Abstract
Psychoanalysts assert that when wrongs have been done to others the impulse to apologize and forgive is natural, although in reality efforts toward interpersonal and social repair are often frustrated. This chapter assesses current debates on reparations for African Americans, applying psychoanalytic ideas to account for American resistance to engage in a process of reconciliation. Contemporary authors claim that racial repair requires a moral and ethical acknowledgment of and responsibility for harms committed to African Americans. This chapter demonstrates, in addition, reparations as a psychological necessity. Racism, however, emphasizing the reality of racial difference, continues, as always, to serve as a powerful defense thwarting the reparative impulse. The result has been the securing of physical separation between Whites and Blacks and the persistence of psychic enmeshment. Absent the implementation of a politics of reparations, African Americans will never achieve externality, or independence, from the White mind.
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling….Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way.
—James Baldwin,The Fire Next Time
Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Re-publication of an article originally appearing in Political Psychology 38, 4 (2017): 637–651.
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Notes
- 1.
There is a long and controversial history, beginning with Freud himself and extending to Critical Theorists as Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others who have linked an interpersonal psychoanalysis with social critique. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1930), acknowledges the epistemological challenges posed by this gambit from the interpersonal to the collective. In this essay, he asserts the challenges faced by society when forced to powerfully repress both sexual and aggressive instincts inherent in the individuals who comprise it. Freud concludes it remains an unsettled question whether the forces of love and eros might successfully counter the increasing dominance of thanatal forces of hatred and aggression. Freud (1930) does not shy away from social analysis based upon his original discoveries of individual psychology. Only by evaluating the usefulness and truthfulness of the analysis, he argues, can one assess psychodynamics’ utility for sociology. In that spirit, my analysis proceeds. Does a careful application of psychodynamic evidence to these group processes yield insights and understandings that otherwise would be missed?
- 2.
Freud (1961), in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” describes unconscious guilt as “moral masochism.” He discusses the challenge to demonstrate to a patient the presence of “an unconscious sense of guilt.” “We may,” Freud (1961) writes, “give up the term ‘unconscious sense of guilt’, which is in any case psychologically incorrect, and speak instead of a ‘need for punishment’, which covers the observed state of affairs just as aptly.” (p. 166).
- 3.
In “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud (1961) makes clear that unconscious guilt or moral masochism, unlike conscious conscience, activates libidinal or Oedipal ties to parental figures. Unconscious guilt, when mobilized, represents a regression to sexualized ties and the evocation of loving feelings to those upon whom one needs (p.169–170).
- 4.
Pierre Bourdieu in Masculine Domination (1991), makes a similar point in reference to his challenge of analyzing gender relations. He writes, “being included, as man or woman, in the object that we are trying to comprehend, we have embodied the historical structures of the masculine order in the form of unconscious schemes of perception and appreciation. When we try to understand masculine domination we are therefore likely to resort to modes of thought that are the product of domination (p.5).” This difficulty is no less the case when assessing American racial domination. Black and White, in America, do not exist as categories of analysis independently of the racist conviction in the separateness and difference between Blacks and Whites. In this regard, they are thoroughly relational terms describing a hierarchical social relationship of domination, nothing essential to the people themselves.
- 5.
US federal law The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the United States government during World War II. Monetary payments were paid to each surviving internee. 82,000 individuals received redress checks. With respect to Indians, the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946 was established to adjudicate claims made by Indians to the US Government. Certain tribes succeeded in receiving large money judgments, the ICCA was a disappointment to most claimants. It defined its own mandate very narrowly, relied heavily on technical procedural rulings, and claimed monetary compensation as the only form of reparations. Only financial claims were considered while broadly defined moral claims for redress were nullified (see Newton 1993).
- 6.
US Assemblyman John Conyers, in 1989 and every year since has introduced into a bill concerning reparations for African Americans. The Bill does not call for reparations but for a commission “to examine the impact of the nation’s 250 years of slavery, and the discrimination that followed, on living Americans. The commission would suggest remedies” (Bogira 2019). The Bill has never gotten out of committee and brought to the full House.
- 7.
“Implicit bias is the bias in judgment and/or behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes (e.g. implicit attitudes and implicit stereotypes) that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control. The underlying implicit attitudes and stereotypes responsible for implicit bias are those beliefs or simple associations that a person makes between an object and its evaluation that ‘are automatically activated by the mere presence (actual or symbolic) of the attitude object” (Dovidio et al. 2002, p. 62).
- 8.
See the recommendations by the Economic Policy Institute report “Black-White Wage Gaps Expand with Rising Wage Inequality,” September 20, 2016 (Wilson and Rogers) calling for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to work with organizations directly engaged in the education, workforce development, and employment of African Americans to identify the ‘unobservable measures’ that impact the Black-White wage gap.
- 9.
In a speech to the nation on July 8, 2016, Obama declared “there are biases, some conscious and unconscious, that have to be rooted out.” For a classic statement concerning unconscious racism in the law, see Charles R. Lawrence III, “The Id, the Ego and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism,” Stanford Law Review 39 (1987): 317–388.
- 10.
Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparations [1988],” Love, Guilt and Reparations and Other Works 1921–1945, Virago Press, 1988, pgs. 312–313. See also Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, “Psychological Repair: The Intersubjective Dialogue of Remorse and Forgiveness in the Aftermath of Gross Human Rights Violations,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 63:1085–1123.
- 11.
The imposition of Jim Crow laws expressed the intent to separate the White body, perfect and free of imperfections, from the Black body, imperfect and soiled. Its aim was to ensure that White and Black bodies do not touch, nor that bodily fluids should intermingle. Toilets, drinking fountains, swimming pools, public seating, barber and beauty shops, and cemeteries all became legally segregated. The laws were enactments, expressing at its core the struggle by Whites to experience themselves as “civilized,” shorn of their “savage nature.”. All other features become channeled into the contaminated, dangerous and different—soiled—Black skin and body.
- 12.
Complaints about micro-aggressions demonstrate the denial of respect and dignity as felt experiences by members of the Black community. There are many examples offered to expose the fact that for Whites the Black body is fair game for intrusion. African Americans are perceived as subjective extensions of the White mind. On college campuses, Black students report typical encounters of White students casually invading personal space by touching their hair without permission. Elsewhere, “Driving while Black” and “stop and frisk” police actions are instances too of the ease with which Whites feel entitled, perhaps even laced with sadistic pleasure, to invade personal privacy and autonomy. These examples serve as instances of the refusal of American Whites to have established Blacks as external and separate from the White imagination.
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to the encouragement and thoughtful responses to those who have read earlier versions: Nick Bartlett, Marcus Hunter, Arno Mayer, Maria Lymberis, Juliet Rogers, Debora Silverman and Alexander Stein. Thanks, too, to my Research Assistant, Markus Hicks.
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Prager, J. (2020). Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations. In: Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_5
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