Becoming Actional in Light of the Trauma of Racial Melancholia

This is a slightly modified transcription of Lewis R. Gordon's lecture on how living is a form of ongoing trauma through which, in its healthy form, there is growth in living a life worth living. Racism, Gordon argues, is the imposition of disempowerment through which agency is turned away from the world on a path inward to the construction of disempowered people being linked to a society premised on one's exclusion, illegitimacy, and erasure. The result is the trauma of racial melancholia, a subjectivity born from the loss of belonging. The lecture is concluded on the importance of social affirming practices of radical love.