Be skeptical of psychoanalytic explanations for racism- they lack critical rigor and repackage anecdotes as universal laws

(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.