Abstract
White privilege continues to be an important issue to be grappled with, including in the context from which I write, South Africa. Melissa Steyn (2012), in her works on whiteness, goes further to link this privilege with what she calls white ignorance. It is of interest as to how this ignorance silences not only narratives of accountability but, also, denies taking responsibility. Linda Alcoff (2007) calls this state of denial epistemologies of ignorance and points to how these assume whiteness as pure, innocent and the bearer of knowledge and truth. With such assumptions in place, how can whiteness be legitimately and rationally questioned? On the obverse side of the coin, what does it mean to be the descendant of those who owned slaves or made their wealth by exploiting those who were deemed to be sub-human? While the evidence of benefitting from an oppressive regime stares many people in the face in a country like South Africa, there continues to be a denial and a sense of convenient amnesia when it comes to many white people acknowledging their active role in the systemic oppression and objectification of those who were “non-white” and therefore deemed less human.
In relation to this, Rachel Liebert starts her book Psycurity from the premise of honesty and vulnerability. She owns up to whom she is by reflecting on her white ancestry in Aotearoa/New Zealand and how that shaped the person she is today. She immediately calls attention to and challenges white ignorance. Accordingly, Liebert calls for a shift from white guilt that paralyses, especially where a person refuses to acknowledge the past (history), and by so doing becomes implicated in centuries of wrongdoing and of human atrocities. Instead, she points us to the importance of acknowledging guilt in a productive way where one acts without being defensive but instead creates a space for (genuine) engagement.
Liebert situates herself and shows how her history is interwoven with colonialism and its brutality. For example, she reflects: “My European ancestors were missionaries and wives of missionaries who arrived on the shores of the southern island of Aotearoa-Ngāi Tahu land. Having travelled from the United Kingdom through India, they played an explicit role in the destruction of Indigenous cosmologies, preparing the ground for the global spread of capitalism, colonization, white supremacy” (p. 2). She engages with the ways in which this interweaving continues to manifest in the present and analyses the various attacks and killings of black people in the current USA. She does this analysis by drawing from theorists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Césaire, Linda Alcoff, Gloria Anzaldua, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, to show the ways in which white skins/bodies continue to be privileged; where white lives continue to be worthy of protecting and saving while black lives are not. This readily calls to mind the point that “the space of circulation of race in American society is regulated by spectacular forms of violence in a ‘society that has intensified its racism behind the cloak of colorblindness and other post-racial myths while at the same time exercising with more diligence its policing and punishing functions’” (Masemola, 2014, p. 54). Taking this further, however, the book highlights the myriad ways in which coloniality continues to play a role in the present, assisted by the various state apparatuses, the media and oligarchic corporations. Understood this way, a neoliberal agenda that contributes towards increased inequalities in society is shown to drive a systematic process that filters down to all aspects of people’s lives and affects how interactions and relations (or lack thereof) happen. Drawing from scholars such as Frantz Fanon to situate herself, Liebert highlights how history cannot be divorced from the present. It is noteworthy that she presses for the need to step away from the suffocating space created by coloniality where being human is sub-divided into hierarchies and the notion of being normal is predetermined by exclusive norms. I would like, therefore, to ask: who qualifies as a normal human being and is deserving of acceptance and protection by the state? This is one of the many questions upon which the book forces us to reflect.
Perpetual state of paranoia
Liebert points to the ways in which people’s bodies are physically, medically and psychologically policed, always guarded for that possible moment when it can be proven that they are not normal. Below I offer a personal reflection to highlight one of the ways in which the policing of certain bodies happens: I must have been one of a handful of black people to disembark from an Israeli airline and I immediately felt conscious of my blackness. Arriving at immigration with a passport that had a stamp from the Arab Emirates I was immediately interrogated about my reasons for visiting that part of the world and the people I met while there. That was my welcome to Israel. When leaving the country I once again had an encounter with law enforcement. I was immediately tagged and called aside and my belongings searched in full view of everyone. Following check-in I was again interrogated and taken to a room where my hand luggage was searched. (personal reflection)
The decolonial moment
There are many ways in which white supremacy continues to maintain itself. For example, “racism emerges in a criminal justice system that has a history of protecting white supremacy and that imposes quotas as a measure of officer accountability – together creating the conditions of possibility for the over-policing of black communities” (Alexander, 2010; Browne-Marshall, 2013, as cited in Liebert, 2019, p. 92). This over-policing of black bodies, which has resulted in the killing of many black people by the police, speaks to how some lives are deemed more valuable than others. Black bodies become easily disposable either by destroying them literally (e.g. police killings) or psychologically (e.g. by incarcerating black people, thereby breaking up black families and ensuring a perpetual cycle of poverty). This treatment of black people relegates them to what Fanon described as a zone of non-being. It is at this point that decolonization becomes a useful tool to consider if we are to reimagine the re-humanization of people in general, and black people in particular.
Liebert argues that decolonization is not only about the removal of the colonizer within the geographical space but about the intellectual decolonization of the colonized and about the colonizer recognizing and coming to terms with the demise of white supremacy. She further asserts that “when white supremacy shakes, white people shake” (p. 81). Decolonization is about language, speech, writing, drawing, freeing of the imagination, and it is also about our mindsets. The process of decolonization allows possibilities to engage with the conscious, subconscious, and the unconscious level through the rituals in which we take part: rituals that create space and summon the presence of the supernatural. Being told that you are “non” means you are “not something”; for example, black people in South Africa were referred to as “non-white/European”. Their being and human-ness were not acknowledged. Being looked at using the lens of someone or something else (the notion of being “non-white” means being lesser, that whiteness is the norm and defines humanity) speaks to that which you lack, do not have and cannot achieve. To decolonize therefore would mean dismantling this fallacy and creating space for the different ways in which one could exist in the world.
Drawing us to decolonization and joining in the current chorus of the need to rethink and refocus our lenses, Liebert invites psychology to open up itself and welcome other modes of making meaning such as “being interdisciplinary in nature and welcoming art as a collaborator, welcoming embodied and inspirited knowledges, and taking guidance from more-than-humans” (p. 131). Unveiling the fallacy of mental instability as an inward process, she succeeds in this book to show the political, historical and overall structural interweaving of experiences. She moves from the theoretical, of which she acknowledges the importance, but notes its limitations, and shifts to the practical and the imaginary – the what if? What could? She answers these questions by experimenting with the possibilities of what imagination can offer. She indicates how she learned “practices of mystery, ritual, and (how) pausing may make a space for otherworldly correspondence, breathing life into paranoia and psycurity” (p. 130). She concludes that “a new weapon for psychologies committed to decoloniality may be … a radical praxis of healing, pedagogy, and protest premised on magical ideation, on making space for imagination, for correspondence with an-other world, here-now” (p. 139). Liebert’s book is an excellent contribution and a potential resource for psychology, black studies, and decolonial scholars and students.
