Their distinctions to dodge the link are silly

(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)

Moss’ central thesis is that being white or having the properties of whiteness is a parasitic affliction that is inherently pathological, “a way of being” (p. 356) with “no cure,” where hatred, epistemological entitlement, superiority, and the need to dominate all other non-white peoples based on difference and otherness is present “at birth” (p. 358), as it “infiltrates our drives early on” (p. 356) in “infancy” (p.357). Although Moss offers a nebulous disclaimer that Whiteness is not the same as being phenotypically white, since Whiteness is an inherent property of being white, his distinction is unconvincing at best if not indefensible—as phenomenal properties cannot be independent from their ontological source, only the way in which they appear. For Moss they appear “as a condition one first acquires and then has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility” (pp. 355– 356). He further states this condition is “foundational,” hence essential and deterministic to a baby’s sense of being, which is acquired after coming out of the womb instantiated as the pulsional desire to dominate, enslave, and exploit others without scruple. On face value, the claim is absurd. Contrasting Whiteness with whiteness is an ontic distinction without ontological difference (as an ordinal property of a property) and is itself incitive. Whiteness is a synecdoche for racism, something Moss confusingly asserts is at once socially acquired, presumably through the attachment system, and inherent to white people as part of their embodied thrownness.4 Instead of using a parasitic metaphor, he concretizes it as if it were an infectious medical disease that is uniquely susceptible to whites when psychoanalysis has long identified prejudice to be a universal human proclivity.