The Anatomy of ‘White Guilt’

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jackson-Sow, “Whiteness as Guilt,” 115.

2 Ibid., 115.

3 See Ikuta, “On the Uses of Acknowledgment for Injustice: Disavowal and Deflection in Baldwin’s Thought,” 435-456.

4 See Bright, “White Psychodrama”; Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism.

5 This follows the method of inquiry in Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame”.

6 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms”.

7 Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 157.

8 McIvor, Mourning in America: Mourning and the Politics of Race,. xii

9 Clemons, “From ‘Freedom Now!’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’: Retrieving King and Randolph to Theorize Contemporary White Antiracism,” 5.

10 Shulman, “Acknowledgment and Disavowal as an Idiom for Theorizing Politics,” 11.

11 Executive Order 13,950. “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” 60685.

12 Ibid., 60684.

13 Ibid., 60685.

14 Executive Order 13,950. “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” 60683.

15 Brown, “Political Idealization and its Discontents,” 28.

16 Executive Order 13,950, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” 60683.

17 Ibid.

18 See Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms”; Klein, “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt.”

19 Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience, 44.

20 Ibid., 54.

21 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” 9.

22 Segal, “From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and after: Socio-political Expressions of Ambivalence,”131.

23 See Caflisch, “When Reparation is Felt to Be Impossible: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race.”

24 Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 66-67.

25 McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, 176.

26 McIvor, “The Cunning of Recognition: Melanie Klein and Contemporary Political Theory,” 251.

27 McIvor, Mourning in America, 26

28 Segal, Melanie Klein, 127.

29 See Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience; Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and Psychoanalytic Dialogue.

30 Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience, 80

31 McIvor, “The Struggle of Integration: James Baldwin and Melanie Klein in the

Context of Black Lives Matter,” 84.

32 Moss, “On Having Whiteness,” 358.

33 See Alford, Melanie Klein & Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory.

34 See Spinner-Halev, “From Historical to Enduring Injustice”.

35 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 195.

36 Coates, “Racial Hegemony, Globalization, Social Justice,” and Anti-Hegemonic

Movements’, 320.

37 Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender and Implicit Understanding, 73.

38 Ahmed, “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 159.

39 Bright, “White Psychodrama,” 12.

40 Ibid., 12.

41 Caflisch, “When Reparation is Felt to Be Impossible,” 579.

42 See Klein, “On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt”.

43 See Klein, “Envy and Gratitude”.

44 Caflisch, “When Reparation is Felt to Be Impossible,” 585.

45 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,”10.

46 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 9.

47 Ibid., 9.

48 Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind, 23-24.

49 Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 469.

50 Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” 130; see Caflisch, “When Reparation is Felt to Be Impossible: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race” for a complementary interpretation.

51 Steele, “White Guilt,” 503.

52 Ibid., 498.

53 Ibid., 504.

54 Moss, “On Having Whiteness”, 368.

55 McIvor, “The Cunning of Recognition,” 252.

56 Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind, 82.

57 Ibid., 83.

58 Segal, Melanie Klein, 127.

59 See Klein, “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States”.

60 See McIvor, Mourning in America.

61 See Alford, Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation.

62 See Alford, Melanie Klein & Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory.

63 Alford, “Melanie Klein and the ‘Oresteia Complex’: Love, Hate, and the Tragic

Worldview,” 175.

64 Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience, 73.

65 Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital, 6.

66 Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, 131-132.

67 Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 2.

68 See Flanagan, How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures.

69 Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, 42.

70 Clemons, “From ‘Freedom Now!’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’,” 3.

71 Ikuta, “On the Uses of Acknowledgment for Injustice,” 436. Ikuta persuasively argues, however, that these works are based upon a faulty assumption that acknowledgment automatically produces action in response.

72 DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, 137-138.

73 Ibid., 141.

74 Ibid., 143.

75 Ibid., 146.

76 Ibid., 149.

77 Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique.

78 Schiff, “Confronting Political Responsibility: The Problem of Acknowledgment.” 113.

79 Laubender, “Beyond Repair: Interpretation, Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical

Play-Technique,” 65.

80 Mills, The Racial Contract, 3.

81 Mills, “Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness,” 48-49.

82 Mills, The Racial Contract, 107.

83 Mills, “Theorizing Racial Justice”.

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Stephen Cucharo

Stephen Cucharo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include psychoanalysis and politics, modern political thought, fascist political thought, Marx and Marxism, and theories of responsibility. He is the recent author of “Justice Beyond Repair: Negative Dialectics and the Politics of Guilt and Atonement”, published in Contemporary Political Theory in 2021. His dissertation “Guilt and the Modern Subject: Lawfulness, Solidarity, and Action” reads guilt as a political emotion against the dominant interpretations set forth by Nietzsche and Freud. Email: [email protected]