ABSTRACT
In Lewis Gordon’s analysis of Frederick Douglass’s existential situation as a black slave, he remarks that “American slavery was a concerted dehumanizing project” (Gordon 1999: 222). He goes on further to say, “It is this dimension that garnered its peculiarly anti-black racist characteristic” (ibid.). Properly understood, “racism is a denial of the humanity of another human being by virtue of his or her racial membership” (ibid.). Such relations deny the presence of another human being because the Other is made “a form of presence that is an absence of human presence” (ibid.: 223). Gordon writes: “Forced into the realm of property, even linguistic appeals-cries of recognition-are muffl ed, unheard, waving hands, gestures for acknowledgment are invisible. It is not that they do not trigger impulses between the eyes and the brain. It is that there has been a carefully crafted discipline of unseeing. The black slave is thus a paradoxically seen invisibility in this regard; seeing him or her as a black slave triggers not seeing him or her as a human being” (ibid.).
