Psychoanalytic explanations for whiteness are ahistorical/offer no evidence

(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.