The House of Difference, or White Silence

Abstract

In this article I track three ways of confronting the question of whiteness and its attendant problematic of racism. I look at two personal episodes one involving inheritances from white explorer forebearers and the place of racism in fetishized objects and second in the institutional difficulties within psychoanalysis in finding ways to speak about race and the dilemma of being a beneficiary of racism. Finally I look at the hidden racism in a much lauded psychoanalytic article, Joan Riviere's (1929) “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” and in the light of these three problems speculate on “whiteness.” I argue that the intergenerational transmissions of guilt and disavowal together leave a blank psychic space that makes an authentic expression of racial consciousness and genuine reparation currently difficult and certainly, even if well intentioned, partially compromised.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This article was developed from a paper presented at the 10th conference at Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Race as a Social Construction, Washington, DC, April 17, 2004.

Notes

¹“Subaltern” is the term postmodern cultural critics have coined to describe the particular position of a contemporary colonial subject, that is, a subject often fragmented by time (migration) and space, dislocated from tradition and community, and forced to speak and function in a distinctly hybrid form. Bhabha makes of this subaltern state both the occasion of alienation and for resistance.

²Work estimated over 4,700 lynchings from the period 1882–1968 with 2,500 occurring before 1900 (Zangrando, 1980).

³In many accounts of the melancholic impact of failing to meet ideals of whiteness is the sense of damage entailed in a failure of mimesis or mirroring of cultural standards. I think actually there is another perspective on this worth detailing. There is a way to see the distinction between pure mirroring and mimesis with a difference in which it is the latter that offers potential for development and transformation. It is from the perspective of chaos theory. From that theoretical vantage point a mirroring self-same relation is actually a pathological formation. A rigidly replicating system is a morbid system. A fully exhaustive mirroring is actually a kind of terrifying form of interpellation, a process whereby the state or the hegemonic ideology or dominant formation enter and fully inhabit subjects. The distinction between self-same and self-similar then becomes a crucial one because in the structure self-similar is a gap, a point of enigma and uncertainty, a kind of potentially vitalizing nonexhaustive partial identification.

In chaos theory, the concept of strange attractors is one in which difference is the site of growth, health, flexibility. It is also the site of resistance, refusal, rebellion. Here is where Lorde's house of difference, echoed in the work of Du Bois, Lott, and others, might be constituted.

⁴This idea is indebted to an online discussion of masculinity led by Ken Corbett for International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in February 2005. The anxiety in addressing deconstructing masculinity as a general category must be read differently for black and white subjects. But some anxiety with regard to masculinity as protected, privileged space may light on all members of this category.