was very important and I am the person who just asked Stuart Stuart Stuart Taylor thank you Stuart. The things to work. Is it okay if maybe one or two more questions. Oh yeah, please yeah. Jim Paris, would you like to ask you as well. Oh, yes, I think let Liteco had hands up for a while. Okay, okay. And then we'll go to Jim. Yes, thank you very much I have any questions, but I will reduce my self to just one thing that has been bothering me, and which I think the professor and is in incisive talk is actually kind of alluded to. I do with the fact that most of the time, when strategies of anti black racism is being talked about or is being theorized, it's usually at the level of culture it's usually at the level of as a professor said of the every day. And never at any level that's beyond that. So the question then becomes, doesn't that then give us a conception of power that is already given up on some kind of a permanence of inequality between people of European descent and black people. Black people will always be reduced to negotiating themselves in a world that is defined by Eurocentric values and Eurocentric power. I thank you. Thank you. Let's let's say cool. Yes, right. Let's say cool. Thank you. Let's say cool modicine. Do you pronounce it at the end modicine or just modicine. Okay, the first one is pronounced D. It's written with an L but it's the take up. Modicine. Yes. Thank you to take all. Yeah, thank you. Jim, would you like to ask us. Here we go. Okay. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Dr. Gordon. My question is, is does does the white side courses or constructed supremacy, or even even the black inferiority. You, you talk about this, this pushing, pushing to different, different, different poles in a way. How does, how does that function perhaps to enhance a disavowal of the client of a climate change disaster. If you can perhaps describe any reflect on any describe any any any any any any correlations there please. Thank you. Thank you. Is there another question. Yeah, okay, there's two anonymous question one says, what does practicing radical love look like for you day to day. And then the final one. It's one more I think. Yeah, it says, in the same way, you, you've said narcissism. It is useful for thinking about whiteness what psychological concept might be relevant or useful in thinking about black consciousness. Well, thank you all for those wonderful questions. The, the first thing to bear in mind is a lot of these questions do connect to power. Well, the first let me just mentioned that earlier I made the distinction between one one problem is that we've inherited a form of lie about power. The lie about power is to think of power exclusively in coercive terms and domination terms. And this has led to people who are so anti power that the moment we bring up power. They don't want it. They're against it. They say things like power corrupts. The problem is that if we unpack power, and the word power actually has ancient origins. The short way to think about power is power is the ability to make things happen with access to the conditions of doing so. Make things happen by using the resources you have to make other things happen. And that's empowerment. Or you could use your ability to make things happen by using the conditions to block others. And that is what domination and coercive power do the word power actually goes back all the way to antiquity. And most people in, you know, what is this tendency to look up words and end up all the time in Greek or Latin. And if you keep doing it you think that only people who spoke Greek and Latin thought what a lot of people don't realize and we that's another lecture but when you know the people who were speaking the ancient and Greek and Latin languages actually refer to other probably the ancients they referred to were African. And even the word power, which is from the supposedly we point out its relationship with the word potency. Okay, potent, powerful. Actually as its origins in the ancient East African word, but they, in the language of metta netta, and they, as a root that's linked to that's believed the divine ability of kings and queens but kings and queens very tricky and African conceptions had gender concepts that were very different. So I don't like to say kings and queens with that ancient past. But to have put a is to have hecka and hecka, which unfortunately made its way into the English language as hex, which is related to like witchcraft is a mistranslation, hecka actually goes all the way back to car. It's a life force, it's related, and it's using a lot of African languages. And it made its way into West African languages to like in Hebrew you say hi, which means life. So it's so you could see the point. Something that builds life is affirming that's a productive power that which ends like right. It's also power, but it's destructive. It's death. So Suarez as a beautiful way of talking about this when he talks about death ethic, who le out row Suarez, Krabi and many indigenous folks in the Americas and all over Africa talk about the distinction between death ethic or death power versus life power that which produces life. Okay. So if we understand that we can understand that our political are active. Every day political work is about if we're going to be life affirming is about building institutions of power. So this comes back to that that point that they go brought up. I'm not actually saying that we leave the institutional building of power to white people. What I'm saying is that we have to understand that if we're addressing our lives we need to work with political power. And political power infuses institutions that affect the lives of people across generations. And what are those institutions, those institutions are the economy. Those institutions are institutions such as governing forces. If you look at their education, all of those things are institutions of power. What offence criticisms of post colonies is that although they decolonize in the sense of becoming independent, they remain colonial because they continue the per their institutions of power education, economies, religion, their institutions of power governing institutions remain in the same grammatical or sociological or institutional framework as colonies. So if we're going to transform our power relations, we need to build completely different kinds of institutions that actually fit the aims we have. Otherwise we're just reproducing colonialism. So this comes now to the question of the way we think about action. There are many people who say we ought to have x, y or z, and then they turn around waiting for somebody else to do it. The moment you identify problems. That is a calling for you and others with you to act but not act from arrogance. If you act from arrogance, you act like you're a God, like you can snap your finger and make things happen. And that's the now power works in the human world. What it means is you need to act within the reasonable abilities you have. And that means you need to understand that you're part of something greater than yourself. Everybody has things they're excellent at things they're good at and things they're okay at. But there's some things we need as many people as possible who are okay at. And there's some things we need many people who are good at them. And especially when we're dealing with issues of leadership we need people are excellent. But not everybody is excellent in the same things. So everything we need to understand is interconnected and they matter. So whether you're talking about the centers you build. If you think about the very fact that we write books. That is also part of the transformation. If we think about the way we actually build, not only the question of formal schooling, which offers certification, but actual education education is a lot of education what you do outside of a formal school. It's all about creativity. There are people who build things that they have no idea will have an impact on the future. We're speaking with each other right now. For instance, because of technologies that were developed by a black man, Latimer was his name in the 19th century. He was actually the person who made the connection to the telephone and a filament for the light bulb, which enables us right now to see each other and hear each other, although we're physically distant. That's power. At a lovelace, she developed the algorithm for the computer. And that's one of the reasons why we're able to work on our computers. Had a Lamar, that Jewish woman who was known as an actress was busy working on also wireless technologies and other technologies. She didn't know that it's going to be something that we use right now in a pandemic. There are so many things that we need. These are problems that are so global in scale that they require all hands and deck for us all to be doing our part. The question about white narcissism about narcissism, you know, friends for not actually argue that racism is fundamentally a form of narcissism. Narcissism, of course, is as many degrees, many gradations. But we're talking about malignant, or, you know, really malignant and abject narcissism. And we don't have enough time so but I could summarize it this way. If you were to have a child and tell that child that child is to have everything. And something's wrong with the world that child never gets what she or he or they get. And that would raise a really obnoxious adult. But if you think about it, whiteness. When we think about whiteness in terms of how it's manifested historically is the description to a group of people that they must always get what they want. In fact, what whiteness is about is to believe that whites must have everything. And if you believe you must have everything. Then whiteness is narcissism. And in fact this everythingness mentality is the point where it also ascribes to whites, the presupposition, then not receiving everything also give rights to white, the right to a presumed victimization. So to have actually the identity of the victimized and the identity of those were to possess everything. That is the core of whiteness. Now it's not that every individual white person thinks this way. We're talking about a conceptual thing. So the question of course, is that if we see this, and the response to it, if such whites don't get everything they have narcissistic rage. And we see that in the world right now, in the form of an effort to turn the clock back and things we say well what is blackness. Again to this logic of opposition. If we think about those who are not asserting the right to everything. They're not making the claim they have no rights. The difference is to take the position that human beings living as human beings have the right to some things. And we may ask what those some things are. Some things are the rights to food shelter clothing, being treated with respect. Good health care, education, joy. In other words, a livable life. You don't have to have everything to have that. But there are important things to have. So implicit in that is a form of humility. And a form of truthfulness about what you need to live as a human being. And this is one of the points that's different about black consciousness versus white consciousness. Because you see, again, I don't argue that every individual white person thinks this way. But when we think of whiteness, this idea, this idea of having everything. It's a form of greed. It works very well with capitalism. It works very well with the idea that who cares about the rest of humanity. And this is one of the reasons why that possessive consciousness also jeopardizes the planet. Because it ignores the fact that a sneeze in one part of the world could be a hospital stay in another. It ignores the fact that polluting in one part of the world can actually lead to a person gasping for air in another part of the planet. It fails to understand that we live together. And so if we're going to address these issues, we need to address it in terms of understanding not only the necessary what Elvis brought up, the Ubuntu aspect. There are many African languages that also and also Asian language that brings up something the equivalent of Ubuntu. If we think of ran, for instance, in varieties of Chinese languages, there are varieties of Chinese languages, the similar concept. The idea then is that if we understand ourselves relationally, then that consciousness makes us deal with what we're living and what is specific. And as we begin to build from there, we begin now to use our imagination and our political action to build different kinds of worlds and I can tell you this. I don't see how we're going to deal with climate change and a lot of other issues if we stick with nation state models, I just put my cards in the table. I don't reject nations we're obviously nations there are other obviously historical ways we live our lives. But I don't think nation states are any longer sustainable. And we're already seeing with the problems we have today the erosion and the jeopardizing of humankind on this model. So there's a lot more I could say, but for now. I hope I've at least responded to those questions. Thank you very much, Professor Gordon. Yeah, you have comprehensively touched on every question asked. I know if there was time, you could go now for the next two three four hours. First of all, once again, thank you for honoring our invitation for being with us this evening for your interesting talk and for the very rich way you've answered the questions that have been raised. We, of course, look forward to being with you some of some of that time in the future. Not sure how this space will be it could be in person it could be virtually again, but we look forward to more conversations on these and of course many of us would be looking into your new book, and perhaps the other ones. Quite a number of them that you've drawn our attention to. And thank you all for being here as well. Thank you to the source Center for African studies for sending out the call the webinar and the invites and basically Oh, it looks like Elvis may have frozen up. But I would also like to say to us today. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much and thank you members of the source community I love whenever I visit there. And I'm looking forward to when I come in person in the future. And to the audience, because many of you are from many other places. I often close by just simply say I want to wish you health safety love. Despite the difficult times and I know there are many difficult times, but do remember to find moments of joy and remember your humanity. That's what enables us to continue building world together. And it's in that that we could actually have possibilities for something better to come. Have a good weekend everyone. Take care. Bye bye thank you. Thank you for so much. Thank you.