Their psychoanalytic explanations simply invert past racism

(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.