Against Evidence Otherwise:

Bad Faith and Antiblackness in Education & Society

Under Contract with Brill Publishing 

Edited by Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University

What is to be done in a world of near universal sense of superiority to, if not universal hatred of, Black folk?

–Lewis R. Gordon (1997, p. 1)

I know I am a Human because I am not Black. I know I am not Black because when and if I experience the kind of violence Blacks experience there is a reason.

—Frank Wilderson (2020, p.225)

Anti-blackness covers the fact that society’s hatred of blackness, and also its gratuitous violence against black people, is complicated by its need for our existence.

–kihana miraya ross (2020)

To teach and learn through antiblackness, we must commit to seeing it. 

–Justin A. Coles (2019, p. 5)

Gordon (1997), Wilderson (2020), and ross’ (2020) scholarship about the societal ethos of antiblackness raises the critical question of what does it mean to be against the Black? (Sexton, 2008) Bearing witness while Black to the utter mundaneness of anti-Black vitriol in an alleged, “racially egalitarian, anti-racist, and post-racial country”, Against Evidence Otherwise situates itself upon that question. As an organizing site of Blackened consciousness, the poignant question serves as a reminder that Black people struggle to exist as humans within the U.S. (and global) society where there is “a cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness” (Dumas, 2016, p. 11). This struggle stems from the notion that humanity is not a universal experience, as strict demarcations about humanness racially enclose white as Human(e) and Black as non-Human(e) (Wilderson, 2010, 2020; Mills, 1997). This color line (DuBois, 1903)—this permanence of racial stratification constructed “between blackness and everything else” (2008, p. 13), holds Black people at the bottom of the well (Bell, 1992). As the thing most despised (Gordon, 1997), Black existence continues to be constructed and construed as a being with little-to-no value. Antiblackness is a crisis of fundamental rights and imagination, as discourses on humanity, who can occupy it, are structured against the Black. Antiblackness is spatially committed to the devaluation of the Black across social institutions through interdependent relationships, interactions, and policies—regardless of Black people’s profession, accolades, or adherence to respectability politics (Gilmore et al., 2021). Seemingly, Black life’s ever-present degradation, suffering, alienation, exploitation, and antagonism is situated on inhabiting a literal and symbolic world predicated on bad faith. Gordon (1995) defines bad faith as anguishly fleeing “a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood” (p. 8). As a self-deceptive social phenomenon where truth is expendable to protect worldviews and/or feelings (Tichavakunda, 2021), people engaging in bad faith use “ideal belief as [their] standard of belief in order to use pleasing evidence as [their] standard of ordinary belief” (Gordon, 1997, p. 11). Evidence, however rigorous, will not alter the bad-faith actors’ belief in their worldview (Tichavakunda, 2021). Therefore, bad faith is grounded on evading our humanly world responsibilities, by using pleasing evidence to convince ourselves that a falsehood is in fact true. People’s collective bad faith is expressed, manifested, perpetuated, and maintained institutionally in societal belief systems and everyday activities (Gordon, 1997). As a group denial, it is civil societies’ bad faith manifestations about Black humanity that situates Black existence to inhabit an anti-Black world. It is civil society’s self-evasion of their humanly choices and responsibilities that created the fact of Blackness (Fanon, 2008). It is the self-denial of having control over that which people have control of (Gordon, 1995), that perpetuates antiblackness. Thus, bad faith and antiblackness is not a pandemic or a grave miscalculation, but rather a total climate (Sharpe, 2016)—a present and unfolding philosophical endeavor—a normalized sociopolitical construction of racialized alienation, predicated on the death, disposability, suffering, and subjugation of Black people (Hartman, 1997; Sharpe, 2016), permeating all facets of life, including education and society.

Black youth have and continue to be under attack in all spheres of education, especially during this media-viral, anti-woke era of post-truth, post-shame, and post-accountability. While public education has been lauded a social good, it operates in bad faith because antiblackness’ entrenchment in schools has profound impacts on Black children’s educational outcomes and well-being. The social unimaginability and exclusion of Black youth (Dumas & Nelson, 2016) in educational spaces is normalized and justified because antiblackness permeates both K-12 educational policy (Dumas, 2016), teaching, learning, leadership (Lopez & Jean-Marie, 2021), and higher education (Mustaffa, 2017; Dancy et al., 2018). Fearing Blackness in day-to-day practices of education and schooling (Doret & Gordon, 2018), antiblackness operates as an institutional narrative (Ferguson, 2003) positioning Black bodies as bad and in need of disciplining (Dumas, 2018). Therefore, when Black students enter educational spaces, their existence is not only denied at the phenomenological level, but their bodies are phenomenologically returned their bodies as inferior (Yancy, 2005), “constructed as wrong, inappropriate, not enough” (Dumas, 2018, p. 39). This perpetual ritualization of deficiency (Yancy, 2005; Fanon, 2008) compels them to endure an assemblage of violence (Jenkins, 2021; Martin et al., 2019; Love, 2019) that shape a Black youth’s understanding of their place in the world. What do Black youth learn (Eisner, 2002) about their role and belonging within the world? What are they not afforded the opportunity to learn? (Milner, 2017) They learn that their lives and worth only matter circumstantially, in partial or marginal ways (Carey, 2019; 2020).

Contrary to civil society’s phenomenological (pre)determination of the Black, Black people indeed are humanswho have value. Woodson (2017) stated that, “the portrait of the Negro has seldom been drawn but by the pencil of his oppressor” (p. 124). This portrait, that circumscribes Black life as inferior (Gordon, 1997), a problem (Du Bois, 1903), a threat to society (Sexton, 2008), and an ontological terror (Warren, 2018) remains, in part, because there is a paucity of research theorizing about the specificity of bad faith and (anti)blackness in education and society. As such, addressing the insidious manifestations of bad faith and antiblackness is a compelling priority that is too urgent to ignore, especially in an era where bad faith actors are harnessing juridical-political power to intrude and curtail the acknowledgment of specific racial histories and oppressive structures. To combat and dismiss (even if momentarily) the oppressor’s ritualization of deficiency (Yancy, 2005; Fanon, 2008), it is crucial that educational stakeholders commit to seeing (Coles, 2019) how and why antiblackness is informed, operationalized, and machinated by bad faith. Therefore, the aim of this edited volume is to recalibrate the conversations about the structural realities of Black lives by collectively theorizing about bad faith and antiblackness, despite civil society’s purposeful evasion of truth, choice, and responsibilities. While Against Evidence Otherwise is not interested in consciousness raising, nor will not provide immediate solutions like neoliberalism demands, it will encourage the reader to tarry with (Yancy, 2023) the dissonance of Black educational scholarship that situates truth-telling as a corrective that exposes the contradictions, ideologies, hegemonic betrayals, and grand narratives that are fabricators and/or enablers of antiblackness. Through a diverse array of scholarly works and insightful analyses from experts and emerging scholars, this volume will supply the reader “a lens to see” the manifestations of antiblackness in the 21st century.

Specific subtopics that we want the edited volume to cover:

• (Anti)blackness and value (see Barrett, 1999; Moten & Harney, 2013) in education and society
• The convergence of bad faith, antiblackness, and the media (e.g., traditional, social)
• The exploration of bad faith, antiblackness, epistemological ignorance, and selective memory in the woke/anti-woke era
• Good faith as Bad faith in education and society
• The exploration of bad faith, antiblackness, and the liminality of Black childhoods and inelasticity of Black innocence
• The intersection of Black space, place, and “technologies” of surveillance, violence, and policing of Black youth
• The juxtaposition of free speech, academic freedom, anti-intellectualism, cancel culture, and the censorship of critical conversations about race, gender, and sexuality in the classroom
• The politicization of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Black literature through manufactured fear and moral panic
• Institutional (e.g., K-12 schools and universities) silencing and divestment towards racial inclusion
• Bad faith, antiblackness, and the “narrative arc of redemption” (Wilderson, 2020)

• The “trappings” of neoliberal-multiculturalism, racial capitalism, and politics of inclusion and exclusion
• Desired-based refusals against curricular violence and political possibilities of Black liberation

Each book chapter will be approximately 6,000 words (not inclusive of references). This edited volume will primarily seek contributions that are conceptual/theoretical, but will also consider empirical contributions as well. If interested, please submit a 250-word book chapter proposal by October 10th, 2025, via email to amir.gilmore@wsu.edu.