Our psychoanalysis indict means you should be skeptical of ALL their claims-they hyperbolize for political reasons

(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.