by Lewis Gordon
What can one do when it is illegal for one to appear? Such a neurotic situation emerges, Robert Redding contends, from a society whose deeply rooted attack on itself, an effort to purge the dark center from which its soul is animated. To see and address this problem, he offers a philosophical critique, which he calls “Borigination.”
Borigination is a philosophy of and about soul. Redding offers specific explanations of the conjoined set of terms he uses to formulate this concept in his first chapter. For our purposes, the crucial point is that “soul” has aesthetic, metaphysical, psychological, social, spiritual, and theological meanings. At the level of popular culture, it is no accident, Redding’s argument suggests, that the expression is tapped onto the understanding of black people. In a world bifurcated into those who have and those who lack, the implications of this observation is tremendous: lacking soul, white people are left with two responses—seeking or destroying it.
Borigination is a philosophy of and about soul. Redding offers specific explanations of the conjoined set of terms he uses to formulate this concept in his first chapter. For our purposes, the crucial point is that “soul” has aesthetic, metaphysical, psychological, social, spiritual, and theological meanings. At the level of popular culture, it is no accident, Redding’s argument suggests, that the expression is tapped onto the understanding of black people. In a world bifurcated into those who have and those who lack, the implications of this observation is tremendous: lacking soul, white people are left with two responses—seeking or destroying it.
The search for soul requires, following the thread of Redding’s argument, developing a better relationship with black people. Why do such? To regain one’s soul. In theological language, this is nothing short of salvation.
Fighting against soul, however, spirals into ruin and destruction. The effort to destroy black lives is, in other words, soul destruction. A world without soul is the death of humanity. Biological entities called “human” may continue to walk the earth, but they would, in effect, be the living dead.
Redding, host of Reddingnewsreview.com offers his reflections from the trenches, as it were. He has spent more than a decade developing an independent voice in the market-driven world of talk radio, where, unfortunately, nothing is feared more than the proverbial truth. It is a world saturated by bad faith—that is, the effort to evade displeasing truth by investing in pleasing falsehoods—with occasional moments of clarity guided by the discomforting fore of evidence.
Sifting through a barrage of evidence is part of Redding’s mission as a journalist. It is also his work as an intellectual and public figure. Evidence is not only what must be argued for, however, but also what must be seen and, as he does on his radio show, heard. Perhaps, too, through his reaching to our understanding, to our soul, it is also what can be felt.
A powerful feature of Redding’s Why Black Lives Matter is reaching forth, with humane passion, to the evidence proverbially available for all to see. This is difficult, heart-wrenching stuff.
Some years ago I wrote “The Irreplaceability of Continued Struggle,” an essay kindly included in George Yancy’s Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics. I also discuss the concept of irreplaceability in my book Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2020). The message is something overlooked by casual portraits of death. A world that sees only the death of “a black” under the state-sanctioned violence of racist police officers elides the reality of what their loved ones and indeed all of humanity has lost: someone who could never be replaced.
The failure to engage the irreplaceability of each black person killed by these practices of ongoing lynching is a dehumanizing defense mechanism of a sick society. To bring the humanity of these victims to the fore, Redding offers a powerful chapter in which many of them appear in their tragic variety—father, brother, son; mother, sister, daughter; on and on. So many killed when in fact posing no real threat to the lives of others.
Why do I say so? The training of police officers enable them often to apprehend white suspects—even those waging weapons at them, those fighting them, those in some cases, as in the racist mass murderer Dylann Roof of South Carolina or the biker gangs arrested in Waco, Texas, are on record of having killed many people and thus pose a greater threat to society—without harming them.
How one is treated in the world depends on whether one is seen as a human being or otherwise. There is something perverse, however, about soullessness becoming a criterion for human recognition, and I’m certain most white people will object and claim the opposite, as did racist theologians of past ages: that it is in fact black people who lack souls and can thus be harmed without remorse.
Redding’s critique is, however, peculiarly ironic and also psychoanalytical. Sigmund Freud, for instance, had offered an unusual critique of anti-Semitism in Moses and Monotheism, which, ironically, would place him in agreement with Redding. Freud argued that Christians persecuted Jews ultimately because they hated Christianity. It was a religion forced on many of the people who became Christian, and it demanded public acts of devotion through resources of guilt. Thus, to hide the guilt of actually hating their religion, many Christians demonstrated an overflow of public love for it in a form that also included killing the Father religion from which it was born—namely, Judaism.
The foundation of all humanity is dark-skin people from Africa, primordial people easily recognized today as black people. Redding’s critique suggests a provocative consideration: perhaps supremacist institutions and their agents unleash so much violence on black people—on soul—precisely because, as soulless, they hate themselves.
Psychologists of abuse are familiar with this phenomenon. Violent abusers ultimately hate themselves. The Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon puts it this way in Black Skin, White Masks: white people’s sense of inadequacy leads to a form of narcissistic rage against black people—especially black men—as much of this is ultimately about white male inadequacy and white female desire to be desired. Both represent a form of lack that leads to an exaggerated sense of importance and, by extension, a constant presumption of victimization and threats.
That no group of Americans display public affection for their country more than white Americans (though there are small numbers of conservative people of color in the mix) with exaggerated assertions of its not only being the greatest country on earth but also the greatest in all history, the case mounts. It is as if the national, hegemonic consciousness seeks redemption for so much evil, for some way of saying the carnage and genocidal activity on which the country is built is somehow worth it all in those who reap its supposed benefits today.
Is such inheritance really a benefit?
Such is the question posed by Redding. There is an existential paradox worth considering: sometimes winner loses and losers win. The loss of soul as the price of “victory” is the folly of abusers; soul integrity is a triumph even in the face of lost battles. Who wants to be celebrated for, ultimately, murdering humanity’s soul?
Redding’s theory of borigination is a demand to take heed of the irreplaceability and gravity of such in our times, for which we have the onus of considering in a world where time itself is, proverbially, running out.
Lewis R. Gordon is the Executive Editor of the Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy. He is Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs, Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa, and Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. His most recent book, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization, is scheduled for publication by Routledge in 2020.
