We Have Never Been White: Afropessimism, Black Rage, and What The Pandemic Helped me Learn About Race (and Psychoanalysis)

Abstract

Amidst a pandemic and the events following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, discussions of race have escalated in the psychoanalytic community. One theoretical formulation, Afropessimism, has served as a lightning rod across both psychoanalytic and academic circles. Another, Black Rage, offers a psychoanalytic theory of the psychic effect of racial oppression on traumatized subjects. Using both as catalysts, this essay explores the historicity of the questions raised by the racial unrest of the pandemic–-the deep embedding of questions of race and Blackness in unconscious prehistories of modernity, the human, and our understanding of our social worlds.

Keywords:

• Afropessimism
• Black Rage
• racism
• Caribbean history and culture
• pandemic
• George Floyd
• historicity
• In Treatment
• Blackness
• mental representation
• relational psychoanalysis

Notes

1 See the Lacan/Fanon track at: https://www.psychologyandtheother.com/conference-2021-schedule.

2 See https://www.laplancheinthestates.com/.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity.

4 The phrase we have never been white references Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991). Latour, while never explicitly naming whiteness as such, describes the founding values of modernity as myths that ground our contemporary notions of subjectivity, history, truth, and knowledge.

5 In her first footnote, Wynter explains her use of epigraphs as tools in the exercise of trying to think beyond our current moment–-as “guide-quotes” or “guideposts” used “to orient the reader as the Argument struggles to think/articulate itself outside the terms of the disciplinary discourses of our present epistemological order” (2003, p. 331).

6 Wynter, following Fanon (1986), calls this sociogeny “our collective authorship of our contemporary order” (p. 317), which we make opaque to ourselves over time, as “the empirical fact of our ongoing production and reproduction of our order, of its genre of being human, its mode of consciousness of mind” (p. 307). Psychoanalysis could be seen as a method with which to restore our faith in the possibility of gaining new historical self-awareness and an understanding of each individual’s creative role in making history–-in other words, creating a linkage between the personal self and the historical self (Rankine 2014).

7 In one sense, Las Casas was the victor because he won the argument that the indigenous could not be enslaved on the basis of the fact that they fit within a Christian conception of the human. In another sense, however, he lost because his antagonist’s argument would become the frame for defining the otherness of the very population Las Casas argued could take the place of the indigenous in providing enslaved labor for the Spanish colonial system, the transplanted Black African. Las Casas believed that Africans who were enslaved and trafficked by the Portuguese were under just title–-that is, bonded labor captured from the bondage systems already in effect within Africa, as opposed to enslaved on the basis of a notion of human difference in the system of plantation slavery about to be transported to the New World (Clayton 2009). It was this notion of enslavement based on a fundamental difference that Sepúlveda was in the process of articulating in his debate with Las Casas.

8 Sinthome here is used in the rigorously Lacanian sense, as neither the social signifier nor the personal imago that can be analyzed, but rather as the way in which each subject enjoys his or her own unconscious reality–-the less analyzable psychic aspects of the subject’s jouissance (Lacan 2016).

9 Ahmed (2004) discusses “six different modes for declaring whiteness used within academic writing, public culture, and government policy, arguing that such declarations are non-performative: they do not do what they say.” These are: (1) “I/we must be seen to be white”; (2) “I am/we are racist”; (3) “I am/we are ashamed by my/our racism”; (4) “I am/we are happy (and racist people are sad)”; (5) “I/we have studied whiteness (and racist people are ignorant)”; (6) “I am/we are coloured (too).”

10 This is itself a symptom of the disruptions of the pandemic, since the encounter is made possible by the fact that Brooke is seeing patients from her home, and Colin, in his own inebriated state, comes to her home after hours.

11 https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=984&t=44559.

12 https://reference.yourdictionary.com/other-languages/creole-words.html.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle A. Stephens

Michelle A. Stephens is the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey.