Abstract
How can psychoanalytic theory help make sense of the social and psychic dimensions of white supremacy? This paper seeks to make sense of the relationships between identity, privilege, and oppression among white Americans. Drawing on decades of social science and psychoanalytic work on race and racism, it argues that the normativity and invisibility of whiteness is integral to the ego identity of white Americans. The cohesion of this internal identity becomes threatened by any challenge to this invisibility, resulting in an inverted internal identification with oppression and privilege.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks are owed for the development of this project. To Beverly Stoute and the race and psychoanalysis class at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, for planting a seed in the difficult task of encountering ourselves together; to Lene Austad and the 2018 Psychoanalysis and Politics Conference, for the opportunity to germinate a messy first draft and valuable feedback; to the reviewer whose thoughtful critique and encouragement gave this paper roots; and finally to the editors whose invitations to further development and unending patience allowed me to shape the project into a more current moment. I'm not sure this paper could have existed without the Black Lives Matter movement and the generations of black voices which came before and continue to call for a liberatory consciousness.
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Steele, J. Fear of blackness: Understanding white supremacy as an inverted relationship to oppression. Psychoanal Cult Soc 26, 388–404 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-021-00214-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-021-00214-8