Search the archive.

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

To drive his point home, Lawrence described American racism as both a crime and a disease, which, strange as it may sound, was both a brave and eloquent indictment and an unfortunate choice of words. Calling racism a crime is a potent figure of speech but is not a statement of fact. On the contrary, racism is obviously not a crime – at least in purely legal terms – when the law actively permits or encourages its presence and persistence in the body politic. Neither is it an infectious illness or degenerative disorder that threatens the well-being of the racist person. These are analogies or metaphors at best. Lawrence might have been wiser to follow Erich Fromm’s usage and call racism a ​“​socially patterned defect​”​ (Fromm, 1941), or even a ​“​pathology of normalcy​”​ (Fromm, 1955) – something akin to a deficiency disease, except what is lacking in people so afflicted are not vital nutrients or sunlight but a lively conscience and a keen critical faculty, faculties which have been stunted or atrophied under the pressure of social forces (Burston, 1991). In 2008, Professor Lawrence published another article that dwelt on what he termed the ​“​collective unconscious​”​ of white society and acknowledged that his earlier claim that everyone is racist – regardless of their skin color – was designed to diminish the defensiveness of his white colleagues in the legal profession, an effort to mitigate or sidestep their resistance to his argument. His honesty on this score is commendable, but sadly, these remarks may also have set the stage for some worrisome developments today, when psychoanalysts now purport to elucidate ​“​the White unconscious,​”​ borrowing tropes from critical race theory and Whiteness studies and applying them in a heavy-handed and polemical fashion. In the process, they end up trying to rewrite history and disseminating banal stereotypes and harmful generalizations about white-skinned people, which obscure our common humanity and deepen the tensions and divisions between white and non-white-skinned communities through a new brand of racial essentialism, one which bears an uncanny resemblance to the racial stereotypes they claim to deplore, almost as if they were their inverted mirror image.

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

Given the circumstances in which critical theory arose, the fact that some critical race theory practitioners claim a sense of kinship or continuity between critical theory and critical race theory calls for careful reflection. And here, I confess, I advise caution. Why? First, because the term ​“​critical theory​”​ is used too broadly nowadays to include thinkers as disparate as Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida, both quite famous, but neither of whom were connected to the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Another reason to be cautious in drawing comparisons between critical theory and critical race theory is that the latter is deeply influenced by postmodernism, while critical theorists like Leo Lowenthal and Jürgen Habermas were sharply critical of postmodernism (Lowenthal, 1987; Jeffries, 2016). Finally, on a more personal note, my latest book, titled Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture (Burston, 2021), takes an unsparing look at C. G. Jung’s invidious comparisons between the ​“​Aryan unconscious​”​ and the ​“​Jewish unconscious.​”​ As I pondered Jung’s harmful declarations on this score, it became quite evident to me that anyone who ventures to speculate about the ​“​collective unconscious​”​ of another ​“​race​”​ or racialized group is in danger of succumbing to and/or perpetuating stereotypes and caricatures that can be harmful, while remaining blissfully unaware that they are doing so (see e.g., Burston, 2021, Chapter 3). So while critical race theory got off to a promising start in relation to psychoanalysis, I am deeply dismayed by the remarks of some contemporary psychoanalysts who speculate about the ​“​White mind​”​ or the ​“​White unconscious,​”​ who veer sharply into dangerous territory.

(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)

It is important to note that Moss’ claim is quite different from the claim that racism is institutional, structural, or societally systemic, hence based on (largely discredited) implicit bias research (Church, 2020; Pluckrose and Church, 2020), which assumes implicit (unconscious and conscious) biases in individuals scale up in aggregate forms to systemic discrimination. Since drives are innate to our embodiment, Moss makes racism an a priori, inborn capacity inherent to infantile development and personality formation, which is pathological from the very beginning of life by attributing causality to simply being born white. In other words, all white people are biologically condemned to be racist by virtue of being thrown into a white-skinned body with certain morphological features. Whether or not Moss considered the political implications of such generalizations is moot, for this is a tacit assumption most readers would reasonably conclude from his essay, as it has already spurred international outrage on social media platforms and in the news, hence calling it a “racist and pseudo-scientific claim” (Lendrum, 2021). Let us apply Moss’ (2021a) assertion, passed off as if it is a scientific fact, that “Whiteness … [is] a malignant, parasitic-like condition” (pp. 355–356) to other racialized groups: Blackness is a malignant, parasitic-like condition that is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Blackness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target non-black peoples. (Quote adapted) How does that make you feel? Are you offended? Sounds like racist cant, does it not? The language is inflammatory, abusive, hostile, and incites outrage. To continue on a gratuitous point, let us compare Moss’ proposition to a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda book, The Pestilential Miasma of the World, published by Robert Ley (1944), head of the German Labor Front, where he says: “Who is the Jew? … We call destructive elements in nature parasites … They devour their hosts. They fall like locusts on them, suck their life away, destroy them … The Jew is such a parasite!” (Bytwerk, 2004, translation, italics in original). What lovely sentiment from a hating humanity. Here are just some of the troubling quotes from Moss’ paper: Any infant is vulnerable to the parasite of Whiteness. (p. 357) Whiteness originates not in innocence but in entitlement … We [whites] are licensed at birth, and therefore entitled, to find, capture, dissect, and overpower our targeted objects. As such, we will finally come to know and take dominion over them. (p. 358, italics added) The voice of Whiteness’s entitled dominion, inside or out, is firm and final: You [non-whites] are not a people; you are labor. You are not a person; you are a deviant. This is not desire; this is sickness. You are not in need; you are a failure. You are not your own; you are ours. (p. 361) And this one: Color provides a universe of suitable objects, placed there like gifts, to be captured and crushed, all at a whim, like, for so many Gullivered children, ants are there to be crushed underfoot, butterflies to be locked in a jar. These crushed ants and suffocated butterflies—victims of a nearly cellular narcissism—offer Whiteness a platform on which to begin. (p. 361) One might wonder why a white man would write such sensational things, if only to garner attention based on identity politics under the guise of appeasing diversity optics, yet it reads as subversive ideology at the expense of truth and rigorous scholarship. Whether Moss is indulging in identity politics is subject to debate, so I will leave that for others to decide, but it is an increasing phenomenon gathering popularity as psychoanalysis continues to adopt the postmodern turn (Gherovici, 2017; Layton, 2020; Mills, 2017; 2020) including woke sensibilities and critical race studies (Andrews, 2020; Frosh, 2013; George and Hook, 2021; Thakur, 2020; Tuhkanen, 2009) where Whiteness Theory has become an offshoot. As an academically trained philosopher and psychoanalyst, my reading of Moss’ essay is that it is illogical at best, uses racist rhetoric and emotional hyperbole that implicitly casts all white people into a homogenous pathological category, and makes universal statements that are not tenable, supported by empirical evidence, or true. He (a) essentializes all people based on race, (b) makes drives (Triebe) in infancy the locus of hate toward all non-white others based on differences in skin color alone (as if race could even be conceptualized as a social-political category by the infantile mind), (c) fails to take into account cognitive and moral development and familial/socialization/cultural practices that undermine such broad-sweeping propositions, and (d) ignores racial, ethnic, and cultural contexts that inform our being in the world. For example, if a socalled white person were born and raised in India, Japan, or Brazil, let’s say, the tables would be turned around, as per Moss’ logic, whites would innately be bad objects for others to loathe and sadistically defile. How then can the universal proclamation of whiteness apply without taking into account historicity, context, and social identity that informs a collective cultural ethos? Even the founder of postcolonial theory, Edward Said (1993), rejects such racial and cultural binaries when, reflecting on the hybridized nature of contemporary life, he writes: Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic. … Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude. Who in India or Algeria today can confidently separate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities, and who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon those two imperial cities? (pp. xv and 15) Moss’ provocative essay appears to be based on ideological deference to far-left politics (postmodernism, critical race theory, whiteness studies) informing the need to address diversity imbalances and power differentials, but it has gone too far afield and is conceptually unsophisticated, if not dangerous incendiary incitement. Moreover, it is destructive to race relations that are currently tempestuous in our multicultural societies. This type of identity politics actually reinstalls and reinforces racist thinking and racialized categories into our social discourse and schemes of conceiving distributive justice that polarizes groups even further rather than facilitating dialogue and reconciliation. Every deplorable sin in culture is now because of whiteness or white privilege/ entitlement/supremacy, a rather pathetic reaction formation where “whitey” (see Horowitz, 1999) must pay for the sins of their forefathers. More ridiculous is the premise that STEM subjects such as mathematics should be taught in school that they are historically based in white supremacy (Klainerman, 2021) despite the fact that major advances in the field have come from Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians, and Arabs—and whatever ethnicity a mathematician is, they seem to get similar results.

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

Finally, Dr. Moss’s contention that Parasitic Whiteness is almost impossible to ​“​treat​”​ evinces a very pessimistic attitude toward the future of race relations and a kind of moral masochism that prompts people to wallow in endless self-recriminations while harboring the delusion that this attitude constitutes evidence that they are morally superior to other white-skinned people who don’t share their perspective. Though it may not be apparent at first, moral masochism of this complexion is really a gift to the radical Right and to right-wing pundits, politicians, and ​“​influencers​”​ all around the world. Dr. Moss concludes his essay with the following reflections. He writes, To turn Whiteness into an object for thought one must first look for a point of stillness. This point actually does not exist. After all, Whiteness, in its mature form, generates a volatile totality from which there is no clear exit, no clear escape. To pursue that exit, to hope for even temporary escape … depends, I think, on a kind of conceptual mobility, a willingness to use metaphors and similes for only as long as they serve, and then to move on. For me, here, the most important of those metaphors have been ​“​parasite,​”​ ​“​mapping,​”​ and ​“​verticality.​”​ Each seemed to me both stable and elastic, capable of simultaneously supporting thought and providing a jumping-off point whenever that support felt exhausted. And, of course, psychoanalysis provides something other than similes and metaphors. It provides a reliable theoretical/technical structure, one we can count on, one that, in spite of its limitations, will hold up – has held up – as we all try to achieve the requisite conceptual, emotional, and personal nimbleness to grapple with the Whiteness that, whoever we are, infiltrates our interior and exterior surround. (p. 370) Moss encourages readers ​“​to use metaphors and similes for only as long as they serve, and move on.​”​ That tacit implication of this methodological maxim is that when your preferred metaphors are no longer serviceable, you may adopt another one, or perhaps jump back and forth among your chosen metaphors to make your case. He never acknowledges the fact that metaphors and similes do not always illuminate. They can also seduce, mislead, and obfuscate. And though he does not say so in so many words, of course, one can’t escape the impression that this nimble rhetorical strategy of juggling metaphors spares him the requirement of providing solid, tangible evidence for his claims. (Is it merely my imagination, or is this odd behavior for a psychoanalyst?)

(Adrian, Phil@NewMexico, Communism and Ambivalence Freud, Marxism, and Aggression in Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique ed. Mills and Burston)

Furthermore, Hilflosigkeit entails a plasticity of human nature. As Freud indicates, for the psyche rooted in an initially helpless body, ​“​the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted.​”​ Of course, the most important features of ​“​the real external world​”​ are social ones, namely, emotionally important others as exerting the decisive influences modulating the nascent subject’s id and helping to sculpt its emerging ego. The Freudian psyche, with its plasticity, is naturally preprogrammed by helplessness to be socially reprogrammed. So not only is Eros substantially empowered by the naturally given and ontogenetically primary couple Hilflosigkeit-Liebesbedürfnis – this couple also brings with it a psychical plasticity amounting to the susceptibility of the libidinal economy to being tamed and domesticated by its social milieu. Others’ impositions of a social reality principle significantly shape the routes and directions of drives and their derivatives. More specifically, these impositions mold the contours of sublimations. Indeed, social valuations, as determining the substitutive object-choices of libidinal thrusts confronted with social prohibitions, are inherent to the very definition of sublimation as a concept in Freudian psychoanalysis.75 As Marcuse comments apropos psychoanalytic drive theory, ​“​The ‘plasticity’ of the instincts which this theory presupposes should suffice to refute the notion that the instincts are essentially unalterable biological substrata.​”​76

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

Needless to say, psychoanalysts must never turn a blind eye to the mind-boggling injustices that afflict communities of color in the USA, especially in the case of patients or trainees who are placed in their care or under their supervision. Nor can they support the dominant narratives that perpetuate these injustices. But neither can they abdicate their responsibility to critique statements or positions that are a-historical, lack substance, or are riddled with contradictions and glaring omissions. If they do so, they are liable to indulge in sweeping and untenable generalizations that may mask a deeper despair about achieving genuine equality and understanding among whites and communities of color. Sadly, the fact that Dr. Khilanani’s talk at Yale University and Dr. Moss’s article occurred merely a month apart indicates that critical race theory and whiteness studies have penetrated the halls of academia and made inroads into the psychoanalytic and psychiatric worlds as well. Unfortunately, given our diminishing attention spans, our growing appetite for sound bites and slogans, and our collective anguish over the long-standing injustices faced by non-white citizens in the USA, the pernicious nonsense Dr. Khilanani spouted will probably have a strong appeal to many readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, to many of them, it probably seems far more ​“​authentic​”​ or ​“​real​”​ than genuine scholarship. Furthermore, it is ironic, indeed astonishing, that some psychoanalysts (like Donald Moss) espouse a kind of racial essentialism embodied in reductive binary categories to explain extremely complex social realities. The stark, Manichean simplicity of binaries like these afford people a false sense of moral clarity, multiple opportunities for virtue signaling, and a sense of pride for being on what they imagine is ​“​the right side of history.​”​ But clinical experience demonstrates that simple binaries often belie much that lies beneath the surface, and psychoanalysis was designed to wrestle with ambiguity, contradictions, and complexity in the individual psyche and society at large. These reflections, in turn, prompt other awkward questions, questions that are currently unanswerable but warrant careful and painstaking reflection going forward. Will ideas like these continue to make inroads (or gain converts) in the psychoanalytic world? The answer, I believe, is yes. But if so, as time elapses, will psychoanalysts discard their former discipline and school-specific criteria for credentialing practitioners as competent to treat or train people of color, and will they attempt to articulate brand-new criteria along these lines? And if so, who will decide what these new criteria are and how to measure compliance with them? And how will compliance with these guidelines be enforced? I do not know the answers to these questions. Nor does anyone else at present, I suspect. We must wait and see. Meanwhile, looking to the future, Dr. Alexandra Woods strongly recommends that psychoanalytic organizations and institutes provide additional (and carefully focused) scholarships and mentoring for promising candidates from communities of color from the beginning of their undergraduate careers onward. She also recommends that courses focusing on culture, race, and class always be included in the institute’s core curriculum and that all the courses offered at psychoanalytic include a ​“​socio-psychoanalytic lens.​”​ From a pedagogical standpoint, these are excellent ideas that merit swift adoption and, in fact, are long overdue. But she also recommends that analytic institutes drop the requirement of holding a PhD and make analytic training available to social workers with an MA degree. The potential benefits to this approach are fairly obvious. Doing so would boost enrollments considerably, help rectify past injustices and the current (mostly financial) impediments to psychoanalytic training for people of color. It may also make psychoanalytic theory and practice more relevant to the other mental health professions in the process. But what of the potential drawbacks, the unintended consequences of lowering standards for scholarship among aspiring analysts? This idea requires further reflection and study. So Dr. Woods’s recommendations for transforming psychoanalytic institutes merit serious discussion. But even so, the question remains: are phenotypically white-skinned people uniquely or overwhelmingly prone to psychopathy, sadism, and a desire to enslave others? The answer to this question is an emphatic no because the vast preponderance of historical evidence suggests otherwise and because – to the best of my knowledge – no one has yet offered a remotely plausible scientific scientific explanation why this might be the case. (Nor will they, in all likelihood.) Another question: are Dr. Khilanani’s and Dr. Moss’s utterances and ideas on this score actually representative of critical race theory and whiteness studies, or do they represent a departure from them? I don’t know, but I suspect that the answer is still moot. Personally, I would very much like to believe that Khilanani’s and Moss’s racializing attitudes toward white-skinned people are not shared by the mainstream in activist communities. But even if they are merely fringe or minority views, talks and texts like these still pose a potential danger to our collective well-being. Why? Because highly credentialed academics and clinicians now speak and theorize openly in this manner in Ivy League settings, and in the process – without intending to, perhaps – furnish right-wing media with ​“​weapons of mass distraction​”​ to divert attention from far more pressing problems like income inequality and climate change, problems that bedevil – and may soon destroy – our body politic and our entire planet.

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

Unfortunately, however, African Americans still comprise a vanishingly small percentage of analysts today – merely .007% (Woods, 2020). In response to this disturbing state of affairs, The New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis formed a Committee on Ethnicity, Race, Class, Culture, and Language, chaired by Dr. Alexandra Woods. Like Dr. Khilanani and Dr. Moss, Dr. Woods is deeply dismayed by ​“​systemic Whiteness​”​ and the role it presumably plays in maintaining psychoanalysis as a ​“​White Citadel.​”​ But it is one thing to be horrified and prodded into action in response to hardships suffered by communities of color and quite another to argue that one’s skin color makes one deeply disposed to act in contemptible and antisocial ways, which is where Moss’s argument finally ends up. In his abstract, Dr. Moss says that Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then has – a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ​“​white​”​ people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites – to reduce their intensities, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. (p. 356) Dr. Moss goes on to explain that the term ​“​Whiteness​”​ is capitalized to denote ​“​Parasitic Whiteness,​”​ which he defines as (1) a way of being, (2) a mode of identity, and (3) a way of knowing and sorting the objects constituting one’s human surround, a condition that, he claims, should not be confused with being phenotypically white-skinned. Nevertheless, he insists that people who are white-skinned are uniquely susceptible to acquiring it, and that once acquired, it is nearly impossible to treat. From that point onward, he says, mitigation and harm reduction are the most effective treatment options. Moss then goes on to say that Parasitic Whiteness infiltrates our drives early on. The infiltrated drive binds id-ego-superego into a singular entity, empowered to dismiss and override all forms of resistance. The drive apparatus of Whiteness divides the object world into two distinct zones. In one, the Whiteness infiltrated drive works in familiar ways – inhibited, checked, distorted, transformed – susceptible, that is, to standard neurotic deformations. In the other, however, none of this holds true. There the liberated drive goes rogue, unchecked and unlimited, inhibited by neither the protests of its objects nor the counterforces of its internal structures. (pp. 356–357) So Donald Moss declares that Parasitic Whiteness ​“​infiltrates​”​ our ​“​drive apparatus,​”​ collapsing the various psychic agencies (id, ego, super-ego) into a single entity bent on domination. But how is a psychic collapse this catastrophic possible, absent a florid psychosis? He doesn’t say. Nevertheless, according to Moss, this process begins when the infant first experiences stranger anxiety and starts to become cognizant of her caregivers’ group boundaries, or definitions of ​“​us​”​ and ​“​them​”​ – that is, those who belong to the caregivers’ trusted reference group and those who do not. In theory, at least, this way of framing things allows for the possibility that if a white-skinned infant’s caregivers embrace people of color among their kin and friendship groups, the infant will be spared the ​“​infiltration of the drives​”​ that drives them to become ​“​unchecked, unlimited, inhibited by neither the protests of its objects nor the counterforces of its external structures.​”​ But more often than not, says Dr. Moss, the result is a sadistic mode of relatedness toward people who are not white. Holding these objects in place, inflicting pain on them – this sadism becomes the exquisite and economical solution to any apparent conflict between wanting and hating. Parasitic Whiteness further demeans its nonwhite bodies and beings by way of a naturalizing system of naming and classification. Once it has mapped and transformed its nonwhite objects into such a fixed taxonomical category, the rogue sexuality of Parasitic Whiteness can expand its aim. It permanently maps them as external/away, and from there, wherever that is, these objects are available for limitless use – limitless labor, of limitless kind. (p. 357) Stripped of excess verbiage, Dr. Moss is saying, in effect, that white-skinned people are extremely susceptible to acquiring a sadistic and exploitative mode of relatedness toward non-whites that leads them to control and enslave them. Once acquired, this rigid and internalized ​“​taxonomy​”​ is is basically locked in and insusceptible to external influences that might take their development in a pro-social direction. There are several problems with this argument. The first and most obvious is that many white-skinned people who were raised in overtly racist environments have become abolitionists, civil rights supporters, and anti-racist activists. Even so, Moss does not desire to understand or explain the psychological processes that prompt many white-skinned people to repudiate the ​“​taxonomy​”​ that is presumably hardwired into their psyches shortly after birth and to oppose the horrors and injustices it brings about, though he doubtlessly counts himself among their number. Another problem with this argument is that it directly contradicts Sigmund Freud’s views on human nature. In Chapter 5 of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud wrote that people are not gentle beings in need of love, who at most can defend themselves if attacked. Rather they must also recognize among their drive impulses a powerful tendency to aggression. Their neighbor, consequently, is not merely a potential helper or sexual object for them. Rather, they are also tempted to gratify their aggression on him, to exploit without compensation his capacity for work, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, after all the experiences of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this observation? Now, whether you agree with Freud or not, the fact remains that he described the desire to dominate and exploit our fellow human beings as a generic human attribute. In other words, said Freud, the willingness or propensity to injure, exploit, and humiliate other human beings, which Dr. Moss deems to be chiefly front-loaded into the psyche of white infants is, in truth, innate and universal and resides within all of us. If so, it is not merely the product of the newborn infant’s ​“​positioning​”​ in the social and cultural nexus, or of a rigid, internalized (and socially constructed) ​“​taxonomy​”​ that gives license to white-skinned people to dominate, exploit, and humiliate non-white people. While you may not share Freud’s grim assessment of human nature, there is plenty of evidence to back it up. Just consider the history of slavery, which was practiced all over the world long before European and Anglo-American imperialism began to shape the contours of global politics. Please consider – were the Sumerian Kings or the Egyptian Pharaohs, who enslaved many dark-skinned people, white? Were the Akkadians, Hittites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, or Persians white? Were the Tartars, Turks, Huns, and Mongols white? Were the agrarian empires of India, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, where untold millions were enslaved for centuries before European imperialism set foot in Asia, governed by white-skinned people? Were the Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs, Olmecs, etc., white? Were the Muslim conquerors who controlled North Africa, the Middle East, and large swathes of Central Asia white? Obviously not. But why rely solely on Freud’s testimony? In Transformations in Slavery, historian Paul E. Lovejoy noted that slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been found in many places, from classical antiquity to modern times. Africa has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of slaves and as one of the principle areas where slavery was common. Indeed, in Africa, slavery lasted well into the 20th century-notably longer than in the Americas. Such antiquity and persistence require explanation, both to understand the historical development of slavery in Africa in its own right and to evaluate the relative importance of the slave trade to this development. (Lovejoy, 2012, p. 1) In a preface to the third edition of his book, Lovejoy acknowledged that one of his aims in undertaking his research was ​“​to confront the reality that there was slavery in the history of Africa, at a time when some romantic visionaries and hopeful nationalists wanted to deny the clear facts (p. xxiii).​”​ Moss doesn’t deny the facts outright, however. He just ignores and sidesteps them completely. So let’s be candid, shall we? For all its shortcomings, Freud’s grim appraisal of human nature has a lot of evidence to support it. By contrast, Donald Moss’s theory of Parasitic Whiteness has none – or none to speak of, apart from his own autobiographical reflections and two meager case histories. Instead, Moss offers up florid conjectures couched in metaphors of ​“​parasitism,​”​ ​“​mapping,​”​ and ​“​verticality​”​ but entirely divorced from the actual history and practice of slavery before and outside of the European and Anglo-American orbits, where domination, exploitation, and humiliation were widely practiced by non-whites against other communities of color. Besides, on reflection, to insist that white-skinned people are uniquely susceptible to these ​“​perversions​”​ and drive ​“​deformations,​”​ as Moss calls them, appears to imply that human nature is basically good, but that white-skinned people are more heavily endowed with sadistic and antisocial traits than non-whites because of their acquired ​“​taxonomy,​”​ a kind of second nature that can seldom, if ever, be remedied. In some ways, Moss’s claims about Parasitic Whiteness are reminiscent of what Wilhelm Reich called ​“​the emotional plague​”​ (Reich, 1976), a deep and pervasive deformation of the psyche, which its victims and carriers are utterly unconscious of. Both these ideas lean heavily on the metaphor of disease. The difference here is that Parasitic Whiteness is deemed to be primarily an affliction of white-skinned people, while the emotional plague, as Reich conceived it, is present in every form of racism and does not discriminate on the basis of skin color.

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

Let us start with Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a board-certified forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who delivered a talk titled ​“​The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind​”​ for Grand Rounds at Yale University’s Child Study Center on April 6, 2021. Her virtual talk was open to the public and was well received, although it was only made available to students and faculty who had Yale ID, accompanied by a ​“​trigger warning​”​ that her talk contained profanity and violent imagery. Dr. Khilanani’s talk was surreptitiously recorded by a member of the audience and ​“​leaked​”​ to journalist Katie Herzog, who published some of her remarks and interviewed her for Bari Weiss’s substack, titled Common Sense on June 4, 2021. Before getting to the substance of her remarks, a bit of context is in order here. In her interview with Katie Herzog, Dr. Khilanani disclosed that she trained in medicine and psychiatry at Columbia, Cornell, and New York University. Before studying medicine, however, Dr. Khilanani earned an MA at the University of Chicago, where she majored in English literature and critical theory. Her studies at the University of Chicago appealed to her, she says, because she was already interested in ​“​the unconscious​”​ and in other (unspecified) ​“​different ways of thinking.​”​ However, when asked what she meant by ​“​the unconscious,​”​ she told Katie Herzog the following: Critical theory is about how you are positioned in the world. Ever since I was a little kid, since I’ve interacted with people who are white, and especially white women, I would notice that things were really off. So what I’ve done by going through psychoanalytic training, which is all about getting in touch with the unconscious, is literally work backwards. I’m like, ​“​OK, I’ve noticed that white people tend to put me in certain roles. White women will experience me this way, white men will experience me this way.​”​ I’m going to use psychoanalysis to work backwards and treat all of this as a projection to see what I can learn about their mind. Two things are striking about this response to Herzog’s question: first, the lack of clarity and specificity, and second, a tendency to conflate critical theory and psychoanalysis. (Yes, the histories of psychoanalysis and critical theory are intricately intertwined, but at the end of the day, they are not the same thing.) Moreover, when asked about the nature of the unconscious, she answered elliptically and promptly lapsed into autobiographical reflection. Indeed, as the interview unfolded, Dr. Khilanani never defined or attempted to describe more fully what she means by ​“​the unconscious,​”​ beyond the observation that it has something to do with how people ​“​organize​”​ their anxiety. Worse yet, in this same interview, Dr. Khilanani asserted that the unconscious ​“​is different for everybody,​”​ an assertion that flatly contradicts her essentialist perspective on ​“​the White mind​”​ and white guilt, which we address further in the next section. Nevertheless, her remarks here do illumine her motives for undergoing psychoanalysis. By her own admission, she embarked on psychoanalytic training primarily to understand how other people – specifically, white people – act, think, and feel as they do toward her. A desire for deeper self-knowledge and/or acquiring the knowledge and skill to remedy unnecessary suffering in others – the usual motives that prompt people to enter analysis – are not even mentioned in passing here. With these thoughts in mind, let’s turn to the actual substance of her remarks. Here are some things Dr. Khilanani said on April 6, 2021: This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45) I had 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) White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time. (Time stamp: 17:06) We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. Now in fairness, before she unleashed this torrent of abuse, Dr. Khilanani informed her audience: I want you to observe your thoughts and feelings as I talk. I said, there’s a difference between a thought, a fantasy, and an action. Now, my reflection on my own rage was actually that I was feeling impotent. So that’s where I was going with that. And kind of normalizing feelings of hatred. This is stuff that exists and I need to dive deep within myself to reflect on how it is that I got here. So there is a reality here, like did I actually cut white people out of my life? Absolutely. The cumulative impression one gets from these remarks is that Dr. Khilanani never intended to deliver a well-researched, well-thought-out presentation but decided well in advance of her talk to simply unleash her anger and contempt for white people, declaring that there is no point in talking to them (although, by her own admission, that is precisely what she was doing at the time). Apart from the catharsis she evidently hoped to achieve by expressing her rage and disappointment so forcefully, the purpose of Dr. Khilanani’s talk, as she herself admits, was to normalize feelings of hatred. And this too poses a problem. To ​“​normalize​”​ something is to make it more prevalent or more commonly accepted than it was previously. But normalizing hatred is precisely the opposite of what civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu sought to do. Indeed, they counselled their followers to confront their oppressors with dignity and resolve and to speak truth to power but not to hate their oppressors, even as they challenged their bizarre racial prejudices and sought justice and equality for themselves and their children. After all, hatred is a toxic emotion that fosters an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, which in turn obstructs co-operation and collaboration among individuals and groups. So though many Americans will doubtless defend Dr. Khilanani’s (First Amendment) right to ​“​normalize feelings of hatred,​”​ if she so chooses, this tactic sounds and feels much more like political theater than it does like a searching and scholarly analysis. This becomes apparent in her disclaimer to Katie Herzog: So when I was saying that talking to white people is useless, I’m not actually really saying it’s useless because if I really thought it was useless I wouldn’t devote time to doing this. I’m talking about an experience that I have, that people of color have, of futility when coming up against a psychological defense. So it’s an experience of futility. So there we have it. Rather than engaging her audience in searching reflection on the sense of futility people of color often feel when attempting to discuss race matters with white folks, Dr. Khilanani performed it in front of a live audience, believing this approach would have more impact. Did it? Who knows. Either way, this still begs the question whether ​“​the normalization of hatred​”​ and the denigration and dismissal of the vast majority of white-skinned people in the name of theory (or indeed, of anything else) really advances the cause of social justice for people of color or whether the kind of racial essentialism that Dr. Khilanani promotes threatens to derail or disfigure that project in the long run. Here are some examples of her racial essentialism. In conversation with Katie Herzog, Dr. Khilanani said the following: People of color, myself included, suffer from being positioned in the world, psychologically, and the stuff that goes with it: violence, this, that. Now, white people suffer from problems of their own mind. They suffer with trust, they suffer with intimacy, they suffer with closeness, shame, guilt, anxiety. They suffer with their minds. Don’t get me wrong, people of color are also neurotic and have their own stuff and ups and downs. But there is a fundamental issue I think that is very unique to white suffering and I think that’s their own mind. Sadly, this way of framing the issue sidesteps the fact that experiences of trauma and loss, abuse, and neglect have a similar impact on our psyches regardless of the color of our skin and that poor whites are also ​“​positioned​”​ in a way that exposes them to a far greater risk of suffering from ill health, violence, incarceration, suicide, substance abuse (and so on) than their more affluent white counterparts and that with the rise of neoliberalism, impoverished and marginalized white folk comprise an increasingly large percentage of the overall (white) population. Moreover, and more importantly, on reflection, it averts attention from the fact that many people of color also struggle with issues of intimacy, loss, guilt, shame and anxiety, and with unresolved (and often unconscious) inner conflicts concerning their parents, siblings, and families of origin, whether they seek treatment or not. Yet Dr. Khilanani insists that the suffering of white people is merely ​“​of their own mind​”​ and ​“​unique,​”​ and when asked why, she replied, It’s going to be hard for me to give you a one sentence soundbite on this but I would say, a high level of guilt. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Other than in white people not eating bread, an incredible level of shame. Feeling really exposed all the time. A lot of perfectionistic tendencies. Not letting themselves move forward. Experiencing themselves as passive a lot. When pressed to elaborate, Dr. Khilanani continued, saying, White people have an intense level of guilt. I have never seen a level of guilt that I see among white people. I mean, white people don’t eat bread. Think about that. There have been wars all over the world over grains and bread and only here, white people are depriving themselves. Think about that shit. Furthermore, she adds, Everyone has this gluten allergy and you’re like, what the fuck is a gluten allergy? That’s a psychosomatic symptom. If you actually talk to a GI doctor, they’re going to say, ​“​Well, there’s Celiac and there’s everything else​”​ with a wink, and you know what the ​“​everything else​”​ is. It’s all the guilty gluten people. And by way of further explanation, she says, I don’t deny that people may get symptoms, but how is it that all these people suddenly now, after all the violence has occurred, are not eating bread. It’s like the weirdest fucking thing. And finally, she said, ​“​The bread is about guilt and needing to keep them in a state of deprivation and stay guilty.​”​ When asked by Katie Herzog whether she thinks that white people actually should feel guilty, Dr. Khilanani replied, ​“​No, I think guilt is the most useless emotion on the planet. What function does it serve? It’s not helpful.​”​ So in Dr. Khilanani’s learned opinion, any and all sensitivity or aversion to gluten that falls short of Celiac disease in severity, that is, is not actually life threatening, must be psychosomatic in origin, despite the fact that many accomplished medical doctors and researchers disagree clearly with her appraisal. She ignores the fact that many non-white people also suffer from gluten sensitivity and deems avoidance of gluten – and more specifically, of bread – to be rooted in lingering guilt feelings associated with colonialism and the lies that were promulgated and designed to support it but provides not a single shred of evidence – beyond her clinical intuition – that this is in fact the case. She then adds that guilt is ​“​the most useless emotion on the planet​”​ that ​“​serves no useful purpose.​”​ This last remark is illuminating because it stands in stark contrast with Freud’s ideas about human development and with mainstream psychiatric opinion. Indeed, by the end of their sophomore year, every psychology major has learned that one of the hallmarks of psychopathy is precisely the absence of real guilt or remorse over a person’s past misdeeds. So on the one hand, Dr. Khilanani claims that white people are psychopaths. On the other, she claims that they are riddled with guilt and psychosomatic disorders. Clearly, something is amiss here. You cannot maintain both these positions simultaneously without lapsing into double think or complete incoherence. These reflections also serve as a reminder that in Freud’s estimation, guilt is emphatically not a useless emotion; that in optimal circumstances, that is, when one’s guilt feelings are not excessive or irrational, but proportionate to our actual deeds or phantasies, its presence serves to curb antisocial behavior and preserve a measure of decency and civility in human affairs.

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

Romantic particularism purports to reclaim an oppositional epistemology and aesthetic that had been obscured by the historical forces of Europe let loose in the world. In fact, it fails to escape the universalism elaborated by the modern university insofar as it reproduces, in form and function, idealist philosophical assumptions about who and what works, for whom and to what end. Romantic particularism has great appeal outside the university through its identification of an “authenticity” in cultural practice that needs recognition, though hardly revision. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 1990 Florida courtroom defense of the ultra-machismo rap group 2 Live Crew as “literary geniuses” was a strategically wily move on his part.1 After all, he helped save some Black men from punishment for “crimes” few white men are charged with committing. However, the result of his approach is to maintain the struggle against racism at a level of abstraction (that is, unacknowledged maleness) that refuses to engage the complexities of power within the ranks of the disfranchised. He reads nauseating lyrics as unassailably valid African American cultural practice (“It’s a Black thing; you wouldn’t understand”), in spite of many, many Black women’s daily struggles to get out from under the crap of that rap.

(Jesse A., Activist, , 2-5)

Time and again, white people acting as allies in other people’s “progress” have not just failed to address racist power relations; they have entrenched white dominance. Altruism cannot be the basis for white anti-racist action. There’s only one thing that can: solidarity. Solidarity is about unity, not around like-mindedness or affinity but around common interests. Neither having the same opinions nor even mutual fondness is required for one to enter into a solidarity relationship with another. All they need is the acknowledgement that, to achieve liberation, “I need you and you need me.” Solidarity is about fighting for oneself alongside another person, for one’s family alongside another family. The thing is, when two people fight for themselves alongside one another, when they perceive themselves to be teammates, they begin to warm to each other. In 1939, a Chicago stockyard worker, Jim Cole, told a reporter from the Federal Writers’ Project, “I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raisin’ our pay, or settling grievances about anything. I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world gettin’ everybody who works in the yards together, and breakin’ up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.”Only when white people come to see that our own liberation is bound up in the liberation of others can we achieve solidarity and have a basis for white anti-racism that does not produce the colonial outcomes generated by altruism.

(Jesse A., Activist, , 2-5)

The dominant liberal conception of white anti-racism emphasizes altruism. In this mode, white people must set aside our own self-interest in order to extend kindness to those less fortunate. Humanitarian assistance is rewarded, and those who practice it are hailed for their self-sacrifice and generosity. White people are encouraged to defer, shrink, and assist. It is not our fight, the white-altruism mode says, so we must strive to decenter ourselves and support black people’s “advancement” as peripheral allies, doing what kindnesses we can to compensate them for the privileges we enjoy. We must reliably articulate non-racist positions using suitably non-racist terminology, correct white people who fail to do these, and under no circumstances use racist language out in the open. Not that people shouldn’t interrupt racist personal acts or respect the expertise of people of color regarding how racism plays out in their lives and communities, but that alone does not constitute a strategy. At best, these interruptions and this deference are a woefully inadequate response to systemic racism. At worst, white altruism is a recipe for disaster. Not only does it treat racism as personal flaw rather than a system of power; it also insists that white people have an obligation to help black communities “advance,” a construction that is vulnerable to white people’s misconceptions of what constitutes “advancement.” Without being anchored to a goal of redistributing power, altruism is often carried along by the prevailing currents of racist capitalism.

(Greg, GlobalBlackStudies@SU, founder/editor @ProudFlesh, Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism ( 2.0 )? Theory & Event, Volume 21, Number 1, January 2018, pp. 282-317 (Article) )

There is here a general critical erasure of the massive tradition of Black anti-colonialism—or anti-colonial Black resistance to “anti-Blackness” and anti-Black colonialism, which transcends nationalization. Wilderson’s “Afro-pessimist” rejects the anti-colonialist paradigms of supposedly “other” peoples, and yet in a manner that reinstates US or Western coloniality nonetheless—a white colonialism that oppresses “the Black” inside and outside the United States’s official geopolitical limits. This position can thus make a virtue out of automatic and absolute anti-alliance postures with no further, actual political action then required for Black people, “the Black critic,” or any Black liberation struggle on this view. Such chauvinism without political commitment or engagement beyond critique is logically consistent, for pessimism, where mere resentment or ressentiment can masquerade as resistance or “pro-Black” “radicalism.” After all, Afro-pessimism (2.0) begins with a proud suspicion of Black liberation or Black liberation movement, itself, no less than of its potentially “anti-racist” or “anti-Black” political alliances. This provincial “American” pessimism reveals more affinities with Créolite in the Caribbean than Césaire’s anti-colonialist eruption of Pan-African Négritude, in reality, its narrowly and negatively delimited rhetoric of the “Blackness” of “the Black” (as “Slave,” of course) notwithstanding. As if this too is a virtue, pessimism is not just suspicious of power but possibility—while, upholding dystopia, it is casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not support a pessimist paradigm, orientation or sensibility. Analytically, moreover, there is somehow no white colonialism for Blacks to fight in Africa or Black countries of Black people anywhere and no terrible landlessness that afflicts the African diasporas of Blackness captive within white settler and/or imperial state formations, for Wilderson and Afropessimism (2.0). (295)

(Greg, GlobalBlackStudies@SU, founder/editor @ProudFlesh, Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism ( 2.0 )? Theory & Event, Volume 21, Number 1, January 2018, pp. 282-317 (Article) )

A glaring absence of Black radical and revolutionary intellectual history should be expected from any expression of “Afro-pessimism.” Indeed, could Afro-pessimism 2.0 take hold as another trend in mainstream academia except in the political void produced after the 1960s and ‘70s by local as well as global counter-revolution and counter-insurgency? This absence affects the shape and agenda of the critical analysis of “anti-Black racism” in essential ways. Wilderson’s critique of the “ruse of analogy” in Red, White & Black becomes a refrain that naturalizes academic approaches to politics now institutionalized with the continued reign of Western bourgeois liberalism. For older and enduring Black radical perspectives, the existence of “anti-Black racism” among non-Black peoples, organizations, and movements is neither a new nor shocking phenomenon. For many Black revolutionary movement logics of the ‘60s and ‘70s, for instance, this did not preclude alliance (or the exhaustion of alliances made) or lead to a doctrinaire rejection of “solidarity” work and its international (or “intercommunal”) possibilities.27 “Contradictions” were expected, so to speak, in theory and practice, which might be resolved or not, depending on material interest, circumstance, etc. For them, this work was not about gauging identity, or the perfection of a projected analogy, but mobilization for the political accomplishments of revolution—a revolutionism that could or may not work toward the development of a new humanism not white or racist or anti-Black after all. The reach for potential solidarities was not construed as a gift or an act of good-willed benevolence, wise or unwise given the risks. Even solidarity work with obviously problematic, openly enemy forces could be a strategic or tactical mode of advancing Black collective self-interests that might dispense with any alliance at any given moment in time without seeing the relationship as a statement of some total identity or non-identity of condition and interests. The notion of solidarity has nowadays been superficialized, remaining riveted on mere rhetorical proclamation and aesthetic or representational identification in neo-colonial culture industries here and there. An older, praxical approach to alliance, perhaps “analogy,” and solidarity is not taken up by current analyses of identity conflicts that prevail with the resurgence of a more academic political-intellectualism and a now much less contested liberalism. This is imperial “multiculturalism” and its malcontents. As much as Afro-pessimism (2.0) may object to certain instances of liberalism, or regulation white racist liberalism at least, it assumes these Western epistemic frameworks of white academic liberalism all the same, thereby ensconcing the colonialism and neo-colonialism it constantly and symptomatically denegates in text after text. (292-3)

(Greg, GlobalBlackStudies@SU, founder/editor @ProudFlesh, Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism ( 2.0 )? Theory & Event, Volume 21, Number 1, January 2018, pp. 282-317 (Article) )

The great anti-colonialist poet of Négritude, Aimé Césaire wrote famously in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party that he wanted Marxism and communism to be placed in the service of Black peoples and not Black peoples in the service of Marxism or communism. He maintained in 1956: “it is clear that our struggle—the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle.” 28 As always, he was writing on behalf of Black people who were, proverbially, the only people on the planet who have been excluded from the “human race” by the “modern” history of Western racism and colonialism which obstructs “a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.”29 What is this Négritude if not Blackness, Black anti-colonialism, or anti-colonial Blackness? This tradition is not a tradition in Wilderson who regularly critiques the analogical arrogance of Marxism, feminism, and an academic paradigm of “post-colonialism” with less common reference to “queer” or “gay and lesbian” categories of analysis as well—all in the name of pessimism. For him, none of these political frameworks with their privileged identarian subjects can capture the condition of “Blackness” and “slavery” (or “the Black/Slave”). While that perspective can allow for some insights—ones certainly seen before around the Black world and ones certainly avoided by so much institutional scholarship—it leaves the general categorical grid of established Western political epistemologies intact. The familiar academic terrain of “race, gender, class, and sexuality” frames the critique for “Blackness” of “gender, class, and sexuality” in addition to “post-coloniality” or “post-colonialism.” The most conventional US academic categories of identity and analysis are still rendered in full as discrete, monolithic, and monological categories and referents (e.g., workers, women, etc.), like the respective political ideologies based upon them in the traditional ideological history of the white West (e.g., Marxism, feminism, etc.). There are “workers” and then there are “women,” generically, and then sometimes there are “gays” by whatever name, not to mention “natives” or the colonized in this culturally specific epistemology of a specific culture of colonialism itself. The upshot is quite conservative, even anachronistically so. This critique is an internal if damning critique embodying and encouraging pessimism largely from within the established order of knowledge that it analytically engages and categorically replenishes and preserves. The grid politics of Wilderson’s critique of “the ruse of analogy” leaves all manner of “Blackness” in a wasteland. The routine categorical contrast with “Native Americans” reduces all that and any colonial condition to a startlingly oversimplified matter of “land” (or “land restoration”); and it occludes “Afro-Indian” history as well as “Red-Black” maroonage all across the Americas. The constant generic contrast with “feminism” or “non-Black women” eclipses the more mammoth criticism of “gender” writ large in Diop and Amadiume’s Black-African studies of Europe or “Western Civilization” as a “racial patriarchy” of pessimism and “anti-Black” imperialism. The contrast with Marxism and its “workers” never resurrects any issues of “class” or economics from any other perspective to recognize or to resist, for example, the white invention of Black elites as vital instruments of racism, anti-Blackness, and white-supremacism. There never appears a trace of any critique of Black “social class’ (or political class) elitism in “Afro-pessimism” (2.0), which is a tell-tale sign of petty-bourgeois or “lumpen-bourgeois” articulations. Lastly, Wilderson’s occasional categorical contrast of “Blackness” with Palestinians or al-Nakba (which aligns in Arabic with the Swahili substitution for the term “Middle Passage”—Maafa, the “Catastrophe”) comprehends no Blackness in Palestine or among Palestinians. His Afro-pessimism can envision no Afro-Palestinianism, unlike a great tradition of Pan-African discourses that also do not dislocate Palestine from an anti-colonialist mapping of the African continent or the Afro-Asian landmass of a Pan-Africanist and “Bandung” imagination, one powerfully shared by Malcolm X and Fayez A. Sayegh. For “Black Power” internationally, Kwame Ture would refer to Palestine as the “tip of Africa” and uphold Fatima Bernawi, the iconic Black woman who’s been named the “first Palestinian female political prisoner,” as the paragon of “Black and Palestinian Revolutions.”30 She is likewise canonized by other AfroPalestinian icons themselves, such as Ali Jiddeh and Mahmoud Jiddeh of the African community of the Old City of Jerusalem, for example— or, say, Ahmad and Jumaa Takrouri of Occupied Jericho—who are each among the greatest of all icons across Historic Palestine, a country which has produced multiple Black Panther formations in Hebrew as well as Arabic in the 1970s and the 1980s. Again, Wilderson tacitly “nationalizes” his category of “Blackness” although this is scarcely in the interests of Black people in or outside of the US colonized mainland of Americanism; and so none of the above “Blackness” survives the critical grid of a very Anglo-American (and white racist state-bound) critique of “analogy,” regardless of the “Afro-pessimist” text at hand. Do not the vulgar colonial-nativist politics of Incognegro’s strangely overlooked comment on “West Indians” go full blown then in Red, White & Black and elsewhere?31

(Paul E. Lovejoy, History@York, The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of

Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery1 Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, II, 1 (1997). https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/31317017/Lovejoy_Revisionist_Interpretions_of_African_Diaspora-libre.pdf?1392317860=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe_African_Diaspora_Revisionist_Interpr.pdf&Expires=1678339058&Signature=CeZc8ehZj5rba7AXZ0AcaFqdW4EPKShdia9dkUALNJ7h7hGTqWhu0uCb4UNI2ZIgY334oFYNv8LeogclKP0ayEZSis7C3bVinAJCJiwXypj~NFVNDqHldozkfz~mTmPuAV08NyiDizrW8PjMX3iG5SmFEVpevjFVj1EoaM3Yl83J-cZFX4Lram904xbjAbJrKzWp4yzu19GebUm0bhQF75~VkwW073TRkaefyYcEI~9Ip9KZRxkzjW9yVfY0t7FQ-sRje2ONyaDE3J6dOrsWQCBdx5ErpSROkZKXVPEYMvw1i175i67qgak1o8aASd-Yg0qyIxnRplJ3N30aJQLN8w__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA)

(Ruth Wilson, , 5-12)

The insistence on finding innocents among the convicted or killed both projects and derives energy from all the various “should not be in cages” categories such as those I listed above. But it also invokes, with stupefying historical imprecision, a cavalcade of other innocents to emphasize the wrongness of some aspect of mass incarceration. In particular, as if mass incarceration were the means through which we are presumed to have inherited duty for some set of the uncompensated tasks because of what our ancestors were violently compelled to do. It’s a reasonable extension given the historical facts of convict leasing and chain gangs that once upon a time were widespread. However, since half of the people locked up are not, or not obviously, descendants of racial chattel slavery, the problem demands a different explanation and therefore different politics. This does not mean that the lineage of abolition extending through chattel slavery is not robust enough to form at least part of the platform for ending mass incarceration in general. However, as it stands, to achieve significance, the uncritical extension of a partial past to explain a different present demands a sentimental political assertion that depends on the figure of a laboring victim whose narrative arc — whose structure of feeling — is fixed, and therefore susceptible to rehabilitation — or expungement — into relative innocence.

(Arun, Geo@MN, A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene EPD: Society and Space 0(0) 1–23)

In the US itself, as scholars from WEB Du Bois (1935) onwards have shown, slavery had to be formally abolished for manufacturing and cities to kick off, spurring processes like the Great Migration of African Americans and, more fortuitously, black music. Following Deleuze and Guattari (and Marx), however dire the extraction of surplus-value from the laboring body, racial capitalism involves some degree (and ideology) of “freedom.” Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) excavation of the terroristic, legal, and psychical aspects of slavery living on after legal Emancipation demonstrates there are strong but disavowed continuities in institutional racism and misogyny. But however violent the post-Emancipation United States has been, from lynching to the prison-industrial complex to the war on crack, there was also the slow rise of black subjectivity, as testified by the black radical tradition to which Hartman herself belongs. She presents one of the finest analyses of the libidinal economies and legal codifications precluding a real black liberation from racial capitalism and individualism, hence of the hypocrisy underneath the official nationalist ideology of “we the people.” Yet an overemphasis on abjection deters from appreciating the enduring plasticity of racism.1 Politically speaking, there must be room, as there is for Du Bois, Fanon, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers, for theorizing how a black elite could possibly emerge against such backdrop of violence and despair, and why it does not dismantle the system of privilege it gains from itself (from Booker Washington to Jay Z). To wit, if blackness is modernity’s quintessential site of abjection, it becomes difficult to explain why the “most powerful man on Earth” has been black. Afropessimists have of course passionately critiqued the deep complicity with an antiblack system shaping Barack Obama and all liberal antiracism, but true to their pessimistic stance consistently eschew formulating where exactly hope for black people (and other minorities) could come from. With the benefit of hindsight, we can understand why capital was compelled to expunge slavery and feudal territorialities, often pitting itself explicitly against older forms of racism and sexism, as well as colonialism and nationalism. After the Second World War, the system of United Nations and Bretton-Woods explicitly aimed to allow capital to flow planet-wide so as to transcend the genocidal nationalisms and imperialisms which had just led to such destruction, even though the world remained catastrophically divided between East and West. Formal decolonization was on the one hand an egalitarian antiracist project often inspired by Marxism-Leninism, but on the other, it turned out to be a new phase in capital’s expansion under the rubric of development, with China now occupying the strangest systemic role. However hypocritical the reproach of premodern brutalities by industrial capitalism, it has proven tremendously effective. (13-14)

(John, Music@Columbia https://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/marketing-idiot-left-brand/)

Having been barraged by thousands of viral postings over the past years, we all know that there is no trick: one sure way of getting people to pay attention to you on the internet is the same way you do it in a public place: you pull down your pants and shriek-or produce the electronic text equivalent of the same. Left politics is no exception: you don’t attract attention by calmly evaluating strategies through which left candidates compete in and win Democratic primaries or run as third party candidates where they have potential to win while making sure that far right Republicans are ejected from power as soon as possible. What will get attention is to scream “burn it down”, the “it” here being the Democratic Party, and to advocate active “sabotage” of its candidates, particularly in the presidential election, even when this will result in, as it did in 2016, four years of a living nightmare. The arsonists associated with this tendency, Paul Street, Jeffrey St. Clair among others appearing at Counterpunch, advocated for just that and continue to do so now, though it’s worth noting that it’s not just establishment Democrats who they reject: Bernie Sanders failed to meet with their approval despite the fact that virtually every establishment institution hated and feared him-and did everything in their power to take him down. Given that Sanders didn’t make it over the anti-establishment bar, their logic dictates that neither would other radicals who actually succeeded in getting elected to office as Democrats. For example, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner who is carrying forward a wholesale purge of the vicious prosecutors who have fueled the mass incarceration epidemic in one major city. Or Chelsea Manning, now a newly declared Democratic candidate for senate from the state of Maryland would also deserve rejection as would Chokwe Lumumba, the newly elected Democratic mayor, now following through on his pledge to make Jackson, Mississippi “the most radical city on the planet.” And they would also sabotage Democrats-anti-establishment, and in most cases otherwise-whose victories will be required to begin to remove from power the “most dangerous organization in human history”. *** At this point, the nihilistic absurdity of their non-strategy becomes so obvious that it hardly merits comment. But the question remains. What accounts for the thousands of clicks and hundreds of “likes” of their postings? To understand why requires recognizing that they don’t go viral in spite of their being idiotic. Rather they go viral *because* they are idiotic. And that’s because most of those reading idiot left content are not actively searching for ways in which they can effectively participate in politics using it to address the almost inconceivable suffering those in power are inflicting on those who don’t have it. Rather, those waving a crufix at any consituency developing behind left wing Democratic like Sanders, Lumumba, Manning and Krasner have no interest in doing that. Ultimately, they look to politics as repository for their fantasies where they can inflict random violence, burn, rape and pillage without consequence. Of course, it’s fun to engage in video game fantasies, as any parent of a 12 year old knows. But doing so has nothing to do with advancing politics which has any chance of helping those who desperately need it.

(Tommy J., Phil@TexasA&M, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century.)

Over the last decade the living wage has been tied to some local successes in America. States and municipalities have indeed succeeded in raising the minimum wage in Maryland, Florida, and some counties in California with calls for a national increase underway. As Donald Stabile notes, “Advocates for a living wage typically support it by arguing that it is necessary for ‘economic justice’ and a ‘fair economy’;” the weight of their cry largely upheld through moral suasion and the sympathy our society has respecting to the rights of low-wage workers and addressing the ever-expanding boundaries of poverty. While proponents of a living wage have emphasized ideas of justice, fairness, dignity, and of course the sacred American creed of rights, few economists have recognized these constructs as actual entities translatable into market principles or governing dynamics. Proponents of the living wage largely dismiss the need for values to be accountable to economic postulates, insisting “the higher compensation would mean they [workers] could walk down the street and look anyone in the eye. They could walk with the self-confidence that only dignity gives. They could, whatever else, feel that they belong.” Such debates largely obscure what is really at stake in the actualization of the values one intends. Is it the case that dignity is realizable through income, and home ownership, rather than equality, or the end to discrimination? Are we unshakable in our belief that discrete attainments within society constitute enough of one’s social self such that a higher income remedies racism, or sexual exploitation, and the sheer brutality of anti-Black violence? How do we reconcile dignity, justice, and fairness with a dehumanizing, unjust, and precariously biased world? Poor people are discriminated against. Poor Black and Brown people are killed, indigenous peoples are erased and defined as savage, and immigrants are thought, contrary to fact, to destroy the economy and live under the constant threat of deportation. Race determines the risk populations have for poverty, and poverty itself has been highly related to crime, domestic abuse, substance abuse, sexual violence and incarceration. Recently, Alejandro Varela has argued that “maps of poverty in the United States…overlay quite seamlessly onto the maps of HIV. That should come as no surprise to anyone who studies or treats chronic conditions, most of which—diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, etc.” Poverty breeds disease and because of the enduring segregation and stratification of races in America, it is drawn to the racialized members of our society. Unfortunately, these are our realities; yet we seem impotent to address them beyond screaming that we rebuke their existence, declaring we will “burn it down,” questioning the causes of such inequities, or even recognizing these social phenomena exist. All these phenomena, all the deaths caused by them, the lives lessened by their persistence; despite all our claims—the consequences will remain. Our theories, and the values we use to justify them, will ultimately do little to actualize our paradigm anymore than those who remain committed to the status quo. We need a stronger approach.

(Susannah, JewishStudies@Dartmouth What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Are there dreams left to us in an era when racism is so relentless that it seems unconquerable, and authoritarianism seems, to too many people, preferable to democracy? Is there an answer to Afropessimism? Has racism made real the warning on Dante’s entry to hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”? Political theorist Susan Buck-Morss has written of the collapse of modernity’s dream of utopia, a dream that had driven both capitalism and socialism. Neither succeeded and the end of the twentieth century has left not only political and economic systems in chaos but crushed our hopes as well. BuckMorss speaks of “a utopian desire for social arrangements that transcend existing forms,” betrayed by “global systems that exploit both human labor and natural environments . . . [with] a panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of modernity and anaesthetize its victims.” She is not nihilistic, however; drawing from Walter Benjamin’s notion of “dreamworld,” she calls on us to “salvage modernity’s universal intent” in the face of the exclusivity of nationalism: “political collectives proclaim themselves champions of human rights and the rule of law and then deny these to a whole list of enemy exceptions, as if humanity itself were the monopoly of their own privileged members.”84 To some commentators, the present day has lost the capacity for the radicalism of the prophetic tradition. James Darsey writes, “[Todd] Gitlin and [Billy] Graham may be worlds apart in their evaluations of what has been lost, but there is a high degree of consensus that it is gone, and that we have found nothing yet to replace it. Radical discourse understood in terms of biblical prophecy has no potency in such a world.”85 Here is where Cornel West’s contribution intervenes. He points to the “rich prophetic legacies of Sojourner Truth, Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, and Martin Luther King Jr., [that] now lay nearly dormant—often forgotten—and the possession of a marginal few.”86 Yet, like Darsey, West agrees that “American religious life is losing its prophetic fervor.”87 He calls instead for a “principled prophetism.”88 Hope is not the domain of political promises, nor of Christian missions to unite all humanity in the baptismal font, nor is it the avant la lettre effort of a universalist “Marrano strategy,” as Agata Bielik-Robson argues.89 For West, it is the prophets who give us the dream and the voice: “Prophetic pragmatism, with its roots in the American heritage and its hopes for the wretched of the earth, constitutes the best chance of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action.”90 What is that principled, prophetic pragmatism? Is it not, as Richard Rorty has argued, a contradiction in terms, that pragmatism needs prophecy like fish need bicycles.91 Here Rorty fails to understand what West means by the prophetic, namely, Heschel’s understanding of prophetic passion. In responding to Rorty, West presents an elucidation of Heschel’s importance as well as that of prophecy. He explains that philosophy without prophecy is like bodies without souls, and that without the prophetic dimension, philosophy cannot understand the passions that motivate, inspire, and console human beings and will ultimately fail to be meaningful. Black musical traditions, especially Blues, West emphasizes, convey an aesthetic appreciation of the prophetic by giving voice to intense suffering and yet offering hope as a redemption from suffering. Here he echoes a comment by Toni Morrison, “For a long time, the art form that was healing for black people was music.”92 Just as the prophet hears and gives voice to the silent agony of the oppressed, so too the Blues give voice to precisely those within the “democracy” who have been enslaved, brutalized, and at times denied the right to live. Yet hope arises: the civil rights movement offered the United States the possibility of becoming a democracy by granting the right to vote to all of its citizens. Black Americans rescued American democracy, and by redeeming America became the messianic figures of prophetic hope. Today, of course, it is not clear that the United States wants to be a democracy, as the courts and state legislatures eviscerate voting rights legislation. Still, there is an important caveat to be raised here. West, like King and many other Black theologians and intellectuals, is cautious about claims that Blacks can “redeem and transform the modern world through the truth and clarity of perception that emerge from their pain.”93 As Craig Evans argues in his book The Burden of Black Religion, there is a long tradition of white assumption that Blacks are innately religious, a claim used by abolitionists to counter beliefs in Black savagery. After the Civil War, the rhetoric shifted, and Black religion was blamed for the alleged inability of Black Americans to modernize. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, Black intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston valorized the “primitive” spirit and emotional expression of Black religion as antidotes to stultifying bourgeois society, paralleling the European Orientalism of the same era that turned to Eastern religions. Yet during the same period, there were white intellectuals, such as Gunnar Myrdal, who depicted Black religion as dysfunctional. By the civil rights era, Black religiosity became a reassurance to whites that Blacks demanding an end to segregation were pastors and churchgoers; religion was thought to mitigate the danger of Black rage. At the same time, Black piety was invoked as inspiration for civil rights with a promise to “save the soul of America.” In each era, the formula suggested that slavery, racism, and oppression generated intense emotional piety in Black men and women, and the very intensity of their piety would in turn redeem their white oppressors. That is the “burden of Black religion” whose logic Evans outlines in his book. Where does Cornel West’s analysis fit into this schema? The Socratic and prophetic are shared with whites, as is the democratic. The fault line is exemplified by the Blues: can white people understand and be inspired and transformed by Black aesthetics, able to sense the hope that can nonetheless be embedded in the pain and suffering that are resonant in the Blues? The literary critic Stanley Crouch polemicized against presentations of Black suffering as a martyrdom that would then convey a kind of “moral magic.”94 If that is the message of the redemptive nature of Christ’s crucifixion, the Christian cross as a promise of hope after death, does the Blues, in West’s terms, function as its substitute, as the expression of suffering—and even death— as the necessary martyrdom for a hope that redeems? Thanks to West’s decades-long engagement with the prophets, his answer is no. Without repudiating the redemptive death of Christ, West nonetheless shifts attention from the Jesus as the Son of God to Blacks as God’s prophetic witnesses. Here we see a dif­ferent sensibility, and West’s understanding of the redemptive nature of Blues stands in that context. The promise of the prophet lies not in a text nor in a death, but in a voice, and it is a voice carrying the compassion of God. Sound is the medium, whether prophetic words or Blues music. The prophet is not simply a mouthpiece for God, but a person imbued, as Heschel writes, with sympathy, attuned to God’s own pathos that is shaped by God’s emotional response to the suffering of human beings. Heschel draws on an ancient Jewish understanding, expressed in biblical and rabbinic texts, that there is a zorech gavoha, a divine need: God is in need of human beings, receiving strength from our good deeds and in pain when we harm one another. Anguish for the silent agony of the oppressed is expressed by the prophet because it is the suffering of God. The prophet’s expression of anguish is itself a balm for those who suffer, and the Blues offer a similar balm, in West’s presentation. Not the suffering, but the expression of it creates the hope that emerges from the Blues; redemption does not come from death or pain, but from suffering’s prophetic resonance and empathic expression. West writes, “Black bonds of affection, black networks of support, black ties of empathy, and black harmonies of spiritual camaraderie provide the grounds for the fragile existential weaponry with which to combat black invisibility and namelessness.”95 West’s theology is not in quest of prophetic states of ecstasy, convulsions, or irrational states, nor has he any inclination to belittle the Bible or Judaism or paganism. His is the rare Christian theology that does not ride a seesaw of self-elevation by denigrating another faith. Nor does West look for voices of calm reason, rationality, and self-importance as a source of religious inspiration. His spirit, like the prophets, turns to the artists who give voice to the silent agony; he writes of Anton Chekhov, for example, “Like the best blues and jazz artists, he enacts melancholic yet melioristic indictments of misery without concealing the wounds inflicted or promising permanent victory.”96 The prophetic spirit for West is not only an expression of the horrors of the world, it is also a rousing call to justice. “To prophesy,” he writes, “is not to predict an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils.”97 It is in this role that West reminds us that we hold up crucial principles of social justice in the United States yet fail to live up to them. Perfection is not possible; West knows from Reinhold Niebuhr that man may be moral, but society is inevitably immoral. Yet in that immoral society there must be a prophetic voice to chastise us—indeed, to condemn us—and never permit our immoral society the excuse of original sin. The prophets’ condemnation of their societies seems to us extravagant; were things really that bad or did they have unrealistically high standards, as Kenneth Seeskin has asked.98 For Heschel— and West, in this respect, is his disciple—the exaggerated prophetic response is a sign of the passion that the prophet brings by viewing human beings from God’s perspective. Heschel writes, “The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?”99 West reminds his readers that “The black church tried to hold together both the dignity and depravity of persons in such a way that God—like Yahweh with the children of Israel—identifies with the disinherited and downtrodden, yet even the disinherited and downtrodden are sinners in need of conversion and sanctification.”100