Stemming the Flow: Racism in White America

The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity 

—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1920

 

Deep within the Earth it is so hot that some rocks slowly melt and become a thick flowing substance called magma. Since it is lighter than the solid rock around it, magma rises and collects in magma chambers. Eventually, some of the magma pushes through vents and fissures to the Earth’s surface. Magma that has erupted is called lava. … If magma is thick and sticky, gasses cannot escape easily. Pressure builds up until the gasses escape violently and explode.” 

—United States Geological Survey

An ominous, destructive force, a social “MAGmA” is oozing and lapping its way across the American landscape. It is spreading out indiscriminately, its ash creating a fog world where what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is a lie become merged and indistinguishable from one another. In Yeats’s  words, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” 

MAGmA’s tidal force in the United States may be impossible to stop and may take a very long time to recover from. As a psychoanalyst I would suggest it is evidence that the United States is a group that is failing to contain the split-off and has evacuated parts of its members. 

In this essay I argue that one of the many causes of this phenomenon is the ways in which white Americans—in particular, white liberal Americans—perversely disavow the ubiquity of internalized and structural racism. By white liberal American, I am referring to the group of white Americans for whom being racist is most ego-dystonic, who are most likely to be ashamed of their racism and most likely to seek to disidentify with racist intentions and wishes. A psychoanalytic perspective promotes awareness of oneself that includes the parts of ourselves that we hate and that are frightening or disturbing; the parts of ourselves that don’t match up with our ideal image of goodness. A number of psychoanalysts and writings about race have argued persuasively that racism against people of color is ubiquitous among white people, that it is in many ways definitional to being white in America. They have suggested that racism acts like a perversion enabling us a forbidden source of satisfaction which is derived from having a sense of domination over others. But many who are white American liberals aren’t convinced. Either we protest this idea openly or agree but allow it to slip out of our minds.

The recent backtracking by many universities and corporations on DEI initiatives that had been created and/or encouraged following the murder of George Floyd is evidence on a societal scale of the lack of conviction among white people who are ostensibly anti-racist. This lack of conviction, to my mind, reveals an unconscious wish to maintain a status quo built on racist fantasies. In either case, within institutions or within individuals, racism gets projected outward.

But where does it go? Projecting racism outward requires someone or some group primed to receive the unwanted “split-off” parts, by virtue of their vulnerability with respect to their psychology, their situation, or relative lack of power. These off-gassed parts fill the unoccupied cavities of a society’s shadowy realms. The pressure builds until it “pushes through vents and fissures” those parts of our society that, through willful neglect, have been allowed to rot, to come apart at the seams. So then who better than the white working class, a group whose economic and cultural needs have been increasingly ignored, dismissed, devalued, and othered by those who identify as white liberals as embodied by the Democratic party? 

 The word “woke” has come to represent something cartoonishly performative, a condescending attitude of being holier-than-thou and of knowing better. But, just like the dismantling of DEI efforts at many institutions, just like electing an openly racist white man to the presidency following the country’s first Black president, and just like the brutality of Jim Crow laws following the criminalization of slavery in all of the US, enemies of anti-racist efforts seek to remove their bite, their urgency, and the courage involved in making them by caricaturing and libeling them. However, the richness and multiplicity of the word and its variations are essential to making societal shifts in taking on unconscious adherence to racism that is ubiquitous among white people. Take the impact of the murder of George Floyd as an example. For many white people, viewing the video footage of a white policeman unhurriedly and unabashedly murdering a Black man in front of a group of Black witnesses while the victim cried for his mother woke them from a self-induced slumber. In the wake of this event, many of us awakened to the living nightmare that people of color experience on a daily basis in the US. And like mourners at a wake, many of us, perhaps for the first time, gazed at the dead body of a Black man, a mother’s son, murdered by a white policeman. As Freud told us in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), to mourn we must contend with our fantasies of murdering the dead, with enjoying the triumph of being the one who has lived. Many white people, in that pivotal moment, saw with horror and shame the racist murderer in ourselves. Many of us recognized the need to unblinkingly face the people we kill by our complicity in a racist system, a system that could make such an unabashed murder possible. Many of us started a long-overdue process of mourning the devastating impact of our complicity, of the ways we enact our own nightmares, creating a nightmare for an Other.

But such tectonic cultural shifts generate great volatility. As we see in psychoanalytic treatments, every step toward greater self-awareness, toward mourning the damage and pain one has wrought, is met with a counter-resistance of corresponding or, perhaps more frequently, greater intensity. Seeing the white community as a group, as a multifaceted organism, the surfacing of taboo unconscious wishes and impulses would be expected to create such a violent counter-resistance. And this has come to pass. 

The resistance is more apparent in those who are unashamed of their explicit racism, like the prototypical wealthy white couple in polo shirts and khakis wielding their assault rifles at people—many of them people of color peacefully protesting for racial equity while daring to walk by their suburban home. But it is also present, perhaps more perniciously so, in those of us who attempt to fight racism, those who actively try to contribute, to be allies in creating a safer and more fair world for people of color, or in those of us who are unwilling to keep in mind the omnipresence of their own racism.

In the face of seemingly inevitable destructiveness, we can feel ourselves losing conviction to address this destructiveness—one which has its origins in our own minds and hearts. It is of urgent importance now to form an emotional wall against the impact of this destructive resistance. This wall would be fortified by the reclaiming of the internalized racism and other forms of murderous othering that is unconscious and disowned. It is a basic Freudian tenet that the ego is strengthened when what is unconscious and forbidden becomes conscious, becomes available for examination. If we wish to have the strength, the conviction, to stem the flow of the MAGmA, we must recognize how our unconscious desires contribute to society’s racism.