Turn - The 1AC is a rejection of assimilation which allows for frameworks to interrogate how race is used as an object

Freud’s theory of melancholia provides a provocative model to consider how processes of assimilation work in the United States and how the depression that characterizes so much of our contemporary culture at the turn of this century might be thought about in relation to particularly marked social groups. In the United States today, assimilation into mainstream culture for people of color still means adopting a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class family values—often foreclosed to them. The loss of these norms—the reiterated loss of whiteness as an ideal, for example—establishes one melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization processes in the United States precisely as a series of failed and unresolved integrations. Let us return for a moment to Freud’s (1917) essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he attempts to draw a clear distinction between these two psychic states through the question of “successful” and “failed” resolutions to loss. Freud reminds us at the start of this essay that “[m]ourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition” (p. 243). Mourning, unlike melancholia, is a psychic process in which the loss of an object or ideal occasions the withdrawal of libido from that object or ideal. This withdrawal cannot be enacted at once; instead, it is a gradual letting go. Libido is detached bit by bit so that, eventually, the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to invest in new objects. In Freud’s initial definition of the concept, melancholia is pathological precisely because it is a mourning without end. Interminable grief is the result of the melancholic’s inability to resolve the various conflicts and ambivalences that the loss of the loved object A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia 671  or ideal effects. In other words, the melancholic cannot “get over” this loss—cannot work out this loss in order to invest in new objects. To the extent that ideals of whiteness for Asian Americans (and other groups of color) remain unattainable, processes of assimilation are suspended, conflicted, and unresolved. The irresolution of this process places the concept of assimilation within a melancholic framework. Put otherwise, mourning describes a finite process that might be reasonably aligned with the popular American myth of immigration, assimilation, and the melting pot for dominant white ethnic groups. In contrast, melancholia describes an unresolved process that might usefully describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. This suspended assimilation—this inability to blend into the “melting pot” of America—suggests that, for Asian Americans, ideals of whiteness are continually estranged. They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal. In configuring assimilation and melancholia in this particular manner, it is important to challenge Freud’s contention that melancholia ensues from a “pathological disposition”—that it emerges from the disturbance of a one-person psychology rather than the disruption of an intersubjective relationship. In our model, the inability to “get over” the lost ideal of whiteness, we must emphasize, is less individual than social. For instance, Asian Americans are typically seen by the mainstream as perpetual foreigners based on skin color and facial markings. Despite the fact that they may be U.S.-born or despite however long they may have resided here, Asian Americans are continually perceived as eccentric to the nation. At other times, Asian Americans are recognized as hyper “model minorities”— inhumanly productive—and hence pathological to the nation. In both scenarios, mainstream refusal to see Asian Americans as part and parcel of the American “melting pot” is less an individual failure to blend in with the whole than a socially determined interdiction. Indeed, Freud (1917) suggests in “Mourning and Melancholia” that melancholia may proceed from “environmental influences” (p. 243) rather than internal conditions that threaten the existence of the object or ideal. Freud (1917) goes on to delineate the debilitating psychic consequences of melancholia. When faced with unresolved grief, he tells us, the melancholic preserves the lost object or ideal by incorporating it into the ego and establishing an ambivalent identification with it—ambivalent precisely because of the unresolved and conflicted nature of this forfeiture. From a slightly different perspective, we might say that the melancholic makes every conceivable effort to retain the lost object, to keep it alive within the domain of the psyche. However, the tremendous costs of maintaining this ongoing relationship to the lost object or ideal are psychically damaging. Freud (1917) notes that the “distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (p. 244). In identifying with the lost object, the melancholic is able to preserve it but only as a type of haunted, ghostly identification. That is, the melancholic assumes the emptiness of the lost object or ideal, identifies with this emptiness, and thus participates in his or her own selfdenigration and ruination of self-esteem. Freud (1917) summarizes the distinction between mourning and melancholia in this oft-quoted remark: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (p. 246). He contends that melancholia is one of the most difficult of psychic conditions both to confront and to cure, as it is largely an unconscious process. “In yet other cases,” Freud observes, one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of the kind occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him [p. 245]. Freud tells us that the depression often accompanying melancholia is extremely dangerous, characterized by the tendency to suicide (p. 252). Here, we must add, suicide may not merely be physical; it may also be a psychical erasure of one’s identity—racial, sexual, or gender identity, for example.