Abstract
Don Moss makes clear at the outset that his is not a “traditionally organized psychoanalytic text.” I was at once intrigued and made anxious by the unknown spaces and frames into which Don Moss casts us with his paper. If we do not have the anchors provided by our traditional psychoanalytic language and ways of thinking, with what do we anchor ourselves adequately to be able to experience and process the “affliction” Don invites us to study? I do not have an answer to that question for all of us. I can only say that, for me, intellectual curiosity about and a need to deeply understand Whiteness were enough for me to agree to discuss this paper, knowing that uneasy feelings would likely be stirred in me by plunging into such untrodden territory. Don recognizes that all the tools we use for inquiry have their limitations. If we rely only on our introspective capacity, we run into the limit that you can introspect only on what you already know. In exploring Whiteness, the search is for more than we already know and for more than we care to know. If we were to rely on theorized observation to study Whiteness, we would face the opportunities and biases of whichever theories we relied on. I would add that traditional psychoanalytic frames are particularly suspect because our history in psychoanalysis has been that we have appropriated those frames to perpetuate Whiteism. Here I use the word Whiteism to recognize Whiteness as action, in addition to its being a way or state of being. By use of Whiteism, we psychoanalysts have persistently and gratuitously privileged one theory over another and/or weaponized “theories” to hatefully exclude or degrade disfavored sexualities and races.
To restate a bit what I have just said, when a psychoanalyst presents a topic that is outside our traditional frames to an audience of psychoanalysts who are in varying degrees of struggle about how much to modify or even set aside our traditional ways of thinking and practicing, we have to expect anxiety to be part of the effort. This has been the case, for example, as psychoanalysis considered new ways of framing and understanding gender and sexuality; but over a few decades by now, we have made important and necessary changes in our theoretical and clinical approaches to these matters. So, as we process what Don has offered us, let’s try to remember that psychoanalysis has tackled other controversial subjects and that having done so has redounded to our benefit. Don’s paper on Whiteness raises the ante even more by interrogating what he calls Whiteness, a new focus on some very troubling sociocultural phenomena that are also deeply psychoanalytic and deserve to be recognized and articulated as such.As I read and reflected on his paper, I was anxious, and I expected to be, because in my experience claims that sociocultural phenomena have psychoanalytic meanings and clinical applications are often discredited and those making them are considered nonpsychoanalytic. As someone who has tried to stretch our thinking as psychoanalysts about race, class, and gender, I expect to be uncomfortable, knowing that I upset the status quo, and that in doing so I will stir discomfort in others, as well as in myself. In exploring race in the consulting room, I have to be prepared for white patients who claim dominion over me as a resistance to such exploration or as the result of what comes forth in transference-countertransference reactions as race is explored. Race may be regarded in the consulting room as fantasy, but it is also a gruesome historical and present social reality in which Blacks are mercilessly killed by whites who feel entitled to do so.For the Black analyst and the white patient to sit with these facts and their fantasied representations is quite a challenge because the realities of race in our country are still so raw and violent, and because our field of psychoanalysis has only recently begun to take these matters seriously. The bulk of psychoanalytic writing on race has been about how to understand the Black psyche. More recently, we have been able to see that there is no way to do so without owning and understanding the pernicious history of race in this country, with the realization that that history courses through all of us. All of us live that history, and it lives within us. Even more recently, we have begun to appreciate that “all of us” needs to include the white psyche, too. The interrogation of whiteness is the new kid on the block, so to speak. I have published one paper on the subject of interrogating whiteness (Holmes 2019), and I have written a second paper on the subject, which appears in this issue. My writing has been from the perspective of white racial identity. Don, as you know, separates his topic of Whiteness from white racial identity.
In his explication of Whiteness, Don states that white people are particularly susceptible to Whiteness, but he makes clear that the Whiteness he is conceptualizing is not the same as white racial identity. I find myself somewhat resisting this distinction, even as I know it is intellectually defensible, because clearly not only white people are susceptible to Whiteness/Whiteism. For example, Whiteism is implicated in genocide whatever the “color” of those who perpetrate it and those slaughtered by it. However, in our country, I would emphasize that Whiteness and Whiteism are largely the linchpins of white people and are unrelentingly aimed at Blacks, but not just Blacks. The white person afflicted with Whiteness can aim it even at other white people. As Paul Krugman (2019) has noted in a New York Times op-ed piece, it’s not just about race. There are more people than we like to imagine who rejoice in the suffering of anyone they see as unlike themselves, especially anyone they perceive as weak. In fact, I suspect that this mentality is part of the explanation for the seeming paradox of strong Republican support in places like eastern Kentucky where large numbers of poor whites depend on programs like food stamps: Those who aren’t receiving aid actually want to see their poorer neighbors hurt.
Krugman goes on to discuss the denying of aid to storm-ravaged Puerto Ricans on the pretense that it is about fighting corruption or enforcing fiscal responsibility. But Krugman calls the practice out as thinly veiled cruelty, what I would consider a form of Whiteism. Krugman also analyzes the pardoning of servicemen charged with or convicted of war crimes by the military, noting that Donald Trump allegedly wanted to campaign with them. Krugman’s analysis is quite Don Moss-like, in that he recognizes the Whiteness of such campaigning: “clearly . . . [the President] likes the idea of indiscriminate killing for which the servicemen were charged or convicted.”
A point I would make here is that social critics of various stripes outside of our field often seem to have a grasp of Whiteness better than we do. Krugman is an example, but there are many others, including James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. As psychoanalysts are we not also called to understand Whiteness? To the extent that we are, Don Moss’s paper is a usefully evocative start. A responsible search to deeply understand Whiteness requires us to take up a number of Don’s specific points. To begin, when Don says that Whiteness is acquired, is there more to say about the mechanisms of acquisition? Can one not acquire it? Can one not have it? Should we aim societally to stop the acquisition process? Clearly, it is a dreadful, chronic disease once in place: to use Don’s words, it is parasitic, malignant, foundational. I would add pervasive given that, according to Don, it takes over the entirety of self, mind, and body. To address again the point of whether Whiteness can at present be separated from being a white person in our society, I am wary and dubious. In our cultural history since slavery, white people have been the hosts of Whiteness. As Don implies about the malignancy of Whiteness, it is at best a chronic condition. As such it can, and dare I say must, be treated. Certainly that is an argument I have made for decades about Whiteness’s first cousin, racism—that it can and must be treated. A bigger, scarier possibility is that the malignancy is deadly. What dies when Whiteness, Whiteism, and racism go untreated? How destructive is it? There is wanton violence in our society that kills every day. Yet there is so little movement to do anything about it systemically. Will we just keep killing one another off and, as President Obama said, bitterly cling to our guns and our Bibles? I think the academic study of Whiteness, as articulated in Don’s paper, is mandatory, as is operationalizing our study of it clinically in our consulting rooms.
In pursuing clinical work with these phenomena, many have by now recommended that analyzing racial phenomena is necessary, as necessary as analyzing oedipal conflict and our usual other foci, not instead of them, but along with them. However, as I have noted, we have tended to limit such investigation to trying to understand the Black psyche. I propose, even more explicitly than Don does, that we must also recognize that there is much in the white psyche that must be understood in relation to white racial identity and Whiteness. Questions we need to ask include but are not limited to: Are white racial identity and Whiteness layered in the mind? Do they sit side by side? Is white racial identity under attack by Whiteness? What is white racial identity beyond Whiteness? These are important questions, and there are others, I am sure. My point here is to invite and encourage open inquiry. Whatever white racial identity is, it is not strengthened by Whiteness. As Don notes, Whiteness causes whatever it attacks to go rogue. So, noting its impact on familiar psychic structures, Don says that Whiteness can cause superego, id, and ego aberrations. We need to consider Whiteness in addition to our familiar notions, such as conflict and deficit, as a source of fragility and dysfunction. According to Don, one is sickened by one’s Whiteness, a point with which I concur inasmuch as it attacks and drains necessary aspects of well-being, for example, cohesive racial identity.
Don emphasizes disturbances that can occur in erotic functioning owing to the rogue influences of Whiteness. As an example, he cites “constant erotized excitement.” He mentions later that our aggressive drive can also go way awry under the influence of Whiteness. I am convinced by my total clinical experience and by Don’s rich clinical vignettes to consider that hate is implicated in Whiteness more than Don has articulated. The clinical examples show the wide destructive sweep of Whiteness in which what belongs to another (one’s own selfness) is appropriated, or one’s own goodness is claimed by defining another as bad, or every object is taken as a need-satisfying object, or one’s self is declared imperious by making the other contemptible, or one insists on a world in which are found only the essences and facts you want, a world devoid of nuance and relativity. All of these facts of Whiteness seem to me to have more to do primarily with desperation and hate than with erotic disturbances. It is an important consideration for me because I think it may be impossible to treat one’s erotic issues without treating one’s hatefulness. I also think that one’s hatefulness is particularly tenacious, and on that account deserves attention. As James Baldwin says in Notes of a Native Son, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain” (1955, p. 101).
I would again like to address the question of how one acquires Whiteness. When Don discusses so poignantly his relationship with his childhood friend, Bobby, he calls his rejection of Bobby a revelation, suggesting that it is inexplicable. Perhaps, but that possibility at this early point of inquiry seems to concede too much. Is there a way to demystify “revelation,” to understand the process without oversimplifying it? I think a clue may be found in Don’s acknowledgment that he was a “lonely kid.” Don states further that Bobby’s wound confirmed Don’s intactness. Is Baldwin’s quote helpful here? Was something ready to hand that permitted Don to avoid the experience of overlapping and potentially overwhelming pains—of being a lonely child, of the increase of that pain through being made more lonely by the loss of his friend, and of the gap left by their separation—an experience that might have stirred in Don an awareness of his own imperfection? What might have been that ready-to-hand thing? Don does offer us, early in the paper, the notion that stranger anxiety is the normal developmental challenge where Whiteness begins to get mapped. Perhaps that fits descriptively, but it is not an explanation by itself. Why? There are cultural values with very deep roots that could turn the stranger anxiety matter into something affirming and positive, that could have contributed to a positive mapping. Why, if Don is right, does stranger anxiety become the connecting point for Whiteness rather than for something more positive? A cultural value to which I refer is the Biblical treatment of the stranger, encouraging us away from making the anxiety we feel in the presence of the stranger into something pathological like Whiteness. The verse reads: For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me [Matthew 25:35–36].
So why so much Whiteness (we, the imperious subjects vs. the contemptible others) rather than the welcome stranger? Where I get to in this inquiry is that we must consider that Whiteness embodies an irreducible tendency to hate. This consideration calls to mind an observation made by Congressman George W. Julian, a radical Republican abolitionist who in 1853 said “the American people [referencing whites] are emphatically a negro-hating people” (Exhibit, Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture).
Psychoanalysts have the challenge, responsibility, and I think opportunity to take on the deep-seated and troubling quagmire of Whiteness. In sharing his paper with us, Don invites us into that quagmire. Will we join him there? I think there will be massive resistance because it requires us to stare into the face of so much pain that goes deep down to our core. As Don says, Whiteness is foundational. I am saying that hate is an irreducible aspect of that Whiteness. Hate is its fuel, and being white gives license to strike the match and burn up anything in the way of maintaining entitled dominion. I do not doubt that Don loved his friend Bobby, but being white and being subject to Whiteness required that Bobby stay in his place, the place Don wanted him to be. When Bobby’s needs required otherwise, Don, as a white person, had easily at his disposal the vicious tools of Whiteness to protect him. Of course, “protection” in this context is an illusion.
Our hope for what can happen with being white and having Whiteness is in the story of Bobby and Don, and Don’s daring to tell it. As Don would say, and as I would say, we probably cannot cure Whiteness. I do believe, and Don believes, it can be treated. I hope the resurrection of Bobby was good treatment for Don. It comes across as an homage to Bobby, and as encouragement to us to resurrect our own Bobby experiences and to give ourselves opportunities for healing. We need to tell our Bobby stories to each other, and to encourage our patients to tell theirs. Thanks to Don’s offering, we have a way of articulating and structuring, within new, not traditional, psychoanalytic thinking, another factor—Whiteness—that needs our attention as conceptualizers and clinicians. I hope that as psychoanalysts we will be emboldened by Don’s work to make our way through the dangerous thicket of Whiteness to liberation, a true liberation, one that encourages a recognition that Whiteness imprisons us all. To treat it is to put those afflicted with it and those afflicted by it on more equal footing, with more of us having the opportunity to be our own self, more freed from the menace of Whiteness.
In trying to keep thinking about the Bobby-Don story, I found it compelling but viscerally disturbing to reflect on the patient who was experienced by Don to be a ghostly recrudescence of his childhood friend. The patient, like Bobby, had a speech impediment. That patient’s experience of people having no idea of what he was saying brought back to me, forcefully, what it is like to be on the receiving end of Whiteism, which so readily dismisses what I have to say. I had to use some of my own analysis to figure out when the lancinatingly painful feeling of being dismissed is due to Whiteism aimed at me and when it is something else, including times when my own hypersensitivity has led to an incorrect interpretation of someone else’s genuine and benign puzzlement over what I have said. If one is not understood due to a speech impediment or a poorly constructed idea, the one not understanding need only make an inquiry, offer support for a clarification, insert anxiety-relieving humor, or wait it out. Any number of humane responses can be imagined and used to remedy a situation of unclear communication. When Whiteism leads to “I have no idea what you are saying,” there are associated verbal and nonverbal components of the Whiteism that are obvious, including contempt, self-righteousness, and a claim of dominion, or clear evidence that what one has said has been appropriated. The perpetrator of this form of Whiteness/Whiteism often has no conscious awareness that his or her dismissive response is wounding, even cruel. A goal of treatment for the one inflicting Whiteness would be to discover that the dismissal is due to a deep-seated intolerance of the other qua other. As Don’s patient said about his father, “He couldn’t stand me as I was.” The Whiteness-inflicting patient would need to learn that he behaves dismissively toward others to serve the demands of his Whiteness that he lord his dominion over another. The person on the receiving end of Whiteness-determined dismissal may also need treatment—to unearth and unshackle her worthy self, to shed the dismissed, worthless, no-good self. I am trying to convey that Whiteness does significant damage to both its host and its objects.
Purposefully, I have tried to learn and apply the concept of Whiteness by limiting my considerations to Don’s construct and language. As I did so, it occurred to me that we have other constructs that may apply, and that may constitute a bridge for those attempting to take on what Don is saying about Whiteness. For example, in that Whiteness sucks out the efficacy and worth of another, might we meaningfully consider the construct of “soul murder”? Is the notion of “malignant narcissism” pertinent? Might there be some value in considering the relationship of Whiteness to sadism?
Finally, I say to you, Don, thanks for being brave, bold, and clear-headed about Whiteness, knowing that it can so easily befuddle and upset us. We need your clarity, and we need to accept the upset we feel; it comes with the territory, as we struggle to understand Whiteness.