Search the archive.

(Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Chicago, Illinois https://jacobin.com/2023/03/us-congress-forever-wars-antiwar-coalition-troop-withdrawal-resolution-syria)

Like many Americans, you may not be aware that hundreds of US troops are currently deployed in Syria, where they’ve been illegally occupying small, opposition-controlled areas in the southeast and northeast. You may also not be aware that a House vote earlier this week to end their presence in the country failed 103–321. Despite hitting another brick wall, this latest attempt to pull US troops out of Syria may offer hope for the future, serving as one more sign of the emergence of an inchoate, cross-ideological antiwar coalition in Congress. Introduced by Donald Trump ally Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, the resolution drew the most GOP support for a war powers resolution so far, according to Just Foreign Policy, with forty-seven Republicans voting for the measure. By contrast, the last time a vote to end US involvement in the country was held — an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act put forward last year by Squad member Representative Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat — only twenty-five Republicans supported the resolution, a shift that’s perhaps owed to this resolution’s backing from MAGA standard-bearers like Gaetz and Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. At the same time, this Trumpian taint — along with substantive concerns about the fate of Syrian Kurds — may also have contributed to the massive drop in Democratic support for the withdrawal, with only fifty-six voting in favor (a substantial number, but less than half of the 130 who had voted for it last year). Every one of the newly expanded Squad voted for Gaetz’s resolution, aside from Florida’s Maxwell Frost, who has previously been criticized for backing away from some of his previously held progressive foreign-policy positions following his upset Democratic primary win. Other notable Democratic “nay” votes include Bernie Sanders ally Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, current House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and California representatives Katie Porter and Adam Schiff, who are both currently competing for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s soon-to-be-vacated seat. Representative Barbara Lee, the third big name in that race, and who’s maybe best known as the only member of Congress to vote against the US war in Afghanistan, voted in favor. The debate over the resolution served as a reminder that, much as with Afghanistan and Iraq before it, everyone wants to end the “forever wars” until it comes down to actually ending a specific one. Opponent after opponent got up to tell the House that they were all for getting out of Syria and ending the broad authorities that have allowed presidents to send troops to obscure conflicts — just not now and not like this. “Though I oppose an indefinite US military presence in Syria, this measure forces a premature end to our mission at a critical time for our efforts,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat. “Now, I have been one of the most vocal proponents in this Congress on reasserting Congressional authority in matters of war and peace,” said Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado. “It is time to pull it back. And it is time to reassert our authority and to have the debates that have been long overdue for many, many years. . . . But there is a good way to do it, and there is a wrong way to do it.” Some of the objections were important, such as concerns about abandoning the Kurds that US forces have allied with in fighting ISIS, and who may be vulnerable to Turkish attack in case of US withdrawal. This was pointed to by new Squad member Representative Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat, in an interview with the Intercept, even as she voted for the resolution. But California Democratic representative Ro Khanna told the outlet that the United States has “enough leverage, in my view, with Turkey to help protect the Kurds,” and that if the president wanted to make the case for a troop presence to defend them, it needed to be made through Congress. Others saw it differently. “Withdrawing US troops might help facilitate negotiations for a power-sharing agreement between Turkey, Kurdish separatists, and the Syrian government, which could help bring stability to the region,” says Hassan El-Tayyab, the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s legislative director for Middle East policy. “That would require leading with diplomacy, not military force.” Other objections on the House floor were more spurious. “Either we fight and defeat them in Syria, or we’ll fight in the streets of our nation,” warned Montana Republican representative Ryan Zinke. “If we withdraw our troops from Syria now, we could see a resurgence of ISIS,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, who instead called for withdrawal to happen only after “the total defeat of ISIS.” A number pointed to Iran, suggesting how far the reasoning for US involvement has strayed. “If we were to withdraw our troops, that increases the worry that Israel has to have about Iran,” said Representative Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York. “The remaining troops assist the Syrian democratic forces in deterrence of continued terrorist threats from Iranian-backed terrorist organizations,” said South Carolina Republican representative Joe Wilson. But there’s no way countering Iran fits the already-stretched legal authorization for US intervention, which is based on the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed after September 11 to let the US military take on those responsible for the terrorist attack. The vote follows Mark Milley’s first trip to Syria as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he used similar reasoning as those opposing Gaetz’s resolution, warning that withdrawing would be “setting the conditions for a resurgence” of terrorism, and calling for the “enduring defeat of ISIS.” The trip is a sign that despite the president pledging to no longer “fight the wars of the past” and to launch a new era of “relentless diplomacy,” the Biden White House continues to view prolonging this particular war as a priority, even as US actions in Syria undermine the administration’s talk of respecting sovereignty, territorial integrity, human rights, and a “rules-based international order.” Also undermining this were Israel’s recent air strikes on Aleppo airport, which took place to little attention and outrage. To add insult to injury, a United Nations official has warned the attack will further impede relief aid to Syria that’s been desperately needed following the horrific earthquake that has killed thousands in the country. In the midst of all these troubles plaguing Syria, the end of the illegal US occupation of the country’s territory seems like it’s still a ways off from happening. But the vote on Gaetz’s resolution does suggest a cross-partisan consensus opposing open-ended US involvement in foreign wars is emerging, even if it’s coming slower than antiwar voices would prefer.

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

(Jon, Psychoanalyticstudies@Essex On whiteness, racial rhetoric, identity politics, and critical race theory A crucial moment in American psychoanalysis in Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads: An International Perspective ed Busch)

Moss’ central thesis is that being white or having the properties of whiteness is a parasitic affliction that is inherently pathological, “a way of being” (p. 356) with “no cure,” where hatred, epistemological entitlement, superiority, and the need to dominate all other non-white peoples based on difference and otherness is present “at birth” (p. 358), as it “infiltrates our drives early on” (p. 356) in “infancy” (p.357). Although Moss offers a nebulous disclaimer that Whiteness is not the same as being phenotypically white, since Whiteness is an inherent property of being white, his distinction is unconvincing at best if not indefensible—as phenomenal properties cannot be independent from their ontological source, only the way in which they appear. For Moss they appear “as a condition one first acquires and then has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility” (pp. 355– 356). He further states this condition is “foundational,” hence essential and deterministic to a baby’s sense of being, which is acquired after coming out of the womb instantiated as the pulsional desire to dominate, enslave, and exploit others without scruple. On face value, the claim is absurd. Contrasting Whiteness with whiteness is an ontic distinction without ontological difference (as an ordinal property of a property) and is itself incitive. Whiteness is a synecdoche for racism, something Moss confusingly asserts is at once socially acquired, presumably through the attachment system, and inherent to white people as part of their embodied thrownness.4 Instead of using a parasitic metaphor, he concretizes it as if it were an infectious medical disease that is uniquely susceptible to whites when psychoanalysis has long identified prejudice to be a universal human proclivity.

(Naomi, Unmasking Psychoanalysis: An Emperor, a Boy, and the Search for New Clothes , ed Petrucelli, Schoen, Snider)

A Yarn of Lies – Analysts as The Swindlers of The Tale This brings us to a third reading: analysts as the swindlers of the tale, our theories, diagnostics, and techniques – a yarn of lies – designed to mystify, silence, and oppress. In what ways, does psychoanalysis, like the clothmakers who inculcate self-doubt in the emperor and his subjects by telling them that an inability to see the fabric was a sign of stupidity or unfitness for office, employ similar tricks and sleights of hand to uphold the patriarchal status quo? These questions call for an engagement with deconstructionist critiques – particularly those drawing on feminism and critical race theory – and their reckoning with the relationship between power and knowledge. Post-structuralist philosophers (e.g., Churchland, 1986; Kuhn, 1962; Haraway, 1988) remind us that knowledge is produced discursively within a system of rules that determine what can be true or false, real, or not. Such observations prompt a reflexive attention to what voices get muted and how psychoanalytic theory does the silencing. From the hysterical woman8 of the Victorian era to today's borderline patient,9 there is an extensive history of diagnosing women as crazy to deny their perception of reality and to silence their dissent (Emily Mann notes a play she wrote about just such a woman in the second chapter of this volume). In what ways do we continue to employ technical principles, such as the transference and resistance (here to the analyst's “truth”), or theoretical constructs such as co-constructed reality and the unknowability of the unconscious (Shames Dawson, this volume), to deny our patients' perception of reality, and thus avoid that which is too disruptive? There is a history, also, of denigrating, silencing, and excluding those in the field – From Jung, Tausk, and Groddeck to Adler, Reik, Ferenczi, Reich, Horney, Bowlby, and Fromm – who have dared to question the status quo (Orange, 2020). Specifically, it was those who spoke with a distinctly humanistic voice – a voice that stressed the effect of culture on psychosexual development and neurosis, and who challenged psychoanalysis’ naturalization of patriarchy – who were often subject to ex-communication. There is Freud's infamous denouncement of Alfred Adler's paper on the “masculine protest as the central problem of neurosis” as “not psychoanalysis” (see Orange, 2020, p.42). There is Ernest Jones’s posthumous denouncement of Ferenczi as insane and subsequent refusal to publish his work, which effectively disappeared Ferenczi's criticisms of the analyst's “professional hypocrisy” and its potentially traumatic impact on the patient, as well as his advocation of a distinctly antipatriarchal analytic stance (1949/1988). There is Karen Horney's disqualification as a training analyst by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and her subsequent expulsion from the APA for her criticisms of Freudian orthodoxy, especially as it related to women's psychology. Again and again, we see the same story play out. To question psychoanalysis’ alignment with patriarchy is tantamount to heresy. Thanks, in part, to our humanistic, antipatriarchal predecessors, today's analysts enjoy a far greater degree of freedom. And yet all too often, we see the mavericks of a previous generation become the patriarchal gatekeepers of the next. Statements such as, “this is not psychoanalysis” and accusations of being “insufficiently analyzed” are just two ways in which those in positions of authority continue to employ markers of intelligence or fitness for office to silence the revolutionaries and inhibit their willingness to challenge the boundaries of accepted wisdom. Absent an ongoing reckoning with our psychoanalytic history – our patriarchal ghosts – not yet turned to ancestors – will continue to haunt our hallowed halls.

(Daniel, Political thought AND Psychology, Psych@Duquesne, Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique ed. Mills and Burston)

Evidently, then, Dr. Khilanani regards liberal sentiments as inauthentic or superficial and deeply divorced from the repressed rage that all white folks presumably feel because their privilege is being threatened by communities of color. Liberals, by this account, espouse good intentions at the conscious level but lack the inner honesty – and by implication, the courage and self-awareness – to admit to themselves that they are riddled with fear and resentment. So we may ask ourselves, would people like these make good psychoanalysts? Not bloody likely. And yet the vast majority of psychoanalytically oriented clinicians currently in practice are white and would probably identify as ​“​liberal​”​ or left of center if asked. So one wonders, if this view of racial and political polarities prevails in the analytic profession, will it dictate that white psychoanalysts and psychotherapists must be screened for suitability (in light of some as yet unspecified criteria) before being permitted to treat or train non-white people in future? (More on this point later.) In any case, the essentialist binary that Dr. Khilanani constructs and the fact that she would feel more comfortable in Anne Coulter’s company than in the presence of ​“​a lot of liberals​”​ hints at a chilling subtext. Perhaps her preference is not merely because Coulter is (allegedly) more honest, authentic, or ​“​healthy​”​ than her liberal counterparts but because Coulter’s politics are profoundly illiberal (or anti-liberal), and on some level, Dr. Khilanani shares Coulter’s contempt for liberal values, an attitude increasingly prevalent among critical race theorists (Pyle, 1999), the American Left (Applebaum, 2021), and in university settings generally (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; Boghossian, 2021). One can only imagine how she feels toward Black liberals, both in and outside the psychoanalytic profession!

(Daniel, Political thought AND Psychology, Psych@Duquesne, Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique ed. Mills and Burston)

So far, we’ve noted two basic problems with Moss’s argument. First, he cannot explain how many white-skinned people (himself included) escape their early conditioning and become abolitionists, vigorous champions of equal rights, or anti-racist activists of one sort or another. Second, his portrayal of white-skinned people as being uniquely susceptible to acquiring the sadistic, exploitative, and dehumanizing mode of relatedness he calls ​“​Parasitic Whiteness​”​ is dramatically at odds with the facts of human history and lacks any real evidence to back it up. Of course, generous souls may insist that we honor the lived experience of the victims of racism, many of whom may honestly believe that white-skinned people are innately more prone to sadism and exploitation than non-whites. After all, they have suffered much, and quite apart from the harms inflicted on their ancestors, the mechanisms that still reinforce structural inequality today are numerous and take the form of exclusionary or predatory lending and housing practices, voter suppression, water and food insecurity, drug abuse and the ​“​war on drugs,​”​ overcrowded schools and prisons, gang life, police brutality and mass incarceration, the ​“​school-to-prison pipeline,​”​ and so on. Mindful of these egregious wrongs, activists and their allies often privilege the testimony and beliefs of the victims of contemporary racism, prompted by a deeply felt sense of solidarity with the oppressed. But this course of action is a decision, a choice – our choice – and is not a guarantee of validity or veracity by any means. As a result, people who ​“​center the voices​”​ of oppressed minorities today but who ignore or dismiss the historical record on sadism and slavery run the risk of fostering a subtle kind of anti-white racism, one which deems sadism and exploitation to be far more prevalent among white-skinned people than among non-white populations.

(Jon, Psychoanalyticstudies@Essex On whiteness, racial rhetoric, identity politics, and critical race theory A crucial moment in American psychoanalysis in Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads: An International Perspective ed Busch)

Another recent deplorable event by a psychoanalyst was a lecture given by Aruna Khilanani at Yale University School of Medicine who said: “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil,” further claiming that all “White people are out of their minds,” are “psychopathic,” and that she publicly confessed to having murderous “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor (Time stamp: 7:17)”5 (Herzog, 2021; Shetty, 2021), a lecture that was widely denounced as hate speech and an incitement to violence (Gustavo, 2021; Malekoff, 2021). This kind of race-based vitriol is a symptomatic expression of extremist ideology that has gained wide currency both in the academy and broader society. This trend in our culture is the complete opposite of Martin Luther King’s exhortation to judge people not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character (see Taibbi, 2020 contra DiAngelo, 2018). Now skin color is primary and “whiteness” is an index of debasement and pathology. Although I have no need to be a defender of being white and perpetuate the current polarization in race relations, it is a further embarrassment to the profession when psychoanalysts now look like “racist psychobabble” buffoons who get on Fox News (Halon, 2021; Kudlow, 2021; Sky News Australia, 2021) bequeathed with the titles “Dr. KhilaWhiteMan” (Mercer, 2021) and “Dr. Woke” (Human Events, 2021). The undisciplined use of racist tirades by professionals only foments more abhorrence, disgust, and hurt, especially when they are perceived by others as undermining the legitimacy of what we write in professional journals, which further sullies our image to the public, one already plagued by crisis and ideology (Mills, 2021; Richards, 2015). Furthermore, I find value judgements making universal statements based on skin color to be inane, if not immoral, socially divisive, and gravely irresponsible as they simply stoke more division and animus that already exist in our troubled racist times. How could the claim that the inherent or innate pathological disposition of “whiteness,” itself a social construction, applies to all people who are identified or labelled as white, let alone advance any constructive discussions about social justice, systemic power imbalances, cultural/ethnic differences, race matters, and their possible amelioration, where this is where the work lies? There is current debate surrounding antiracist theory among the black intelligentsia, i.e., Adolph Reed (New York Times, 2020), Thomas Chatterton Williams (2015), Glenn Loury and John McWhorter (Loury and McWhorter, 2021; Perry, 2021; Weiss, 2021), and others (see Hughes, 2020; 2021; Riley and McWhorter, 2020), and we should be mindful that these ideas do not represent black people across the board, but I point to them as evidence of a diversity of views contested by black professionals themselves (Weinstein, 2020). Among these are critiques of Ibram X. Kendi’s (2019) How to Be an Antiracist, what Coleman Hughes (2019) calls “anti-intellectual” based on its empirical inaccuracies and ideological drift over rigorous data-based analysis, as well as against diversity consultants like Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) White Fragility, what John McWhorter (2020) refers to as a “racist tract,” which Jonathan Church (2018; 2020) further denounces as flawed science based on epistemologically dubious implicit bias research generalized to society as a whole. These critics point out how a dehumanizing, supercilious condescension occurs when antiracist sentiment is used as an argument to dignify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) when it in fact diminishes them as people, like the racism Moss attributes to all whites. All this does is, predictably, lead to provoked defensiveness, outrage, and white backlash, hence making social rifts, indignation, resentment, and animosity more pronounced. Despite the fact that critical race theory (CRT) originated in legal studies examining how race and racism is correlated with institutional, structural, and systemic practices as well as other social justice inequities, these historical antecedents have been interpreted and subsumed within contemporary critiques in the phenomenology of culture that are predicated on “race” itself, or it would not have attracted such fervor from common citizens and US legislators who have introduced proposed bills and have already passed laws that ban teaching CRT in elementary and secondary school (Ali, 2021; Friedersdorf, 2021; Gerstmann, 2021; Greenfield, 2021; Iati, 2021; Wallace-Wells, 2021). Despite misinterpretations or distortions of CRT, not to mention the silly notion of making it illegal to teach or even talk about race in schools and society, which violates free speech amendments and academic freedom alike, the culture wars on the very concept of race have stoked deep resentments and social-political divisions surrounding identity. When identity is reduced to the color of one’s skin, we have devolved into a very ignoble economy of signifying difference based on splitting. Here we will never be able to reconcile opposites when we remain oppositional to one another. The problem with treating white people en masse as a homogenous category is that it succumbs to a reductio ad absurdum argument that fails to take into account pluralities and a whole array of mutable differences in people mediated by other complex social factors, as if whites as a social collective are responsible for the suffering of all non-whites. Given the historical fact that human civilization was largely built on slavery orchestrated by numerous races, nations, and ethnicities before white imperialism, the focus on parasitic colonial white supremacy as determinate ontological oppression in contemporary society neglects the most egregious problems with universalizing race in the most totalizing ways. This pseudo-reasoning is not only a category mistake, it is a prejudicial ideology based on the bankrupt circular premise that claims (implicitly or explicitly) that all whites oppress alterity by virtue of being white, hence an obtuse causally reductive proposition, itself a racist belief—nothing short of bigotry. If “race” is used as a dog whistle to condemn one group while condoning another based on skin color alone, then we have an inherent contradiction or antinomy based on the paralogism of pitting one identity against another in the service of identity politics that will meet with no resolve. This will only produce vehement resistance, reproach, and retaliatory rebuke by the targeted group under assault. People speaking on behalf of a whole category of peoples, such as race, ethnicity, or skin color, fail to recognize the infantilization, if not frank racism, in such attempts to universalize representations of a whole class of social collectives, as if every individual could be represented by a generic generalization. How can you represent them? To assume that you can is to already reduce them to being an object or thing that devolves into classification alone. How could such totalizing claims/universal representations be empirically valid? By making such sweeping generalizations about whites, Moss is also inviting people to adopt and attribute his views of whites by non-whites, which is not accurate nor fair-minded for him to impose on any group of peoples.

(Jon, Psychoanalyticstudies@Essex On whiteness, racial rhetoric, identity politics, and critical race theory A crucial moment in American psychoanalysis in Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads: An International Perspective ed Busch)

In my book The Ontology of Prejudice (Mills and Polanowski, 1997; also see Mills, 1998), I was one of the first contemporary psychologists to address the notion of universal racism based on unconscious predisposition, but provide ethical arguments for why we (as humanity) must transcend this primitive form of thinking based on a simple economy of identity and difference. It pains me to witness the growing split and social rupture I anticipated 25 years ago when I wrote that book. People should be called out when they violate a humanistic collective ethos, especially when it potentially justifies and leads to retaliatory racism, such as we are currently witnessing with the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Asian hate crimes, as it perpetuates more disdain and a perverse, distorted logic directed toward alterity as the evil Other (Mills, 2019a; b), when this type of mentality is under the sway of unconscious ideology looking for an emotional whipping boy to pillory regardless of what skin color, ethnicity, or (trans)gendered subject is pointing the finger. It is my understanding that Moss has received threats as well as the organizations he is affiliated with,6 which is most unfortunate, but not surprising. Given that JAPA published a racist piece under the guise of antiracist sensibility, no wonder people would get worked up and there would be counterattacks on social media. When racist sentiments are disseminated in professional public space, liberally minded people on the left as well as the conservative right get pissed off, especially those who take offense at being labelled white racists. Not only Moss, but the reputation of the journal, the Association, and the greater image of psychoanalysis is now under scrutiny. Given this scandal has gone viral, there is no use trying to cover it up or dress it up in new garb intended to dismiss or placate dissent. The worse possible thing to do is to try to deny the racist overtones of the paper through a pompous justification, patronizing excuse, or redirecting shift to focus blame on aggressive critics or threats from others as if the journal did nothing wrong. Nor should they try to conceal the deed by manipulating the APsaA’s presence on the web, and act like other “crazies” out there are attacking them—like the Tucker Carlsons and David Dukes of the world. This will only look like a public relations ploy in order to save face and redirect culpability. The editor made a faux pas and should not have allowed such an incendiary text to be published without undergoing a blind review process, as such gaffes and racist remarks would have been prevented from appearing in their current form. Because the paper cannot be retracted, JAPA should issue a public apology and allow open criticism, scholarly critique, debate on the Moss paper, and the greater social issues that are at stake, rather than trying to whitewash it, pun intended.