ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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Fear of Black Consciousness
Lewis R Gordon
Allen Lane, £20
“I CAN’T breathe.” George Floyd’s dying words have established an iconic meme resounding throughout the world.
Just as the asphyxiating coronavirus “sees” no boundaries, responding most effectively to pre-existing conditions, Lewis Gordon, a leading Afro-Jewish existentialist philosopher, recognises that “our pre-existing pandemics of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, fascism, and their accompanying racism” provided vulnerable social sites for the virus to spread more efficiently.
Gordon quotes WEB Du Bois, the famous social scientist, educationist and socialist, founder of the NAACP: “Being born black does not entail in social scientific terms what it means to be black.”
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