The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013

10.1215/00382876-2345252 2013 Duke University Press

Lewis R. Gordon
Race, Theodicy, and the Normative
Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness
Race, as Sylvia Wynter argues, is also a biod-
icy (Wynter 2006: 142). By this, she means that
the theodicean grammar of the world in which
race was constituted is also, we should understand,
one about the negotiation of life and death. Among
its many consequences, race is about in one sense
who lives and who dies. In another sense, its nor-
mative signicance leads to a rephrasing of who is
supposed to live and who to die.
1
Theodicy literally means gods justice.
From theo (god) and dike (justice), the word
emerges from a problem forged by expectations of
a good or benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent
deity. Such a being is presumed to be committed
to what is rightin some reasoning even more,
where the being itself is what is right and good
which makes the emergence of evil and injustice a
major problem. If the deity has the capacity to
eradicate evil, indeed, the ability to have prevented
its emergence in the rst place, why are there
manifestations of evil and injustice?
The problem raises a variety of vexing prob-
lems for all except perhaps the most extraordi-
nary of the faithful or the most naive among them.
If the deitys benevolence is a necessary condi-
tion of its existence, then the presence of iniquity
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suggests either the deitys impotence or malicious foreknowledge. If evil
and injustice are the deitys will, the universe is under the yoke of a very
bad deity. Another conclusion is simply that the deity doesnt exist.
A third solution is to demonstrate the compatibility of evil and injus-
tice alongside the existence of such a god. Many theologians have taken this
course. From St. Augustine (1950) in the early middle ages to Gottfried Leib-
niz (1952) in early modern through to Kwame Gyekye (1987), John Hicks
(1978), William R. Jones (1997), Sherman A. Jackson (2009), and Anthony
B. Pinn (1999) in recent times, the conundrum persists with answers not
often satisfactory for the faithful (see also Gordon 2008). Not much has gone
beyond St. Augustines reection on two exonerating conditions for his deity,
although argued in many instances with increasing brilliance, which was for
his fellow Christians and him the deity: the problem is a consequence of
human limitations.
Human beings are not omniscient and therefore cannot possibly
understand the full signicance of what appears to be evil and unjust. That
familiar response boils down to the old adage, G-d knows.
2
The alterna-
tive response reminds us of the signicance of love. The deity endowed
humanity with free will. As an act of love, it demands restraint as human
will, imperfect as it is, makes its way through the ages through actions
good and bad, right and wrong. In both formulations, human beings are
the problem. Gyekye (1987), Jones (1997), Jackson (2009), and Pinn (1999),
while endorsing its humanistic ethical implications, are not satised with
this response. Its metaphysical implications are not in the favor of G-ds
existence.
Others, such as F. W. J. von Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich
Nietzsche, had thought through the implications of theodicy at the level of
nature and history.
3
The existential problematic raises the question of what
is permitted to be in the world versus what is not. If the unfolding of time
and history is at the end of the day right, then what is to be made of that
which it eliminates and those who are pushed to the wayside in this drama?
They, along with others such as W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) through to Frantz
Fanon (1991) and more, have noticed the continued presence of this kind of
argumentation even where there is the absence of an avowed deity.
4
Even
secular societies may have a theodicean mode of rationalization, where the
society itself or some system of treasured knowledge or values occupies the
deic role. In theology, this is called idolatry.
For our purposes, idolatry offers a theodicean grammar or form. Its
rationalization depends on rendering its contradictions external, which
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Gordon Race, Theodicy, and Emancipatory Challenges 727
means, from a systemic point of view, systematically dead. This dimen-
sion of theodicy, then, shifts as normative investment moves from knowl-
edge and society to life, from biology (bio-logos) to a biodicy (life-justice). We
could call this the presupposition of inherently lived justication.
Such is not only the story of race but also the specicity of its modern,
Manichaean manifestation. That protorace had its origin in theological natu-
ralism brings these considerations to the fore. The world of theological natu-
ralism was, after all, one in which the theological and the natural were insep-
arable. There was no supernatural in that world because the natural was what
the deity produced. Thus, instead of the natural and the supernatural, pri-
mary distinctions in Western modernity, there was the natural and the unnat-
ural. The latter simply meant that which deviated from the former. In medi-
eval Christian theology, the unnatural was that which deviated from Christ,
which made it also evil or demonic. Among such deviations were two refus-
ing groups: Jews and Muslims.
The etymology of race points to this theological naturalism but with
odd considerations. The prototerm was raza, which referred to breeds of
dogs and horses, and then Jews and Moors.
5
The complicated issue with
dogs and horses, as we know, is that their emergence from their ancestral
species was through human involvement. Thus, their natural form was
heavily mediated or, under another interpretation, deviated. It would be
odd to consider dogs and horses unnatural, however. That they are
domesticated animals signals a relationship between them and the human
beings they serve. Jews and Moors represented a deviation from the natu-
ral in a similar way: each supposedly part of G-ds creation, they are, never-
theless, deviations through supposedly human hubris. Comparing them
with domesticated animals, then, signaled also the social role they were
expected ultimately to play. Thus, in the reconquest, referring more to an
order of power than to historical fact, since there was not a prior Christian
conquest of Islam because the latter emerged after Christianity and was in
fact the conqueror, the search for signs, markings, of unnatural origins
was among its governing activities well attested to by the Inquisition.
The question of origins was, however, among the considerations of
raza. The term was not German, Latin, or Greek, languages that dominated
the northern Mediterranean northward, but Arabic, Hebrew, and Egyptian.
As a variation of such words as ra (Arabic), rosh (Hebrew), and ra (Egyptian),
words referring to head and beginning, its signicance for origins was
clear. The Afro-Muslim conquest of Iberia, which created Andalusia, no
doubt offered distinctions premised on originsa consideration not only
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among the conquered Christians but also among the Muslims who were
transformed the more their faith reached beyond western Asia.
6
The Christian triumph in Grenada in 1492 meant, among many things,
the expansion of a legitimation crisis, where origins became a constant con-
sideration even as ships reached shores in which those who greeted them
were not Christian, Jew, or Muslim. The epistemic upheavals that followed,
where justication shifted from the deity to the question of deities them-
selves, where accounting for the natural required nontheological sources, led
to new examinations of origins and correlative anthropologies: raza was
adopted, adapted, and transformed into classication systems through which,
over time, we have race. But along with this transformation were also contin-
ued forms of rationalization. Thus, as deviance was marked by a shift from
normative centers, old theologically symbolic markers of the light and the
dark, Manichaean throughout, continued. There was no hope of a good deal
for the night in this tale.
7
The historical situation of the dark, which eventually became the
black, was marked before the debates between Bartolom de Las Casas and
Juan Gins de Seplveda about the humanity of Native American popula-
tions and their salvation both spiritually and biologically, through appeal to
heathenish and darker sources from Africa (see Hanke 1974). The recon-
quest had already set the stage for the relationship with the black, but this
blackness was one in which refuge could not be sought in the soul because
of its already betrayed presence in the color of skin. To make matters worse,
the populations thus marked by blackness had no reason to have expected
such, which meant their inauguration into this schema, an epidermal one
as Fanon (1967) characterized it, were without knowledge of the logic that
erased their inner or lived reality. A form of amnesia was necessary to trans-
form people from a world in which they once saw themselves as the future
as, in other words, their version of modernto the Fanonian problematic
near the end of Les damns de la terre: In reality, what am I? (Fanon 1991:
penultimate ch.).
This problematic of blackness is symbiotically linked to the world in
which Christendom was transformed into Europe, where Germanic and
Mediterranean Christians were transformed into whites. As there was no
reason to have considered themselves black or African prior to the imposi-
tions of these identities on them from kidnapping to Middle Passage to
enslavement, black existence became marked by the peculiarity of paradox
and melancholic displacement. The former was a consequence of having to
have always been what one becomes. The melancholia is to be endemic to a
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Gordon Race, Theodicy, and Emancipatory Challenges 729
world in which one is rejectedto be homeless in the epoch to which one is
indigenous. Paradoxes are brought about through displacement at levels of
identity, for to be black is not to be; it is to be, as Fanon observed, in the
zone of nonbeing. Thus, blackness is fundamental to the formation of Euro-
pean modernity as it is one that imagines itself legitimate and pure through
the expurgation of blackness. It is, in other words, the theodicy of European
modernity.
Du Bois saw this problem in many ways. In one sense, he formulated
it as the problem of being a problem. This realization led to a schism in
which a consciousness of society and of not belonging to it through paradox-
ically being endemic to it is one of Du Boiss great insights. He outlined well
the theodicean problematic of blackness as the absent term, even in its pres-
ence. This logic required apartheid behavior even at epistemic levels, as
Railand Rybalka (2010) correctly observed, and that consideration moved
more radically to the conditions for the possibility of thought itself (see also
L. R. Gordon 2006). In effect, it demanded purication of theory, which
meant theory that behaves, theory that abides by the rules, theory, in other
words, with limited vision. The reference to vision is no accident here, as
theory etymologically emerges from the Greek innitive theorein (to see),
through which we get theoria. As with theodicy, the theological groundings
of this concept should be evident, which reminds us of a basic insight of the-
oretical work as an attempt to see what deities would see. To see as a god
indeed, as G-dwould be an extraordinary achievement for humanity,
which is no doubt why much of early modern reection on decoding the uni-
verse took the form of deciphering the language of G-d. Where G-d is seen
as light, however, there is no darkness, which makes all truth, all thought,
ultimately without contradiction. Truth and thought obey G-d in this theo-
logical metaphysics precisely because the deity could command their obedi-
ence. In that conception, necessity and sufciency meet because thought
and deed, from that which is omniscient and omnipotent, are one.
Epistemic theodicy takes the form, however, of demanding the
supervenience of consistency models of rationality. In effect, it requires
rationalizing reasons obedience. A problem emerges, however, when the
scope of this effort includes its own evaluation. It begs the question for ratio-
nality to assess its own consistency, since it is consistency itself that is up for
evaluation. To evaluate consistency or rationality requires something more,
and that is reason. What, in other words, if reason doesnt behave? And what
if its delinquency is precisely because, as an evaluator, it must be above, para-
doxically even, itself? These kinds of questions reveal the contradictions of
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metasystems, of any theoretical model that must evaluate itself. But brought
down to earth in the context of these reections, it means addressing the
sides of theory that rationality hoped to suppress, and what are they other
than their darker sides? Theory, in other words, could articulate the light
only because its reach is also into its negations, namely, the zones of non-
being (for more, see Gordon 2010b).
This understanding leads to rethinking some key features of the emer-
gence of colonized epistemic practices. To identify them as colonized means
to admit their suppressed terms, their hidden or feared undersides. The previ-
ous meditations on theory bring to the fore considerations of practices of sci-
ence as well. Here we are in a terrain similar to Du Boiss (1903) reections on
potentiated double consciousness, where the contradictions of false particu-
larities unveil and enlarge the grammatical practices of knowledgein more
prosaic language, the universalizing, as opposed to universal, activities of
expanding thought (for discussion, see Henry 2005; and J. A. Gordon 2007).
And made plainer: This means blackness, broader in scope, unmasks the
false security of whiteness. Reality, in other words, is always bigger than that.
Among the many instances of this unfolding is the constellation of
epistemic practices known as the human sciences. One fallacy is the ten-
dency to treat these sciences as pure, wherein their completeness is dem-
onstrated and then they are methodically applied to human beings.
8
What
is missing is the understanding that human being was already racially
inected through the presupposition of epistemic practices premised on
normative whiteness. The human sciences emerged, after all, out of the
question, What is man?
9
But as we have seen, that question emerged through
encounters with the extraordinary and the different. When a presumed
human we meets them, interrogation emerges on the question of
whether we are they. This rupture leads to meditations on the question
of standards by which we are determined as who or what we are and they
are the same for what they are. This identity question, however, leads to fur-
ther meditations on those standards, and in them is the additional problem-
atic of what is a human being (for more, see Gordon 2011c). This philosophi-
cal anthropological question, if we will, is rendered more difcult by the
epistemic upheavals that emerged from a collapsed theological naturalism.
Where necessity no longer reigns as a god, where idea does not mean exis-
tence, where the human being must take hold of the responsibility for what
is seen (secular theory), the possibility of what to become is the metaphysical
and epistemic investment in no less than the modern problematic of freedom
in an epoch conditioned through and through by the presupposition of racial
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Gordon Race, Theodicy, and Emancipatory Challenges 731
difference. In blackness, in other words, emerged three conditions of mod-
ern thought itselfnamely, philosophical anthropology, freedom, and the
justicatory practices of both (see Gordon 2010b, 2008).
The emergence of the rst is already outlined and understood through
the historical reality of systems denying the humanity of whole groups of
human beings in the rst place. Such denial, contradictory in terms (because
it relies on the supposed nonhumanity of some human groups, of putting
outside of human relations that which depends on human relationships),
inevitably leads to the effort to force behavior on human subjects through
epistemic and political acts of closure. The problem, however, is that a closed
human being, a human being without possibility, is not properly a human
being.
10
Freedom, then, became an intimate condition of human exempli-
cation. As symbiotic, the two faced legitimating questions, and thus the jus-
ticatory practiceis blackness justiable?emerged (see, e.g., Gordon
2000: ch. 1). I have elsewhere called this the metacritique of reason precisely
because of the black side of thought premised on contradictions of reason
(see Gordon 2010b). A Fanonian allegory is perhaps useful here. In Black
Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967: ch. 5) observed the ight of reason when the
black enters the room. The black could force reasons obedience, but this
will no doubt be unreasonable. But reasons ight as he reached out to it is
also unreasonable. The black faces, in other words, the nightmare of unrea-
sonable reason. Barred from the use of force, the only alternative is to reason
with such (unreasonable) reason (see Gordon 2011d). This reasoning, if we
will, is the continued burden of blackness.
Although these reections pertain fundamentally to the epistemic
challenges of blackness, I do not think they are radical enough. One presup-
position of decolonizing the epistemic conditions is that it will lead to a form
of normative catharsis. The presumption is that a form of false knowledge is
sequestering the kinds of responsible activities needed to think and act better,
and by the latter I mean at least ethically and justly. These normative terms
are often presumed as prisoners behind European-nurtured epistemic walls.
What if there is another layer of imprisonment? What if the presumed nor-
mative resources to be unleashed from the putting aside of epistemic infelici-
ties persist at a more radical levelthat is, at those of the norms themselves?
In his critique of European colonialism, Aim Csaire (2000: 41)
raised a similar concern when he argued that what transpired in World War
II was not anomalous but instead was a manifestation of the actual values
Europeans lived in the colonies, namely, Hitlerism (see also Maldonado-
Torres 2008b: ch. 1). It was not only that European colonialism actively
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fought against the humanity of colonized subjects but also that the modes or
technologies of colonization were expressions of Europe itself. That being the
case, Csaires analysis of what emerged on the European continent was sim-
ply its value system turned inward. His argument was not that there werent
good things about Europe. As a human community, it also had bad elements,
and as those were pushed outward to the colonies (in theodicean language,
outside of the god), they eventually spilled over into a vengeful return.
Csaire identied a problem later echoed by Fanon in his encomium
for people of what is today called the global South to look beyond Europe for
inspiration, develop new concepts, and set afoot a new humanity. The con-
ceptual question alerts us to the epistemic challenge, but Fanons praxis
demand (set afoot a new humanity) speaks to a task at the level of lived
reality. Even more, Fanon earlier in the same passage encouraged going
beyond the Greco-Latin pedestal of European values (see Fanon 1991: ch. 1
and conclusion; for discussion, see Gordon 2010a). While proponents of
those values might attempt to defend them as human values or universal val-
ues, this normative critique questions such an assertion on a par with that of
double consciousness and potentiated double consciousness. Is it not another
case of European particularity asserting itself as human universality? And
even more, as we saw in the philosophical anthropological question, isnt
part of a radical critique the question of privileging one group of human
beings as the human in the rst place?
We are on familiar terrain. For as with the theological and epistemic
questions, the normative one faces the problem of theodicean grammar as
well. Are the norms for which many of us are ghting in the name of, say,
racial justice or liberation from antiblack racism free of normative coloni-
zation even where they may be so at an epistemic level? Isnt it presumptu-
ous to think that the decolonization of knowledge has the same norms as
its consequence?
We do already have a clue on this potentially vexing problem. Black-
ness, after all, as the underside of theory, is a relational concept (see Gordon
2010b). To think of blackness means always to imagine it in relation to some-
thing else, since to do so is to establish at least a phenomenological relation-
ship of thought to its object or subject (Gordon 2010b; see also Gordon
2011b). This basic relationship offers the critique of the theodicean one,
where the role of a god in effect eliminates the rest of the world by becoming
an exclusive domain. It requires being without an outside and thus being
outside of relations with anything else. The distinction of being-in-relations ver-
sus nonrelationality raises a normative difference since blackness, and its
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Gordon Race, Theodicy, and Emancipatory Challenges 733
relationship not only to the included but also the excluded, promises an ever-
widening normative range.
An example of this difference is what we could call justice talk. This
activity is often done as if it is all-encompassing but insufciently addressed.
Thus, there is always the search for justice as though every normative
arrangement of social institutions has simply fallen short of its virtue, as
John Rawls (1971: introduction) espoused through his claim of justice as the
primary virtue of institutions. This presumption works, of course, if justice
were simply a term already present in every human community and simply
standing within the northern European tradition of thought as a term trans-
latable into its correlate in other languages. But translatability often begs
many important questions of human difference. It could not only be the case
that justice was not translated but in fact imposed but also that its scope,
even where translatable, is part of a smaller normative eld within the frame-
work of the non-European group to which it is posed. If this is correct, then
the proponent of justice has the task not only of understanding what is com-
mon about justice across human communities but also what could be learned
beyond justice across them as well. Where justice is asserted in a theodicean
way, this is a terrifying thought, as it requires looking at the underside of
justice only as injustice instead of what may be right or good beyond
justice.
11
Race, theodicy, and normativity, then, pose special questions for our
age, especially in terms of challenges raised by blackness. The last, for
instance, has a bad habit of demonstrating societal, scientic, and normative
contradictions. Blackness, constantly posed as illicit appearance, means that
hopes for justice in a system premised on licit appearance leads not only to
contradictions but also to the maintenance of exclusion in the name of justice.
In the realm of science, there was the presumption that science is correctly
implemented through the exclusion of race, particularly blackness. The cri-
tique is the same as on the societal level: it is a theodicy that elides the sym-
biotic foundation of its own system. The human sciences, for instance,
emerged out of worries and encounters with human difference. Instead of
bad science producing race, it was, in other words, race that produced human
science, since it required a meditation not only on the human but also the
really human. I have outlined some of the normative problematics in terms of
justice, but there is more to consider, for the normative dimensions of what
it means to be human also affect the conditions of appearance and other
norms such as those of violation and violence. If one is not supposed to
appear, then one has violated a norm by doing so (see, e.g., Gordon 2012).
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Blackness, then, is a challenge at the heart of what is to be done as
humanity reects on how it is bound to its subsequent generations, how,
that is, it is bound to itself. This binding, the hallmark of religiosity, raises
the question as well, in a secular age, of the extent to which religiosity itself
as a disavowed condition is also a blackened one. These reections at levels
of knowledge and value, the separation of which I hope has been shown to
be neither neat nor even viable, I also hope will be of some use as we con-
tinue to reect on the continued signicance and future of things black.
Notes
To Sylvia Wynter, with continued admiration and appreciation.
1 This is familiar to anyone who reects on racism and genocide. For critical discus-
sion in these terms, see Feder 2008; Sheth 2009; and Gordon 2011a.
2 For readers wondering about this expression, G-d. The answer: Im in the Jewish
camp and subscribe to the logic of what is involved, including the hubris, of referring
to the ineffable or, at least, that which shouldnt be fully written or uttered.
3 For discussion, see, for example, Gabriel 2011; and iek and Gabriel 2009.
4 For discussion, see Gordon 2008; and compare also Gordon 2004.
5 See, e.g., Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozsco (1611), who in his Tesoro de la lengua,
explained the term as pertaining to the caste of purebred horses, which are marked
by a brand so that they can be recognized. . . . Raza in lineages is meant negatively, as
in having some raza of Moor or Jew (quoted and translated in Nirenberg 2007: 79).
6 Literature on this subject is vast. In addition to Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan 2007, see
Mignolo 2003; Davis 2003; and Van Sertima 1992. Compare also Gordon 2008: ch. 1.
7 In addition to Gordon 2008, see also Gordon 1995b; Baltazar 1973; Mignolo 2003,
2012; and Maldonado-Torres 2008a.
8 For discussion of this fallacy, see Gordon 2000: ch. 4; J. A. Gordon 2006; and
Rybalka 2010.
9 See Foucault 1971 for a magisterial study of this question and the formation of the
human sciences, and compare Wynter 2006 and Bogues 2006.
10 For more, see the discussion of epistemic closure Gordon 1995a: ch. 3.
11 For more on this problem and formulation, see Gordon 2013.
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