The Racist Within

Abstract

This article demonstrates the author’s psychoanalytic method of pursuing racism’s various forms, functions, and locations, including within himself, a person of color. It argues that to disrupt racism on any level, we must realize the unconscious motivations every individual has to actively engage in racist ideology. This is due to racism’s malevolent efficiency to articulate and structure experiences, such as threat and enjoyment, for both the individual and the group. The paper uses clinical vignettes to show the value of theorizing interdisciplinarily to accurately portray the complexity, contradictions, and intractability of racism’s manifestations. It claims that addressing the questions racism poses requires first articulating the particularity of one’s active psychic attachment to what racist process provides.

Keywords:

• Unconscious
• racecraft
• internal racism
• contradiction
• anti-racist
• children
• child psychoanalysis

Notes

1 Here and subsequently, I use the term thought, as in racist thought, in Kleinian/Bionian fashion, blurring the divide between emotion and cognition (see Spillius 1988).

2 Patients supplied written consent to use clinical information and I have further added disguise to protect privacy.

3 Previously, I studied the functions of phantasied attachments to relatively famous distant others. I termed these celebrity objects (Reynoso 2012, 2013, 2016).

4 Elsewhere, I’ve discussed the unconscious hatred in the racialized affection of sports fans’ idolization of professional athletes (2014, 2018).

5 Though the majority of sexual violence in the United States is committed by White men (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence), racecraft is used to morally degrade men of color as feared hypersexualized sexual predators.

6 I have discussed the inherent exploitative, racist and misogynist aspects of being a sports fan, including reflecting on my own racism and misogyny (2014, 2019).