The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: On the State's Legitimation of Juneteenth and Liberal Concessions as Political Anesthetization In Slavery's Afterlives

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Joshua Briond

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched[...] In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.”

—James Baldwin

On Thursday, June 17th, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. According to CNN, the holiday will become the first federal law holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983. Ultimately, the bill will allow a fragment of the nations’ surplus populations —excluding much of the largely racialized lumpenproletariat and underclass— a day ‘free’ from the capitalist exploitation and alienation that comes with the traditional day-to-day of the laboring class. The timing of the implementation of the national holiday—amidst rebellions, particularly in Minneapolis, in the aftermath of Winston Smith’s clearly politically-motivated, state-sanctioned assassination—cannot be understood as anything other than yet another attempt at anesthetizing the captive Black colonies in sentimentality and symbolic gestures. 

"this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. i, too, am the afterlife of slavery."

—saidiya hartman, lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route (2006)

The institution of Black slavery, that rendered Black captives as chattel, capital, productive property, was economically, culturally, and politically ubiquitous. Yet, despite its legacies and afterlives, there has been no material reckoning, or atonement for its anti-Black psychosexual and physical terror and violence. In fact, the ghosts of what is largely understood as slavery’s past, have continued to manifest in the economic polity, modern policing and prisons, and social, cultural, and ideological underpinnings, etc. Descendants of Black captives whom, in many ways, remain hyper-surveilled, overpoliced, hyper-exploited, underpaid, alienated, and often succumbed to occupation of our communities and premature death, have little-to-nothing to show for being major instruments in assembling and maintaining the global capitalist economy since we were trafficked to the Euro-Americas. But you are damn sure we have one month per year, and now an extra day, to learn about and hashtag-celebrate the most whitewashed and bleak articulations of Black historical events—events that have largely only taken place because of Black resistance to white terror, violence, and domination. 

“A critical genealogy of White Reconstruction requires close examination of the non-normative—nonwhite, queer, non-Christian, and so on—iterations of white supremacy within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Such non-normativities are constitutive of (rather than incidental or exceptional to) the protocols, planning, and statecraft of contemporary counterinsurgency/domestic war, extending and complicating rather than disrupting or abolishing the historical ensembles of anti-Black and racial-colonial state violence.” 

—Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction 

Since 1776 and the founding of the United States of America, the white power structure has been in a constant state of attempting to—arguably, at times, successfully—ideologically and politically sedate the most wretched, particularly the Black colonies, through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures while ultimately supplementing white rule. As Gerald Horne has taught us, this founding itself was brought into being after a successful power struggle against the British rulers to preserve the institution of Black slavery. As noted by Dylan Rodriguez in the epigraph above, and throughout his book White Reconstruction, the white settler-colonial state has had to “undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable.” This includes, but is not limited to, incremental (neo)liberal reform as sedation and the multicultural diversification of settler-colonial, surveillance-capitalist, and imperialist apparatuses.

If we are to understand the American project itself as a consequence of intra-European counterrevolution to preserve the institution of slavery. The civil war as described by Frederick Douglass, “[starting] in the interest of slavery on both sides[...]both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” The Reconstruction era as an attempt to establish a workers-democracy—in the aftermath of the countless slave revolts across North America and the Civil War ultimately ending chattel slavery—only to be defeated by ruling class forces. Jim Crow as an inevitability of the settler state and its individual deputized upholders’ idiosyncratic anxieties surrounding the collapsing synonymity of Blackness and the slave positionality. The Civil Rights Movement as an understandably decentralized reformist effort toward Black freedom, through attempts to expand the civil liberties of Black people within the American colony, co-existence with whites within the white power structure that became co-opted by the state ordained Black bourgeoisie and US intelligence leading to mild concessions. Then, we—as Black people—have to understand that we have been in an outright war of attrition with the white power structure for nearly half a millennium.

It is important to recontextualize major historical events — from the Civil War, to the crushing of the Reconstruction era, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of neoliberalism and the expansion of the carceral regimes posited as the solution to Black rebellion in the 1980s, to modern policing and prisons, etc. — are all distinct types of “reforms” to politically sedate Black surplus populations and sustain white settler-capitalist hegemony. 

In an interview at Howard University, Gerald Horne discusses the weakening and marginalization of Black radical independent institutions, publications, and leaders, such as Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, as a trade-off to disintegrate Jim Crow in return for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “other examples of legislation meant to chip away at Jim Crow.” Horne goes on to question whether the price for political “freedom,” in the electoral arena (which many Black radicals would argue, in the age of neocolonialism and pseudo-independence was never actually freedom) was substantial enough to warrant celebration as a form of Black progress without the economic infrastructure and self-determination needed for true liberation and justice. Just like in the 60s, as Horne notes, we are still performing uneven trade-offs with white power. We demand an end to police terror with Defunding the Police at the outset; they give us painted Black Lives Matter streets, while celebritizing, commodifying, and cannibalizing the names and faces of Black martyrs like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We demand healthcare, living wages, and erased student loans; they give us a federal holiday. In the post-Civil Rights era, and the state’s crushing of Black Power, there has been a depoliticization, if not outright assassination, of Black politics: all symbolism, uneven trade-offs, bare-minimum concessions, and identity reductionist representation as a substitute for actual Black power and self-determination. In the era of neo-colonialism, with the expansion and symbolic inclusion into the plantation economy through our coerced [lumpen]proletarization, we have been anesthetized to our continued exploitation, alienation, destruction, and genocide. Liberal multiculturalism, reform, or as I would call it, political anesthetization, at the very least, temporarily, has been able to halt the “problem” of black resistance.

“The understanding that modern policing has emerged out of the dreadful history of Black enslavement brings with it an urgent need to acknowledge what is not yet behind us. The plantation isn’t, as so many of us, Black and otherwise, think or at least wish to believe, a thing of the past; rather, the plantation persists as a largely unseen superstructure shaping modern, everyday life and many of its practices, attitudes, and assumptions, even if some of these have been, over time, transformed.”

- Rinaldo Walcott, “On Property” 

Though there has been a virtual erasing of our chains and the physical plantation (at least for those of us who are not “legally” incarcerated), the plantation economy has expanded and the mere logics and ideological production have remained the same: keep the slave(s) in check. The white power structure has always been concerned with keeping its thumb on the pulse of its slave population. There has been a non-stop, coordinated counterinsurgent effort by the white power apparatus to divert energy away from the inevitable radical potentialities of the slave, colonized, dispossessed, and superexploited classes—especially as capitalism’s contradictions become far too blatant to disguise. The marking of Juneteenth National Independence Day is just a continuation of the settler society’s legacy of empty promises and symbolic gestures to supplant material gains and maintain their hegemony. 

The United States is incapable of bringing about true justice or accountability for the crimes of its psychosexual and political economy beyond these hauntingly insulting and psychopathic attempts at state recognition of its own historical aberrations through moral symbolism. True justice and accountability must be avoided at all costs by this power structure, as this would inevitably expand the political imaginations of people, leading to the incrimination of every cop, soldier, politician, wall street hack, ceo, etc., and exposing itself for what it is: illegitimate and obsolete. Once you realize that all of the violence being exported everyday in and around the US are not individual aberrations that could be changed with a shift in political leadership, but an inevitable and continual outcome of superstructures built on and sustained through anti-Black slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, everything begins to make sense. It is liberatory. Heartbreaking. Infuriating, even. Because the solution becomes clear. It is the solution that everyone—whether subconsciously or not—is doing everything in their power to avoid coming to. It is the solution the United States and its propaganda networks spend billions of dollars every year to shield from the psyches of its captives. It is what Black captives in Haiti realized circa 1791, and are still being punished for ‘till this day. 

There is a special, psychopathic irony in the legitimation of Juneteenth through the colonial-capitalist state’s immortalizing of the liberation of the slaves through the very structural foundations in which said slaves were rendered productive property as captives, in which the legacies of slavery remain pervasive across social, cultural, political, and economic lineages. Not to mention the colonial and imperialist technologies inspired largely by the events of (anti-)Black slavery and colonialism, exported across the imperialized world for the purposes of land, capital, and resources—under the guise of (white) freedom and democracy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what is the state’s recognition of Juneteenth to its Black captives? To the Afro-Palestinians living under the world’s largest open-air prison on the United States’ dime? Or the slave-labor of mineral miners in the Congo supplying the U.S. resources? How can visualizations of Nancy Pelosi and Black lawmakers singing Lift Every Voice and Sing in ceremony for the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday—while actively rejecting Black organizers’ rallying cries that could improve Black people’s material conditions and save lives, such as Defunding the Police— signal anything other than yet another colonial lullaby to anaesthetize our dreams and efforts toward Black liberation and self-determination? While openly and unapologetically pledging their allegiance to multiculturalist white supremacy in the age of neocolonialism? 

“Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have, indeed, for so long and for so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing[...] This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of a historical record. In another way, this dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

—James Baldwin, 1965

Encoding Anti-Blackness: Castration In the Digital Age

By Kahlil Martin Wall-Johnson

Like the Senegalese street vendors that sell heart pins imprinted with all the common Spanish names, El Negro de WhatsApp has become available for any cause. Like the cards aisle at Safeway, better yet, you can customize him yourself. A single Google images search will provide you with a daily ration of his infinite reconfigurations. When the meme first emerged, I belonged to several WhatsApp groups (classmates, football team, etc.), in which I was usually the only non-Spaniard, and always the only person who claimed any Black ancestry. It began as a Bait and Switch prank; you receive an innocent URL pertaining to something of interest (the bait), then as soon you bite, the link redirects you to El Negro de WhatsApp (the switch).  The bait could also be an image, cropped in such a way that he is hidden until you scroll down. In the original prank, he stands before a dirt road in front of several crumbling cinder block structures. His wiry frame supports only three articles of clothing: a plaid bucket hat that shadows his eyes, a blue towel draped over his shoulders and a green fishnet tank top. His left hand is supporting his 18-inch, flaccid, veiny penis. In fact, the penis is not his at all, it was created thanks to photoshop, a quality of the image that is often overlooked. From coffee mug to Christmas cheer, El Negro de WhatsApp outgrew the category of prank before its first birthday to become “the biggest meme produced by social media culture in our country” [1].

One street vendor’s name was Ousmane. Like so many other Senegalese men, he sent money home to his family, whom he only saw once every several years. As he is the prototypical African immigrant in Spain, it is not a stretch to suggest a representational correspondence between Ousmane and El Negro de WhatsApp, cached in the phones of so many Spaniards. Might we ask; Who is the true butt of the joke, the Spaniard who takes the bait? Or the object of humor, standing before the recipient with a basket full of trinkets and a fake smile? Ousmane’s inventory ranged from lighters and chewing gum to exotic keepsakes such as carved elephants and cowry shell jewelry.  He always said “perfecto” when asked “como estás?”. It would appear that the Spaniards who pass him by are trafficking a keepsake of their own; the photoshopped African body.

When this image startles the pranked individual, a scramble ensues to exit the page - the circumstances hardly provide time for reflection. Whether or not it’s real is beside the point. As far as Fanon’s prelogical thought is concerned, The Negro of WhatsApp stands for the African immigrant, invader from the south, an external threat to Spanish national integrity. Hordes of young Africans are swimming north, across the Strait of Gibraltar. Mothers hide their daughters, bishops cross themselves, the newspapers cry rape. The province I was living in at the time is glorified as the place where the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula began. This, as well as its being the only region not conquered by the Moors, is a source of great micronationalistic pride for the local Asturians. “Asturias es España, lo demás es tierra conquistada” [Asturias is Spain, the rest is conquered land] goes the saying. They even claim celtic ancestry, along with lighter hair and eyes, than their lazy southern counterparts. It is said that Rey Pelayo, blessed by the Our Lady of Covadonga, started throwing rocks at the Moors in 718 ad. Pelayo remains one of the most common names in Asturias to this day. He might have to start throwing rocks again.

Upon my return to the United States a parallel fantasy was waiting for me, only differing from El Negro in that it was molded to North American representations of Blackness. You may know him as Wood Sitting on a Bed, or Huge Penis Guy. Vice Magazine describes him as “The Man Bigger than the Meme”[2]. The big Black American athlete, three hundred pounds of muscle staring at you, legs open. Dubbed the “hero of the pandemic” by Know-Your-Meme[3]. This time, the bait was often an irresistible yet unbelievable coronavirus update. The man in the image is the late Wardy G. Joubert III, now available on Covid-19 masks and Christmas socks.

The meme, in this case a symbolic instrument of white culture, exists for only a fraction of a second on the viewer’s screen. By its very ephemeral nature it defies contextualization, but white people didn’t start collecting Black nudes today. A chronology was needed to rescue these memes from the retrograde amnesia of cyberspace. How do you anchor something in time if most people only see it for half a second?  The first two chapters of David Marriott’s treatise On Black Men offer themselves as an eclectic meditation on the history of Black male genitalia in photography. A macabre genealogy threaded through three seemingly isolated events; the use of kodaks at the lynching scene, the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the souvenirs of Jeffery Dahmer’s homoerotic, cannablist, murderous exploits.  Sufficiently eclectic to beckon the meme.

Marriott links these events by suggesting that “looking is a form of incorporation, of taking something inside”[4],  and draws from Otto Fenichel’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the ocular system; “‘the eye’ Fenichel writes, ‘is conceived as an organ that robs and bites’”[5]. I intend to stretch this reading to include El Negro and Wood, symbols which are too crudely phallic to refrain from dabbling in the itineraries of classic psychoanalysis. Having agreed to humor this aspect of Marriott’s work, my intention is not so much to directly entertain psychoanalysis as to engage with said interpretation as a guiding metaphor, or ancestry test of sorts, in order to contextualize these memes. My reluctance to rely or dwell on the shock value of On Black Men’s content should also be admitted. In any case I hope the blood splatter will speckle the ahistorical and humorous scaffolds of the meme, as you will see it is not I who has worked the initial connection between art and assault, but Marriott himself.

Insofar as El Negro and Wood, prior to the incisions of Adobe Photoshop, were photographs, and as such, faithful to certain constricts of the real, it is only fitting to touch ground with the first turn-of-the-century mass-produced roll-film camera. In this regard, the ubiquity of Kodaks at the lynching scene attests to the predilection of the camera for the ravaged Black body. ”The photograph is there to be gazed at, and fingered, over and over again: Look at me, I was there”[6] infers Marriott, who italicizes the lynching scene as a site of castration; “White men, and women, demand a keepsake, a memento mori: toes, fingers, or - most highly prized - a black penis”[7]. The tradition of collecting these keepsakes, mutilated and transformed, has weathered the test of time. Lest we forget that El Negro de WhatsApp is the handiwork of a skilled digital surgeon. But why collect these keepsakes at all? Marriott meditates on the function that looking upon the Black body in such a way has for the white psyche as he likens the camera lens to a prosthetic organ - a peculiar means of self-fashioning by embedding oneself in the flesh.

Now we turn from the gala of the lynching scene to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the year is 1989. You stand before Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, a photograph of “a man, clad in leather, urinating into the mouth of another man” disrupts your field of vision[8]. Next you are confronted with images of a “trussed-up, lacerated scrotum and penis”[9]. Finally, you come across Mapplethorpe’s Black male nudes. “Sullen and heavy like the trunk of an elephant” muses a critic[10], as he describes Man in Polyester Suit; a photograph of a man’s waist, the Black penis “hanging, ‘veiny and pulpy’” from the pant zipper[11]. “So exotically weird” ...” inhuman, like some parasite species that has managed to graft itself on to the human form... The penis looks like an elephant's trunk, not really human at all, certainly not civilized.” writes a different observer[12]. These descriptions share an uncanny resemblance with those of El Negro de WhatsApp, whose fictitious genitalia were also dubbed elephantine - “un pene elefantiásico”- by El Confidencial[13]. The Museum goer (and prank recipient) suddenly finds that repulsion and attraction are not mutually exclusive. “How do you start to tell the difference between the two?” asks Marriott of the spectator struggling to separate disgust from desire[14].

This interplay is reminiscent of the pranked Spaniards and (white) Americans attempting to reconcile their homophobic values with a deep curiosity and intrigue in the Black body. How do we account for heterosexual men in two deeply homophobic cultures obsessing over artificially enlarged male genitalia? El Negro and Wood, two of the most circulated visual tropes today, happen to be stimuli few would admit to wanting to see. Does the recipient exit the page? Or does he inspect the goods? For Marriott, gazing intensely at an object implies an element of castration; “to incorporate, to eat, through the eyes; to want to look, and look again, in the name of appreciating and destroying, loving and hating.” are all part of the same process[15]. Exploiting this analogy to its fullest permits an interpretation of the photograph as the site at which this process of devouring and spitting out is recorded. The question that I intend to revisit is: what does this particular interpretation connote for software with the capacity to imperceptibly edit an image? But for now, what of Mapplethorpe “as a (white) man who cuts up bodies in the name of art”[16]? And of these photoshop specialists (presumably white) who cut up Black bodies in the name of humor? In this regard, On Black Men calls forth the violent history of the Black body and film; “‘the camera cuts away’” writes Marriott,” ‘like a knife, allowing the spectator to inspect the goods’”[17]. The reader cannot help but be reminded of the lynching spectator, to whom the camera offers itself as a means to cut something away and save it for later.

From this point on, whatever stood between figurative devouring of human flesh and actual cannibalism is thoroughly shaken, as the (white) serial killer, rapist, cannibal, and photographer Jeffery Dahmer is incorporated into our genealogy, an addition that Marriot admits, may appear to be outrageous. When a cache of Polaroids hidden in a drawer depicting “bodies naked and abed, ripped open and dismembered”, “images of scattered remains -- lungs, intestines, penises, livers and hearts”  was discovered by the Milwaukie Police Department of Wisconsin, it took the officers at hand several moments to conclude that the images were, in fact, real[18]. Dahmer’s surgical expertise in both photography and human anatomy, which he acquired in the military, lent a deeply unsettling, meticulous quality to his ineffably revolting obsession with the Black body. Marriott notes how his “bizarre ‘enshrinement and desecration’ also marks the aura of photographic memorabilia at lynching scenes” and, in considering the photographed bodies as “sliced open to the cruel yet determined gaze of a man”, he pushes us to consider how the perpetrator’s hands were no more guilty than his eyes[19]. “But was the best way of killing them to take their pictures; or the best way of picturing them to see them dead?”[20]. 

The chronicle of events developed by Marriott is somewhat at odds with Sadiya Hartman’s inclination to “illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle”[21]. While these distinct emphases are not incompatible, it would nonetheless appear that targeting an everyday artifact of internet culture aligns itself with a quotidian-oriented approach. In light of this concession it would be Marriott’s inclusion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s art that warrants any cross examination (or jumps) from his genealogy to our objects of concern. On this subject I should add that my account of On Black Men cannot possibly have done justice to Marriott’s synthesis of art, lynch mobs and serial killers. The point not to be missed here is that in all the events in which we have centered the Black man, the same organ is under siege, in much the same way.

The Well-Endowed Man and El Negro de WhatsApp images were first posted by the accounts misterflyy and aquastorm427, respectively. Assuming that the individuals behind these accounts are also the creators and editors of the original image, what can we say, for example, of aquastorm427 as they sat before the unedited original photo, freshly imported into Adobe Photoshop, mouse in hand, ready to cut and slice? Or of misterflyy, gazing, full of ideas at the original image with Photoshop’s surgical tool kit, prepared to sever and disfigure? As I asked before, where do these cyberspace anonymities laboring under the guise of humor, stand in comparison to Mapplethorpe as a man who slices bodies to produce art? If the camera is analogous to the eye, insofar as it “robs and bites and cuts into people” and the photograph to a relic on which this process is inscribed, then anatomically to which organs do we link Photoshop[22]?  Perhaps the mouth and hands that disembowel, transform and redetermine? The creation of these memes requires that the original image be castrated, the penis traced and staked out, then removed from the body and set aside in order to be enlarged and manipulated. The Black groin, in an act that reaches back centuries, is digitally castrated and helplessly returned, oversexed and rapacious, to the public eye, as fact.

It should be repeated that after the original bait and switch pranks began to circulate massively, the images have been subject to even more modifications and edits. In other words, the inflated Black penis, has since been extirpated from the already edited meme and inserted into an innumerable, and ever growing, amount of spin-off memes, similar pranks and merchandise. In this sense, the oversexed phallus of the captive body, now doubly castrated, has undergone a continuous process of distillation and abstraction. Fanon’s critique of Michel Cournot could equally have been meant for El Negro de WhatsApp. ”No longer do we see the black man; we see the penis: the black man has been occulted” he wrote[23]. Recalling how the bucket hat eclipses El Negro’s face, we see the Black man occulted once more.

“The object status of Blackness means that it can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories”[24]. Wood and El Negro are radio waves, bouncing off satellites just to make you squirm. I believe this has something to do with what Afropessimists have coined the fungibility of the Black; while being “substitutively dead”, it is also “passionately enabling”[25]. This helps to explain how the caricatured Black penis, now understood as “property of enjoyment”[26],  can be used to feel so many things; be it in its capacity to enable the avant-garde spectator of Mapplethorpe’s photography to be artistically pushed out of their comfort zone, to permitting Jeffery Dahmer to feel “oddly and humanly loved and alive.”[27], or to shock a friend with a text. In this line of thought, Matamoros-Fernández comments on how the “black male body in this meme is often transformed to humorously convey different emotions in everyday conversations on WhatsApp. White people can photoshop “El Negro de WhatsApp” with a shrunken penis and share the meme to express that the weather is cold, or commodify the same black body as an exaggerated reaction to the latest breaking news”[28]. Accordingly, the “limitless frequency” and “untold territories” that Wilderson writes of are even more relevant when we factor in the nature of cyberspace and the intensity with which these images are being modified and circulated. By anyone with a computer, they can be edited, cut, captioned and projected through space at light speed, eternally cached in the vast repository of the internet. “Liberated from time and space, belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking”[29].

To suggest that the operations, or mental behavior, that discern honesty from everything else occur at more than one level of consciousness bespeaks no allegiance to psychoanalysis. Photography presents itself as “preeminently a world of fact, not of dispute about facts or of conclusions to be drawn from them”[30]. The medium appears not to have been meddled with, an attribute that editing software subverts.  Assuming that a select few will consciously recognize these images as edits, it would be unwise to allege this recognition to all levels of consciousness. Afterall, how does fictitious photography fit into our previous representational schemata? The skilled Photoshop technician harnesses the polarized distinction between fictitious fabrication and photographic evidence. I find it timely to add that these two memes were not confirmed as edits until their metadata was run through Fotoforensics and their originals tracked down. In other words, there are no remnants of the operation that betray Wood or El Negro’s claim to the darkroom of evidence. Such software has the potential to be a smuggling route for dreams to enter the social imaginary as fact, a means to hide the creative process.  This sleight of hand universally disguises fantasies with unparalleled sophistication. After centuries of refining the act of disfiguring the Black man’s groin, European and American culture can sew him back together without leaving a trace of deadly fetishistic investment and compulsive fascination in, and with, the rhythm of Black physiology that lurks beneath the innocent facade of meticulously rearranged pixels. This helps to illuminate the violent element inherent to distorted representations in other mediums. When Black masculinity is hypersexualized by the orator, the writer, or the painter, the Black body still passes through the meat processor of cultural fantasy as these attributes are grafted onto the captive body. Here however, in the case of photoshop, this step is far more tangible as it is easily observed on the screen. 

The consequences for Black men of a rendezvous with a phobic image of themselves has as of yet been largely ignored, a question that sits as the primary concern of the introduction to On Black Men. Here Marriott engages at length with Baldwin and Fanon to remind us of how the Black man at grasp with these pranks is “both victim and spectator- spectator as victim” and signals the perils of surrendering to the screen[31]. If we pay heed to Fanon’s depiction of the Black psyche as “violently intruded upon and displaced by racial hatred and phobia” when considering the pranked Black individual[32], the situation of violent intrusion garners an additional layer. His guard is down, intrusion is then both literal (on the screen), and psychic. The reasons for which I have delayed addressing the dangers of the screen for Black people, as forewarned by Baldwin, is that said critique is primarily concerned with cinema, suffice to say a public viewing space. It is worth pointing out that while cyberspace offers a platform unprecedented in its capacity to harbor and disperse material of any kind, most Black people have no means of accessing, never mind negotiating, the content of non-Black chat rooms, or (WhatsApp) group chats.  Insofar as I have considered the ubiquitous utility of these memes a manifestation of fungibility, Frank Wilderson III comments on how “There is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process”[33]. This could be aptly used to reflect on the safe-from-scrutiny quality of non-Black virtual spaces. This would make el Negro and Wood slightly more akin to an inside joke than a publicly displayed stereotype of white culture, a distinction that in no way intends to disregard the experiences of the many Black people who have been (and will be) ambushed by the switch.

Yet another question laid down by Fanon is nabbingly relevant; “Is the Negro’s [sexual superiority] real? Everyone knows that it is not. But that is not what matters. The prelogical thought of the phobic has decided that such is the case”[34]. The capacity of editing software to refurbish rumor as fact renders Fanon’s argument somewhat dated, as he does not factor in (nor could he have) the malleability of the digital. His reflections on representations of Black men describe a time when the imago was reproduced through folklore, oral tradition, literature and cinema. Today the genital power of the Black man, “out of reach of morals and taboos”[35], is perjured by distorted pixels, sustained by photographic documentation, no longer relegated to the plane of prelogical phobia. 

While these pranks do point to the imperative of implementing regulatory, internal, digital platform policies, it would be nothing other than disrespectful to thinkers such as Fanon and Wilderson to suggest that the sexual demonization of Black men could be curtailed through a gesture as abstract as coded policy. Nonetheless, understanding how these representations are molded to the limitations and possibilities imposed by technology aids in paying heed to the “tremendous capacity for reconfiguration in the service of continued dominance” of anti-Blackness[36].  The bulk of the literature made use of here to examine these images operates within the premise that the libidinal economy of non-Black life and the biological vilification of the Black man are inextricable. Acknowledging an endorsement of the demise, however fabled it may be, of American and European culture as we know it is the only scenario that permits a meaningful condemnation of these particular representations, while still faithfully engaging with the aforementioned authors.

Notes

[1] AS, Por fin sabemos de dónde surgió el “Negro del Whatsapp.” (May 15th, 2019), https://as.com/epik/2019/05/15/portada/1557912221_652932.html, (accessed August 20, 2020).

[2] Zaragoza, A. (2020b, June 9). The Untold Story of Wood, the Well-Endowed Man From Those Coronavirus Texts. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxeywy/the-untold-story-of-wood-the-well-endowed-man-from-those-coronavirus-texts,

[3] Know Your Meme, Bait and Switch Videos / Pictures. (August 17th, 2020), https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bait-and-switch-videos-pictures, (accessed August 20, 2020).

[4] David Marriott, On Black Men, 1st ed., Vol. 1, (Columbia University Press, 2000b), 25.

[5] Ibid, 27

[6] Ibid, 9

[7] Ibid, 9

[8] Ibid, 23

[9] Ibid, 23

[10] Ibid, 25

[11] Ibid, 25

[12] Ibid, 25

[13] Antonio Villarreal, La auténtica historia del “negro de WhatsApp.” (El Confidencial, December 31st, 2019) https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2019-05-10/meme-negro-whatsapp-historia-nsfw-123_1991262/#:%7E:text=En%20Italia%20circula%20el%20bulo,de%20WhatsApp’%20es%20John%20Umweto

[14] Marriott, On Black Men, 27

[15] Ibid, 27

[16] Ibid, 24

[17] Ibid, 28

[18] Ibid, 35

[19] Ibid, 36

[20] Ibid, 36

 [21] Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture), 1st ed., (Oxford University Press, 1997), 4

[22] Marriott, On Black Men, 27

[23] Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Revised ed., Vol. 1. (Grove Press, 1952), 147.

[24] Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 1st ed., (Duke University Press Books, 2010), 235.

[25] Ibid, 234

[26] Ibid, 89

[27] Marriott, On Black Men, 39

[28] Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, ’El Negro de WhatsApp’ meme, digital blackface, and racism on social media. First Monday, 25(12), 2020 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i12.10420 (accessed August, 8th, 2020).

[29] Wilderson III, Red, White & Black, 235.

[30] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, (Penguin Group, 1985), 73.

[31] Marriott, On Black Men, 4.

[32] Ibid, 10

[33] Wilderson III, Red, White & Black, 235.

[34] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,137.

[35] Ibid., 154

[36] Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 1st ed., (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2008), 133.

We're All Living in a Future Created by Slavery

[Art by Alex Williamson]

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, composed of 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

When I was 19 years old, I was arrested.

Instead of a dungeon, I was held in an overcrowded holding cell. Instead of being shackled and transported across the ocean on a floating prison, I was handcuffed, sitting shoulder to shoulder with another young Black male being hauled across the county on a prison bus.

During intake, I was stripped of my clothes, forced to stand naked as officers stripped me of both my pride and my dignity. I tried to cover my genitals. It was my last grasp at holding onto my humanity. I was commanded by officers to remove my hands. They had guns. I had nothing. I complied. The officer barked, “Lift up your nut sack.” I had no choice. I was ordered to “squat down and cough.” When I was finally handed a pair of state-issued boxer shorts, I was so desperate to have on anything to cover my exposed body that I did not give a damn that the underwear had been passed down, circulated among others who had been stripped naked before me.

Author and scholar Saidiya Hartman once wrote, “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship.” I echo her pain as I think about — and live through — the ongoing crisis of carcerality and those affected most by its existence.

I think about the African diaspora. I think about my family. I think about myself.

In the summer of 2017, I visited the continent of Africa. While there, I basked in the beauty of the lively Ramadan nights in Morocco. I stood in the searing sun of Egypt. I took pictures with the great pyramids as my backdrop, mimicking Malcolm X during his visit in 1964. When I made it to Ghana, I visited the final resting place of Kwame Nkrumah. While standing at his tomb, I thought about Nkrumah writing, “All people of African descent whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African Nation.” I stood there thinking about the divide between being identified as African and being of African descent. I was in the homeland of my ancestors, and yet I knew none of their names or faces.

But I did know why they were forced to leave. I had reached a point where I could not return home to the United States without experiencing the carceral castles on Ghana’s Gold Coast.

My feet were firmly planted, affixed to the weather-beaten ground of the Castle of St. George in Elmina. I stood in front of a cell, designated for incarcerated Ashanti, Mandinka, Hausa, Wolof, Fula, and Susu from various kingdoms who had been deemed as deserving of death because they fought to live in freedom. I stood there in front of a thick black wooden door hauntingly marked by a human skull and a set of crossbones carved into stone.

Behind that door was a darkness I never experienced.

In the 7x10 prison cell, there was a total absence of light. There was also an abject emotional darkness that came with knowing folks, wrapped in the same skin that I’m in, were left there to starve and rot in death.

The captives imprisoned at the Castle of St. George were a part of what I call the carceral class. I am a member of this class.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent who are systematically stigmatized as unfit for freedom and deserving of the dehumanization that comes with being incarcerated. It is essential to the idea of Black people being framed as the locus of crime and Blackness as being synonymous with criminality. As a classification, the carceral class denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

Although he didn’t name it, Malcolm X knew about the carceral class too.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent. It denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be systemically ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

In Malcolm X’s blistering 1963 speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” he spoke of the systemic condemnation of Black folks in the United States. He lasered in on the uncomfortable common bond of being Black in America. Malcolm made it plain and uncompromising. “We are all Black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves,” he said. “You are nothing but a ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

I wrestle with what Brother Malcolm said. Not because I disagree with the troublesome truths that he spoke, but because I feel his analysis can be built upon.

His words still ring in my mind on a loop.

“You are nothing but a ex-slave.”

You are nothing but a slave.

You are nothing.

You are a thing.

Malcom’s speech takes me back to Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. In it, Mbembe lays bare his views on what it means to be branded, burned with the mark of being a slave. He viewed slave as the “forename” one must “give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered — with impunity.”

I think about a time before enslavement. Before Africans were ensnared in the wretchedness of having both their labor and their lives exploited from can’t see in the morning to can’t see in the evening, they were prisoners of a particular kind.

Those who were captured and eventually enslaved were regular folks: commoners, farmers, wage workers, domestic servants, and artisans who worked with their hands. Two-thirds of those held captive were young African men. As Marcus Rediker recounts in The Slave Ship: A Human History, slave raiders targeted “‘the roughest and most hardy,’ and avoided the privileged ‘smooth negroes.’” The class-based vulnerability of the common folks figured centrally in their capture and confinement. Rediker continues:

Second to war as a source of slaves were the judicial processes in and through which African societies convicted people of crimes ranging from murder to theft, adultery, witchcraft, and debt; condemned them to slavery; and sold them to African traders or directly to the slave-ship captains… Many Africans and (abolitionist) Europeans felt that judicial processes in West Africa had been corrupted and that thousands had been falsely accused and convicted in order to produce as many tradeworthy bodies as possible.

A judicial system of injustice had waged war on African commoners, criminalizing them into a world of carcerality.

Malcolm’s raspy tone echoes again in my mind. I hear him saying, “You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

And again, Brother Malcolm was correct.

We did not willingly travel to the Americas on the Mayflower. We were forced here on the White Lion and the Clotilda. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

The largest wave of forced African diasporic movement was anchored to punishment and carcerality. Everywhere the descendants of the Middle Passage were forced to find footing, carceral-class status and the struggle for liberation followed.

Malcolm knew the global connectedness of Black folks’ oppression. He knew that in the West, the African diaspora’s carceral-class status is still branded to our being.

Forty percent of the 10 million incarcerated Africans brought to the Americas and sold into chattel slavery ended up in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that 75% of Brazil’s prison population are Brazilians of African descent. In the country’s capital Brasília, Afro-Brazilians make up 82% of those incarcerated. Although only 11% of the country’s total population is between eight and 24 years of age, this age group represents approximately one-third of those imprisoned.

In the United States, Black adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than white adults. As of 2001, one out of every three Black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime. While 14% of all youth under 18 in the United States are Black, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile detention facilities are Black. Among Black trans folks, 47% have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

The criminalization of Black folks in the United States is both a pathologizing and totalizing practice. No group is spared. No group is left unvictimized. These are progeny of the commoners, prisoners of war, and freedom fighters who made up the original carceral class.

Malcolm also knew that as a Muslim, “There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully.”

On Christmas Day in 1522, 20 enslaved Muslims, wielding machetes, attacked their Christian masters on the island of Hispaniola. It was the first recorded enslaved African revolt in the Western Hemisphere.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

Four years later, enslaved African Muslims rebelled against the Spanish on the coast of present-day South Carolina. It was the first rebellion by enslaved folks in the history of North America.

In 1729, Granny Nanny, a self-liberated African Muslim leader and warrior, led her army of Maroons in Jamaica into the battle with the British — and crushed them in combat. On August 14, 1791, an enslaved African Muslim named Dutty Boukman led other enslaved folks in an uprising against the French. This rebellion and the death of Boukman are marked as being one of the sparks that lead to the Haitian Revolution. On the 27th night of Ramadan in January 1835, a group of enslaved African Muslims in Salvador of Bahía, Brazil, organized one of the largest slave rebellions in the history of the Americas. After being forced aboard on June 28, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, an enslaved African Muslim, led the aquatic revolt on the Amistad.

For members of the carceral class, resistance is in our blood. Resistance is a binding component of our collective experience. Resistance is in our history. This is the history of Black folks like Safiya Bukhari, Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali, Kamau Sadiki, Jamil Al-Amin, Mutulu Shakur, and Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

This is why we resist to this day.

In the end, I return to where I started, thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s words. We live in a time created by the original mass incarceration — the transatlantic slave trade. The “peculiar institution” that is rooted in carcerality. Malcolm X knew this. Political prisoners in the United States today, who need to be freed, know this. I, too, know this. There has not been a point in my life where I have not been intimately impacted by the carceral state. We know this because we have all been subject to and subjugated by the carceral state. It is this experience of knowing that informs my fight to abolish the carceral state.

Anti-Black Police Terrorism

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Republished from the author’s blog.

An email was leaked the other day. In it, the sender praised the police, and wrote that people protesting in honor of George Floyd were involved in a “terrorist movement.” I repeat, the writer wrote that the protesters were involved in a terrorist movement. The person responsible was the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Police — Lieutenant Bob Kroll. The same Kroll who was accused by four Black officers of openly wearing a “White Power badge” on his motorcycle jacket.

For eight minutes and 46 seconds we watched. For eight minutes and 46 fucking seconds we were forced to fix our eyes on George Floyd’s face buried into the asphalt, gasping for air, crying out for his deceased mother’s help — but no help came. We watched a dying man scream, “Tell my kids I love them,” to whomever was willing to listen. We watched Floyd bawl, “Please let me stand,” while two policemen pinned his handcuffed body to the ground. We watched as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck until he could no longer cry out, “I can’t breathe.”

For eight minutes and 46 seconds…

We watched an act of terror.

We watched a man being terrorized.

We watched four officers, on camera, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, commit an anti-Black

act of domestic police-terrorism.

I was not an eyewitness, but I know what I witnessed.

What I saw, with my water-filled eyes, was not a case of mere excessive force. Nor was it simply an act of police brutality. There was something so much more precious than Floyd’s civil rights being violated. That language did not fit what I watched for eight minutes and 46 seconds. There was something morbidly perverse about how unbothered Officer Derek Chauvin was as he took Floyd’s life. There was no struggle. No sense of danger. Chauvin appeared to be at peace with his decision to lynch George Floyd.

I am calling the lynching of George Floyd an anti-Black act of domestic police-terrorism because that is what I witnessed. And I am doing so by employing the framing provided by the government of the land of the (un)free, home of the enslaved to make such a proclamation.

Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act defines domestic terrorism as an act that occurs primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. It is an act that is dangerous to human life, that is intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or influence the government, by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. The FBI adds that acts of domestic terrorism are, “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”

Minneapolis is within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

George Floyd is a human being that had his life violently taken away. The four men who nonchalantly terrorized Floyd, are a part of a larger group of state-sponsored law enforcers. Law enforcers who throughout America have historically and contemporarily racially profiled and targeted Black civilian populations.

Some Americans have the birthright to view the police as protectors and peacekeepers. Some fully embrace the plethora of programs painting law enforcement as heroes, heroines, and damn near deities. I am not from that America. I am from the Othered side of America. Coming from where I’m from, the police protectors of the people is a fallacy. But it is a fallacy I am familiar with. It is a fallacy that is persistently pumped into the brains of Othered-American imaginations through copaganda. Film franchises like Beverly Hills Cop, Rush Hour, Big Momma’s House, and Bad Boys all are pro-police programing. But those movies do not mirror the real-life horror films being captured on cellphones and shared through social media. We are watching Black civilians being put to death in public execution videos. And the executioners are the police.

I repeat…

For eight minutes and 46 seconds, we watched four officers, on camera, commit an anti-Black act of domestic police-terrorism.

It may come as a shock to some that I am calling the police terrorists, and their anti-Black actions acts of domestic terrorism. I am diagnosing what the police do to Black folks acts of terror because it is the truth.

I am calling it police-terrorism because I need you to come to

a

complete

stop.

I need you to critically reflect and decolonize the context in which you engage with the term terrorism within itself. It reminds me of Malcolm X asking a room packed full of Black folks, one of the most crucial questions I have ever heard. The question Brother Malcolm asked was, “Who taught you [Black people] to hate yourself?” With that question in mind, I would ask, who taught you what terrorism can be imagined as being? Who taught you which individuals and groups gets the dishonor of being labeled as a terrorist? Former White House Task Force Deputy Director on Terrorism in the Reagan administration, Edward Peck said that terrorism and terrorist are, “in the eye of the beholder.”

I am looking at police-terrorism through the eyes of a Black man.

I am looking at the police the long memory of the Black experience in America.

I am looking at policing through the Black gaze.

Policing units and individuals have terrorized Black people in the United States as far back as the slave patrols and night watches, and continue to the present. When bell hooks said, “Black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversation with one another a ‘special’ knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people,” some of that special knowledge was, and still is, dedicated to surviving encounters with the police. That special knowledge is passed down from the elders to the young folks when they reach a certain point in physical maturity. My elders called it, “lookin’ grown.” It was an acknowledgement that I clearly was not an adult, but in the eyes of all (citizens and law enforcement) invested in policing my Black boy body, I looked older. I looked less innocent. I looked criminal.

I looked killable in the eyes of those policing me.

Black parents are forced to pass down special knowledge with their children about how to hide in the shadows and the shade to avoid the adultifying policing gaze. What routes to take coming home. What clothes to wear. What tone to speak in. How to reach for your wallet. It’s all a part of the talk to try and teach your child how to survive the unfortunate potentiality of being terrorized by the police.

The predictability of police terrorism took the lives of Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others. The randomness of these people reminds the broader Black community that as long as you are Black and breathing, the police are willing to steal your last breath.

While the public debate has largely focused on the appalling injustice of state-sponsored terror against individual Black folks, an additional, overlooked injustice is taking place. It is the collective consequence of seeing individuals that look like you, or someone that you love lying defenseless and dead in the streets. It is when an individual being terrorized is converted into communal terror. Police-terrorism spreads acute fear, among the whole Black community. The people who are wronged are not only those who are killed, but also their Black neighbors who witness the terror through their windows. The Black bystander filming Black death on their cellphones. The Black families who bury their breathless bodies afterwards. They feel a justifiable fear or terror of the police.

This fear is not incidental, but intentional.

From the Black gaze, the police conduct themselves as a state sponsored group of, “racially motivated violent extremists,” that target the Black community, which according to the FBI, makes them a “national threat priority.” But American history has shown that protecting Black bodies from the threat of domestic terrorism is not a priority.

Reminder…It is 2020 and lynching is still not a federal hate crime in America.

Reminder…It is 2020 and the Ku Klux Klan are not classified as a terrorist organization in America.

This is America.

And in America, the police are permitted to treat Black people with, what James Baldwin would call, a special disfavor, because of the color of our skin. It is in this special disfavor that we can have our doors kicked in by the police, and be shot to death in our sleep. It is this special disfavor that can lead to the police shooting us in the back, as we run with the same feet as our enslaved ancestors fleeing from Slave Patrolmen. It is this special disfavor that can lead to the police gunning our children down in less than two seconds, while they’re playing outside. It is this special disfavor that made a policeman rape 13 Black women, and that same special disfavor made those Black women believe that no one would believe them. It is this same special disfavor that renders the souls of Black folks breathless, while we are still physically alive. It is this special disfavor that made the world stop for eight minutes and 46 seconds to witness an act of anti-Black domestic police terrorism.

COVID-19 and the Global Pandemic of Anti-Blackness

By Ewuare X. Osayande

Originally published at the author’s website.

The initial word was that Black folks couldn’t catch it. Rumors began spreading that Black people were immune to the virus. But what we have learned and continue to learn with each passing day as the global death toll rises is that Black life is quite susceptible to this virus. But not in a way that makes sense biologically. Black people are not genetically predisposed to this novel coronavirus. What we are is generationally predisposed to an anti-Black discrimination that has weakened our communal immune system leaving each of us vulnerable to this virus in ways people in other communities are not.

Wherever Black people are in this world, we exist mostly on the social margins, isolated and disproportionately impacted by policies and social practices rooted in notions of white supremacy that undermine our collective capacity for health, wealth and safety. Whether on the continent of Africa or throughout the Black Diaspora, our health and safety have been severely hampered by a global social order that has rested upon a racialized ranking that necessitates Black existence be fixed at its bottom to enable and justify whiteness to exist at its apex. Since the 1500s, this arrangement has had deadly implications for Black people. As the bodies pile in over-crowded morgues, hospital rooms and rented trailers in the US and in all the places where Black people live, this virus is exposing the pillars of that structure in ways that are as horrific as when European slave ships set sail from Africa to the Americas.

For the first month or so most of the news coverage in the United States addressed the issue without consideration of race. This was touted as a virus that was wreaking havoc on all segments of the population equally. Then Milwaukee happened. The first casualties in that predominantly white working-class city were all Black men. And when more Black people continued to die, the community there began to ask questions that forced a narrative change. Initial reports claimed that the upsurge in the Black community was due to Black people not heeding the warnings and precautions. Then as activists began to call out the contradictions in the news coverage, more honest reports emerged identifying racial disparities in all areas of life as the true underlying conditions that account for the sky rocketing rates of infection and death in Black communities.

Yet, scant attention had been paid to the impact that generations of discrimination in health care, housing, education, employment — the fundamental pillars of the society — has had on Black people’s overall health. Even less attention has been given to the need for strategies to redress the underlying social and economic constraints that continue to suffocate the life of Black possibilities and opportunity. That Black people in Flint are forced to tackle this pandemic without clean water is a telling indictment. Black communities have already been dealing with pandemic-like concerns for decades in the US. And as much as we would want to believe that money solves all problems, this virus is showing us that wealth or its lack is not much of a deciding factor.

Less than a week after Milwaukee, officials in the wealthiest predominantly Black county in the country, Prince George’s County in Maryland, were rushing to meet the surge in expected hospitalizations as a result of the virus spread. A few days later, the county had amassed the largest concentration of positive cases in the state.

These disparate conditions facing African Americans are further compounded by the everyday racism that puts Black life at risk. Despite the directives from all levels of government for every person to cover their nose and mouth when in public, video footage of Black people being accosted and harassed by police are seen with a regularity that is beyond baffling. Some show Black persons escorted out of grocery stores under claims of looking suspicious. In the videos we see them being followed by police as they exit stores as white customers enter wearing the exact same masks on their faces. The very racism that is responsible for the weakened immune systems of Black people due to stress and anxiety have not shown any signs of reprieve in this time of extreme grieving.

For most Black people, there is no sanctuary. There is no salvage from the turmoil of being turned away at the very places established to provide care. Each week new stories emerge on social media and national news outlets of Black people dying just days after being denied admission at hospitals despite showing symptoms of the virus.

At the time of this writing, the Black mortality rate from this Corona-virus is more than twice that of Latinos and Asians and almost three times the rate of white mortality in the US. According to the APM Research Lab, “in some places, the multiple between Black and White mortality rates greatly exceeds the 2.6 overall figure that we’ve constructed from all available data for the nation. In Kansas and Wisconsin, Black residents are 7 times more likely to die than White residents. In Washington D.C., the rate among Blacks is 6 times higher than Whites, while in Michigan and Missouri, it is 5 times greater. In Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, New York State, Oregon and South Carolina, Blacks are 3–4 times more likely to die of the virus than Whites.” This is incomprehensible.

African-Americans represent approximately 13 percent of the US population. In the UK, the Black population is less than 5 percent, yet the Black mortality rate from the coronavirus is running at more than three times the rate of whites there, far outdistancing other minority and immigrant groups in the process. The London-based Institute of Fiscal Studies has released a study that attempts to get at an explanation for these stark disparities. What the researchers are clear on is that Black workers in Britain are over-represented in “key worker roles,” what here in the US would be considered essential and front-line workers. What these studies have yet to get clear on is how anti-black racism, itself, is a key factor.

Britain’s own prime minister, Boris Johnson, whom many consider a Trump knock-off, recently recovered from a COVID-19 infection that had him on life-support. Yet, even his near-death experience has not led to the creation of a plan for the most impacted communities. In the land that not too long ago tried to remove its Black citizens, British leaders are lax in their concern for Black life.

Back here in the states, all concern for Black life has been overlooked as attention has been focused on the spectacle of armed white militias and white evangelicals storming Democratically-run state capitols demanding that their governors reopen the economy. Trump, for his part, calls these noose-wielding, swastika wearing, confederate flag waving Americans “very good people” and encourages governors to “give a little.” Yet Trump has not given much of any support to communities ransacked by this virus. In fact, the governor of Maryland has reportedly put the national guard on watch of essential PPE stockpiles to block Trump’s efforts at intercepting state supply. Re-opening state economies and public facilities en masse right now would amount to a national death sentence for Black America.

That death sentence has already been enacted unofficially in Brazil. In the country with the highest population of Black people in the diaspora, Black people are dying at rates that dwarf all other communities there. First brought to the country by the wealthy returning to major cities where Black people work in menial jobs and as house servants, the virus has now spread into the over-crowded favelas where residents live without running water and proper sanitation.

In many ways, the Brazilian government mirrors that of the US response. Both nations are led by capitalists who came to power with claims to clean up government corruption with campaigns mired in rightwing conservative rhetoric with winks to white nationalists and militia groups. Both nations have class-based economies that keep Black and Brown workers locked in poverty, discrimination, intimidation and violence, where police regularly engage in flagrant acts of brutality, assault and abuse. None of this coincidence. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro flaunt their friendship before the world. Their strategic alliance as political leaders are linked in a whiteness that revels in anti-black violence that is both rhetorical and real. Both men have dismissed the guidance of medical experts on how to reduce the spread in their respective countries. Touting a tough-guy image reminiscent of Mussolini, Bolsonaro has gone as far as making impromptu appearances in densely populated areas as public acts of disregard of the pandemic. But this is not about lack of understanding or ignorance. Both leaders were receiving briefs months before the virus’ arrival on their respective shores. These are malicious acts representative of a political class that seeks to coddle a Christian evangelical base that has long kept social distance from science as they await the return of their white savior. For them, this pandemic is prophecy fulfilled.

Yet, even science has not been the friend of Black people during this pandemic. At the height of the crisis, when governments were desperate to find potential cures, two French “medical experts” went on live TV with one, Dr. Jean-Paul Mira (who heads up an intensive care unit in a Paris hospital), saying, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” Although this was met with some criticism from various sectors, the fact that two esteemed doctors would casually call for experimenting on a population of people is more than revolting. It speaks to the kind of anti-blackness that has plagued African populations since France colonized most of the continent. It speaks to a world that is willing to promote experts and leaders willing to push the envelope of acceptable parameters of denigration of Black lives. It shows us how little progress has been made since the 1921 publication of René Maran’s classic anti-colonial novel, Batouala, in which the lead character says, “We are nothing but flesh out of which taxes may be ground. … The white men are killing us slowly.”

But perhaps nothing shows the inhumane levels of anti-blackness in this time of COVID-19 than the experiences of Africans in China.

Despite being the target of Trump’s racist campaigns that seek to deflect blame for his abysmal failures to curtail this virus’ impact onto the Chinese government, China has concocted its own racist narrative which has targeted Africans throughout China. Video footage of Africans kicked out of their places of residence onto the streets without any means of support from local or national agencies sent shock-waves of anger throughout Africa. In Guangzhou there have been cases of Africans having their passports taken by police further jeopardizing their safety. Conditions deteriorated so terribly that rumors began to spread of African officials planning to send planes to return their countrymen and women back home.

The African presence in China is a direct result of the strategic inroads the Chinese government has made with African countries such as Kenya and Nigeria. Since becoming Africa’s largest trade partner more than a decade ago, China has invested billions in infrastructure development with an emphasis on port and railroad construction. Yet, what is clear is that these investments will do little to change the excessive class-stratification and extreme levels of income disparity that exist throughout Africa.

These recent events suggest a pattern of abuse all too familiar to African workers and migrants in search of a financial foothold in a global economy predicated on an exploitation that disregards their humanity to the point of death. The world may have shuttered when Trump compared countries in African to excrement, but shitty is a most accurate term to describe the response around the world to the Black COVID-19 mortality rate.

At the time of this writing, more Black people have now died in the US from this coronavirus than were lynched during segregation. Never in a white supremacist’s wildest dreams could they have imagined a plague that would wipe out thousands of Black lives in a matter of a couple of months. When the germs clear and the air is breathable again without fear, this moment in human history will be marked by the toll it has taken on Black life. It will reveal a turbulent world economic order crumbling on the backs of an essential Black labor pool kept at subsistence levels of health with no sufficient safeguards in place. Will all that may be uncertain and unknowable about our world right now, one thing is for sure — the pandemic of anti-blackness, its symptoms and effects, will remain long after the coronavirus COVID-19 has come and gone.

Ewuare X. Osayande is a writer and activist. The author of several books, his latest is a collection of poetry entitled Black Phoenix Uprising. Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.

Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

By Jonathan Mathias Lassiter

“My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served”  (Morrison, 1992, p. 90).

“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this. What you say about somebody else – anybody else – reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me” (James Baldwin, 1963).

Imagine a person. How tall is this person? What is the gender? How does this person dress? How does this person speak? Now, imagine the skin color of this person. As you pictured this person, was it a white person? If it was, you are not alone. For many, person is synonymous with white person. However, too often little attention is given to this fact. White people just are. Their race and embodiment of whiteness is seldom analyzed or is done narrowly. Furthermore, the psychological implications of whiteness for white people remain largely unexamined. This lack of detailed and nuanced study about white people and whiteness uneases me. There is a dearth of discourse about white people as a racial subject and whiteness as a pathological system with psychological consequences for white people. This essay is an attempt to address that (dis)ease and move toward an understanding of white people and whiteness, as racial subjects and a pathological system, respectively, in the field of psychology and beyond.

I begin this essay with a discussion of definitions for terms that will be used throughout. I transition to an overview of the racial origins of psychotherapy and the subsequent erasure of those origins. The remainder of the essay will present a discussion of whiteness in the psychological imagination and its implications, first for people of color and then white people.

Terminology

It is important to have a common understanding of the three critical terms that will be used repeatedly throughout this essay. These terms include psychological imagination, white people, and whiteness.Psychological imagination is used to describe the formulations and definitions of ideas and ideals that pertain to psychology-in the mainstream-as an academic discipline, and to psychological phenomena in general. This imagination influences people who work or study in that discipline as well as those who do not. The term white people refers to people who, regardless of national origin or cultural background, have white skin, consider themselves to be white and/or are treated by the majority of people in society as such, and personally benefit from resources and privileges associated with whiteness. This term is used in this essay to discuss the general populace of white people in America regardless of socioeconomic status. No disclaimer should be needed but to increase the likelihood that the points of my essay are understood and not clouded by defensiveness, this author knows that not all white people embrace and actively collude in whiteness. Furthermore, it should be understood that whiteness can be and is internalized by both white people and people of color. One does not have to have white skin to perpetuate whiteness. However, the perpetuation of whiteness is only beneficial to white people. People of color, no matter their collusion or protest, are still systematically and systemically oppressed by whiteness.

Whiteness is defined as

“a complex, hegemonic, and dynamic set of mainstream socioeconomic processes, and ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting (cultural scripts) that function to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite. Whiteness drives oppressive individual, group, and corporate practices that adversely impacts…the wider U.S. society and, indeed, societies worldwide. At the same time whiteness reproduces inequities, injustices, and inequalities within the…wider society” (Lea & Sims, 2008, pp.2-3).

It should be noted that whiteness is not monolithic or immutable. Its meaning is constantly shifting and being constructed through an array of discourses and practices in various arenas of society (Wray & Newitz, 1997). In this way, white people either directly or indirectly benefit from their positioning at the top of a hierarchy that preferences their ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting above those of others. This positioning of whiteness is held consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously by both people of color and white people. It is enacted in both subtle and overt ways. Too often the white human being is the person who is really being considered when one is discussing or writing about the human being. Yet, the whiteness of the human being is obscured and painted as an every(wo)man.

White-washed Psychology

Psychology, as many understand it, in the western world is grounded in whiteness. Plato’s thoughts, in 387 BCE, on the brain and mental processes and René Decartes’ ideas about dualism of mind and body in the 1600s are taught in most, if not all, History of Psychology courses to be some of the earliest foundational writings about psychological processes. Psychological science is thought to have its beginnings in Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental laboratory in psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany that opened in 1879. Furthermore, it is commonly taught that the origins of psychotherapy are found in Sigmund Freud’s and his students’ work beginning in 1886.

It should be noted that Freud, himself, was a Jewish person. His approach to conducting psychotherapy with his patients was aligned with many characteristics of Jewish culture. These characteristics included being exceedingly verbal, emotionally expressive, trusting of reputable strangers, and believing in the “expert opinion” of a professional (Langman, 1997). The Jewish traits were the underpinning assumptions of patients’ behaviors in the psychotherapy room. Freud and other early members of the psychotherapy movement, such as Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs taught their students to approach psychotherapy and their patients in this manner (Langman, 1997). In many ways, western psychotherapy in the early 20th century was a secularization of Jewish mysticism (Bakan, 1958).

However, the ethnic foundation of psychotherapy rooted in Jewish culture was eroded with the shift toward an empirical approach ushered in by white Americans John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner with their theories of behaviorism (Langman, 1997). Behaviorism focused on objective and measurable behaviors while rejecting the subjective domains of human experiences such as thoughts and emotions. This shift was a step toward the whitening of psychotherapy in that it centralized many characteristics of white culture including rugged individualism, competition, mastery, and control over nature, a unitary and static conception of time, and a separation of science and religion (Sue et al, 1998). This shift highlights the mutability of whiteness and its tendency to leech the essence from its counterparts. British colonists were once defined by their Christianity and Europeanness but their Christianity and Europeanness became subsumed by their whiteness in the Americas. In a similar way, Jewish cultural contributions to western psychology and psychotherapy were subsumed under the whiteness of American white people.

However, more obscured than the Jewish underpinnings of psychotherapy and psychology, is its earliest ethnic foundation. The African roots of psychology predate all others. In-depth scholarly research reveals that the origins of what is now called psychology can be found in the philosophical, scientific, and mystical practices of the Anunian and Kemetic civilizations dating back to 4,000 BCE (Bynum, 2012). In these traditions, psychology is considered as the study of the human spirit (Nobles, 1986). It is the study of how people understand and define their humanness within the context of a community (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). Anunian and Kemetic psychology preferences a view of the self as primarily a spiritual entity projected into the physical realm (McAllister, 2014). Meyers (1988) proclaimed that the African worldview is an optimal one in which encompasses viewing the spiritual, mental, soulful, and physical aspects of being as one; knowing one’s self through symbolic imagery and rhythm; valuing interpersonal harmony and interconnectedness; embracing self-worth as an intrinsic value that derives from one’s very being; and viewing life as a plane that is unlimited (Karenga, 1993; Meyers, 1998). Life is thought to be trifold operating on three planes that are before-life, earth-life, and after-life (Fu-Kiau, 1993, 2001 as cited by Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). The human spirit is thought to move through “seven moments” which are “before, beginning, belonging, being, becoming, beholding, and beyond” (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010, p. 14). As can be seen, the earliest conceptualizations of psychology were not limited to the physical realm bounded by empiricism with which white-washed psychology has become identified. It was more encompassing of the seen and unseen, the before, now, and beyond. This type of psychology is a more complete assessment of the human experience that acknowledges the knowable and unknowable. (See Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010 for more details.) It is rooted in Africa and predates any other thought on the study of humanness. However, whiteness has recast psychology in its imagination. From this perspective, the image of the purveyors and consumers of psychology are tacitly assumed to be white or, if not white, approached in their relation to whiteness. Psychology is limited by whiteness-informed ideals of quantification, denial of the spiritual, and biomedical preoccupation.

White People and Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

Psychology, much like all fields of human inquiry, often defines white people and whiteness in relationship to what it is not. Guthrie (2004) points out that some of the earliest studies of racial differences related to psychological abilities attempted to define white people as separate, and as members of a “higher” form of human being than people of color. For example, a series of psychological studies from as early as 1881 and 1895, reportedly “proved” that people of color, namely Japanese, American indigenous, and African-American people, had quicker reaction times to sensory stimuli and thus were more “impulsive,” while white people were more “reflective” (Guthrie, 2004). The interpretation of the results of such studies is interesting. These results were interpreted to imbue white people with a presumed desirable quality of reflectivity and people of color with a presumed undesirable quality of impulsivity. Other early studies conducted by white psychologists also found “evidence” of African-Americans’ lack of ability for abstract thought but prowess in sensory and motor skills (Guthrie, 2004). This type of psychological imagining defines white people as mentally adept and physically underdeveloped; implicitly, and sometimes overtly, suggesting that white people’s intellectual skill should be valued over the physical capacities of people of color. And thus, this intellectual value sets white people as the standard in the realm of intellectual functioning. These interpretations of research highlight that scientific findings can be used for the uplift and humanizing of people, or for their pathologizing and dehumanizing of them. Such interpretations by pioneering white scientists in the field of psychology point to an imagining of white people as superior and people of color as inferior.

One may protest that findings of early psychological studies are outdated and do not reflect mainstream contemporary psychology. I agree that such blatant racist interpretations of research findings are almost nonexistent in today’s world. However, it has been replaced with a colorblind mentality that does not address these racist underpinnings and subconsciously positions white people as the default against which all others are measured. One does not have to look far to find evidence of this point. It is common practice for editors of peer-reviewed psychological journals to publish articles with titles such as“Millennials, narcissism, and social networking: What narcissists do on social networking sites and why,”“Finding female fulfillment: Intersecting role-based and morality-based identities of motherhood, feminism, and generativity as predictors of women’s self satisfaction and life satisfaction,” and“Friendship between men across sexual orientation: The importance of (others) being intolerant”(Barrett, 2013; Bergman, Fearrington, Davenport, & Bergman, 2011; Rittenour & Colaner, 2012). The broad language in the titles (i.e. “millennials,” “female,” “women,” “men”) of these articles suggest that the authors of these studies have recruited and conducted research with a sample of diverse participants who represent a microcosm of the diverse human family. These articles’ titles suggest that the findings of the studies are, with a margin of error of course, applicable to all men, women, and millennials. A glance at the Methods sections proves otherwise. Not the least offense, the samples are virtually racially homogenous. These studies included 6.8%, 8.8%, and .08% people of color. While any findings from these studies are an addition to the understanding of psychology, they should be clearly understood as an examination of psychological concepts among white people in America, not as universal concepts or even American concepts. No journal editors required that the authors change their titles to reflect the predominantly white culture of their participants. While some readers might not understand the significance of these titles and the titling practice in psychology, the absence of reference to white people is commonplace and this small sample of studies is unfortunately representative of the type of widespread branding of the psychology of white people as the psychology of people. This type of branding obscures the culture of white people and the interplay of whiteness with psychological phenomena. It makes it hard for one to understand the essence of whiteness because this type of branding erases whiteness and elevates the psychological experiences of white people to be those of the human race. Dyer (1997, p. 2) wrote “there is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity…whites are people whereas other colours are something else.” In this way, white people implicitly set themselves as the arbiters of humanity and maybe even the only true embodiment of it.

From this point of view, whiteness in the psychological imagination is conflated with humanness in the psychological imagination. Therefore, whiteness is superior and centered in the psychological imagination. It is often obscured yet powerful in its organization of the field of study in a way that revolves around itself and thus maintains its power. It positions itself as the pure, unbiased presentation of scientific phenomena that explains what it means to be human. This imagining of whiteness is erroneous and dangerous.

Whiteness and Its Implications for Psychology Students of Color

Students of color often experience the psychology field as an unwelcoming and dehumanizing space. Research indicates that psychology students of color report experiencing stereotyping, alienation and isolation, cultural bias, prejudice, and challenges to their academic qualifications and merit in their educational programs (Gonzalez, Marin, Figuerosa, Moreno, & Navia, 2002; Johnson-Bailey, 2004; Lewis, Ginsberg, Davies, & Smith, 2004; Vazquez et al., 2006; Williams, 2000; Williams et al., 2005). Psychology students of color do not see themselves or the communities they represent reflected in the image of psychology. Researchers (Maton et al., 2011) found that African Americans were 12.6 times more likely, and Asian American and Latina/o American each 5.1 times more likely to report stereotypical rather than fair and accurate representation compared to white students. In turn, Asian Americans were 49 times more likely, African Americans 23.7 times more likely, and Latina/o Americans 19.9 times more likely to report that their group was not represented at all than to report fair and accurate representation as compared to white students (Maton et al., 2011). Students of color are overwhelmingly presented a curriculum that paints whiteness as humanness. They are deprived of an image of humanity that includes them and are thus dehumanized in their educational process.

Experiences of dehumanization and disempowerment in a system of whiteness leaves students insecure in their academic abilities, unsure of their sense of belonging in academia, emotionally battered by racial insensitivity, and feeling impotent to address these issues. Thus, students engage in self-censorship, assimilation to whiteness-centered academic program norms, and abandonment of scholarly pursuits of interest and use to communities of color (Gildersleeve, Croom, & Vasquez, 2011). Whiteness in psychology often leaves students of color feeling isolated and treated unjustly.

My colleagues and I are intimate with the types of experiences that the empirical research on students of color elucidates. One day during my third year in graduate school, I had an African American female, let’s call her “Natasha,” start crying when I asked her how she was feeling. She told me, “I don’t feel like I belong here. These students say some of the most offensive, racist shit and the professors agree with them. Then when I speak up and call them out, I’m told that I should respect everyone’s opinion. It feels like they don’t want me to succeed.” Listening to Natasha, who was a first year student, I remembered my own experience of feeling racially assaulted in academic and clinical training settings. I felt her pain and the confusion that accompanied it. Boiling with empathy, I said “it’s because they don’t want you here.” Natasha looked at me with an expression of astonishment. “Look around,” I continued, “how many professors of color do you see here? Don’t you know that when they created the first programs in psychology, you and I were not the students they had in mind? We were not meant to be here. But we are. And it is up to you to make sure that you stay here, against all odds. The world needs your brilliance. The world needs your intelligence and the perspective that only you can offer. So cry, get mad, but use that to push you forward, to the top.” While, I admit that I might have been emotional when I responded to my friend, the overall message was one of resilience. Scholarly research on the history of psychology support my statement and illuminates the struggles of people of color who were the pioneers in graduate education in psychology (Guthrie, 2004). It has often been the case that in a system of whiteness students of color have had to generate their own power from within and use adversity to propel them forward. It is an uneasy and unjust position to be in but unfortunately, often, the reality. Resilience is the cornerstone of the foundation that students of color must build upon when facing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

Multicultural sensitivity and diversity are popular topics in psychology training programs. While the American Psychological Association and many APA-accredited schools and internship training programs tout diversity on paper, many students of color find there to be little in reality. I often heard at clinical training sites that “there are several different forms of diversity and too often people get hung up on race.” This is a true statement, of course. However, the tone with which it was often spoken and the number of times that it was mentioned whenever someone mentioned diversity or race highlighted an unsettling thought for me. Was this comment an excuse to not discuss race? Was this comment their get-out-of-the-race-question-free-card? In my experience, discussions about race and ethnicity were rarely undertaken in any sustained or formal manner. At one site, there was only one formal discussion of race throughout the whole year. Particularly egregious about that discussion was that an African American psychologist who was unaffiliated with the organization was engaged to conduct it. This was troubling because one of the only two times a psychologist of color presented a didactic was when the topic involved race and ethnic diversity. That psychologist was recruited for this one time only event. An implicit message is that the only topic people of color are qualified to discuss is race. And as evidence of the lack of diversity in the organization, it had to reach beyond its walls to find a qualified speaker on the topic. Furthermore, race and ethnicity was boiled down to one presentation and not discussed in any formal manner during the rest of the year. In addition, the focus of that site’s approach race and ethnicity was limited to African Americans. I am not opposed to people of color’s unique and similar experiences as human beings being highlighted in the study of psychology. It should be a foundational component of psychology education. It is the manner in which the spotlight is shined on people of color that is troublesome. People of color are often discussed in psychology as if they are outside of society and in some cases, outside of the species. People of color are presumed to diverge from the default of whiteness and thus are the special cases. They are often examined and presented in a consumable manner to onlookers who, with scientific and objective perspectives, try to understand them. If people of color are the special cases, then who are the people to whom their exotification is being explained? Who does this type of racial and ethnic diversity training serve and whom does it not serve? Furthermore, white people and their race and ethnicities are rarely included in conversations about race and ethnicity. Their racial and ethnic heritages are erased by whiteness and they are placed outside of the paradigm into a separate and implicitly elevated position. Thus, reinforcing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

“Diversity is more than race” seemed to be code for “let’s not talk about race.” This silence around race often seemed to come up in case presentations. I have often found myself as one of the only psychological trainees of color in organizations that served predominately people of color. Many of my white peers often presented clients of color in similar ways: “she’s so angry;” “he won’t talk to me.” However, many never questioned how their race might be influencing the client’s behavior or their conceptualization of and approach to the client. Or if they did so, it was with a “yeah, but” dismissive quality. Many of my white counterparts have tried to wish away race. During one group supervision session one colleague commented that the only way to decrease racism and fully incorporate men of color into society was to stop treating them with “kid gloves.” I was unsettled by this colleague’s statement and either the sheer ignorance or blatant racism that it demonstrated. I could not help but respond. I commented that men of color most often experience the exact opposite of what she was suggesting and that in fact they are treated with iron fists. “Men of color,” I said, “are often subjected to punishment for behaviors that their white counterparts are not and are punished harsher than their white counterparts when they do commit crimes.” This colleague responded with an expression of discomfort that proved she had no real understanding of the experience of people of color and yet all she wanted was to “help” these young men who came from unfortunate circumstances. While I don’t think this particular colleague had malevolent intentions, inequality and injustice often stem from the blind spots of well meaning people. Students of color in psychology programs often experience a barrage of microaggressions and blatant ignorance that assault their racial and ethnic identities and, sometimes, their humanity.

The Scholarly and Pedagogical Centering of Whiteness in Psychology

Researchers have found that the majority of participants in research studies are citizens of western, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations and most of them are highly educated (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Thus, the knowledge about the psychological experiences is incredibly first-world and neglects the experiences of the majority of people on earth who do not inhabit such WEIRD spaces. Even within these WEIRD spaces, whiteness further constricts psychological knowledge. As in a previous section of this essay, many of the titles of published research papers purport to describe universal psychological phenomena but in actuality only present a white-centered description of it, as most psychological study samples are predominately composed of white people.

Three recent critical reviews of the racial composition of participants of studies published in scholarly psychology journals provide statistical information about the centering of whiteness in psychological research. In 2005, researchers found that among all the studies published in the top three counseling psychology journals from 1990 to 1999, 57% of them reported the races or ethnicities of their samples (Delgado-Romero, Galvan, Maschino, & Rowland, 2005). This means that 43% of the studies failed to present data about race or ethnicity and implied that either 1) race and ethnicity is not important enough to report or 2) that the sample was homogenous in its whiteness. Furthermore, the authors of this study found that when race was reported, it was often in relation to whiteness. For example, many studies referred to their participants’ race as “white” or “other.” Again, this sets whiteness and white people as the default stand-in for humanity and people of color as deviations from the norm. Among studies that did report specific racial and ethnic characteristics, overall samples were composed of 78.2% white people, 5.8% Asian Americans, 6.7% African Americans, 6.6% Latino/as, 0.9% Indigenous people, and 0.1% multiracial people (Delgado-Romero et al., 2005). Compared to the overall population of the United States, whites and Asian Americans were overrepresented and African Americans, Latino/as, and Indigenous people were underrepresented in counseling psychology research. In an analysis of the races and ethnicities of participants in studies that were published in the top six American Psychological Association journals in 2007, authors found that 60-82% of them were white (Arnett, 2008). Furthermore, 7-60% of the studies published in these journals did not report the racial and ethnic composition of their samples (Arnett, 2008). An examination of the race and ethnicity reporting in four social science/psychology journals focused specifically on ethnic and racial minorities found much more inclusion of people of color. Specifically, of participants of studies published in these journals from 1990 to 2007, 38.7% identified as Latino/a, 22.5% identified as Black, 17.8% identified as white, 9.0% identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, 1.6% identified as Indigenous, 0.4% identified as multiracial/biracial; 8.3% were categorized as “nonrespondent” (i.e., the study did not provide information), and 1.7% were categorized as “other” (i.e., individuals did not identify as any of the listed classifications) (Shelton, Delgado-Romero, & Wells, 2009). It seems that people of color are only included in the psychological literature when the topic of study is race or ethnicity. These three critical reviews provide empirical evidence of the frequent exclusion of people of color from the psychological imagination.

When race and ethnicity are included in research studies, these constructs are usually approached in three distinct ways. These include the universalist, culture assimilation, and culture accommodation approaches (Leong & Serafica, 2001). The universalist approach ignores race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are deemed unimportant and not worthy of incorporating in the empirical process. Research studies that use this approach do not even ask participants about race or consider how it may interact with or influence the manifestation or expression of the psychological phenomena under study. The culture assimilation approach relegates people of color to the margins and they are conceptualized as deviations from whiteness and white people. Studies that use this approach are usually comparative in nature; they assess the difference of the racial and ethnic groups on various psychological phenomena with white people positioned as the reference group. People of color are assessed based on whether or not they significantly differ from white people. Conclusions from these types of studies often focus on how people of color can or should adjust to become more assimilated with whiteness to better match the performance of white people in the psychological domains under study. The culture accommodation approach more fully considers the influence of the race and ethnicity (and how race and ethnicity influences the sociological context of people) on the expression of psychological phenomena. Studies that utilize this approach move beyond ignoring and comparing people of color to white people. They seek to understand how race and ethnicity influences how people define, experience, and make sense of psychological phenomena in a culturally specific manner. Beyond culture accommodation approaches, many psychologists of color have developed culture-specific schools of psychological thought. The advent of Asian American Psychology, Latino/a Psychology, Black Psychology, and African-centered Psychology illustrate a move away from an assimilationist stance to an indigenous focus. Specifically, these fields of study center the humanity of people of color and examine all psychological phenomena from a perspective that is inextricably tied to one’s cultural context.

The centering of whiteness is engrained in the academy and those seeking to de-center it often find it difficult. When scholars try to emancipate their scholarship from the confines of whiteness, they are often met with opposition from the gatekeepers of psychology (i.e. journal reviewers and editors, funding agencies, and colleagues). There is empirical evidence of academics of color facing barriers in their universities due to racial discrimination, both at the individual and structural levels. The devaluing of scholarship that does not privilege whiteness is a particularly troubling occurrence. A recent study found that it is hard for the research of scholars of color to be funded (Ginther et al., 2011). Ginther and her colleagues found that Asian Americans and Black applicants were less likely to receive investigator-initiated research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH; the largest governmental funder of scientific research in the United States) compared to their white counterparts. Even after statistically holding constant differences in the applicants’ educational backgrounds, countries of origin, training, previous research awards, publication records, and employer characteristics, Black scholars were still found to be at a disadvantaged in receiving funding from the NIH. If this disadvantage is found at the national level at an institution that has a long history of creating programs to increase diversity (Ginther et al. 2011), the racial disparity in research funding at other organizations (e.g. local, institution-based, or private) is likely to be greater. When scholars of color are able to conduct their research, either with or without funding, they often find that it is not deemed as scholarly legitimate or scientifically rigorous (Harley, 2008; Kameny et al., 2014; Stanley, 2007; Turner, Gonzalez, & Wood, 2008). There are many times when scholars of color find themselves at odds with journal reviewers when they attempt to publish scholarship outside of whiteness. Stanley (2007) wrote about the clash between counter and master narratives in the academy. She explains:

“A master narrative is a script that specifies and controls how some social processes are carried out. Furthermore, there is a master narrative operating in academia that often defines and limits what is valued as scholarship and who is entitled to create scholarship. This is problematic, because the dominant group in academia writes most research and, more often than not, they are White men. Members of marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, have had little or no input into the shaping of this master narrative. Therefore, research on marginalized groups by members of marginalized groups that reveals experiences that counter master narratives is often compared against the White norm…” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14).

In contrast, counter narratives: “…act to deconstruct the master narratives, and they offer alternatives to the dominant discourse in educational research. They provide, for example, multiple and conflicting models of understanding social and cultural identities. They also challenge the dominant White and often predominantly male culture that is held to be normative and authoritative” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14). Researching and publishing the research of counter narratives that de-center whiteness and more fully embrace the diversity of humanity often requires assertiveness and perseverance. Presenting a non-pathological, non-comparative, and non-deficit representation of people of color in the scholarly literature is a revolutionary act.

One would think that in a field like psychology where so much lip service and written policy is focused on diversity this would not be the case. Research findings, which have been discussed throughout this essay, prove otherwise. Unfortunately, I have personally experienced the sting of gatekeepers who are invested in perpetuating master narratives. Recently a reviewer had this to say about a manuscript of mine that focused on an all Black sample of men who have sex with men (BMSM): “In this paper, the population of black gay men is treated almost as a universe unto itself…the author seems to make conclusions about how religious BMSM are without making explicit comparisons to white men who have sex with men or to other groups.” These particular remarks from this reviewer are indicative of an investment in the centering of whiteness. When the reviewer comments that I treat the population of BMSM as “a universe unto itself,” it implies that there is something inaccurate about or amiss with the notion that BMSM could possibly be of scholarly (maybe even human) value in and of themselves. He also suggested that I make a comparison between the Black men in my sample and white men and that no conclusions can be made about the religiosity of BMSM without such a comparison. His suggestion is indicative of the assimilationist approach that was explained by Leong & Serafica (2001). In other words, in his opinion, whiteness is the standard. Without whiteness to measure the experiences of people of color against, how can one know what is real? In his critique, this reviewer strips away the legitimacy, worth, and humanity of BMSM. In his imagination, BMSM cannot possibly exist in the absence of whiteness. The reviewer goes on to comment that the “…questions of how and why the relationship between religiosity and sexuality may be different among black men than among white men are indeed fascinating questions.” I question, “fascinating to whom?” Too often, researchers of all races whose scholarship focuses on people of color are subjugated to journal reviewers’ fascination with whiteness. Publishing and presenting research about people of color that is not pathology-focused or comparative, while not impossible, is challenging in mainstream scholarly outlets.

The Psychological Wage

Thus far the research reviewed in this essay has been persuasive in its accounting of the narrowing and repressive effects of whiteness for knowledge production and for the experiences of students and faculty of color in the field of psychology. However, it would be a mistake to believe that whiteness in the psychological imagination only has implications for people of color or only for people who work and study in the field of psychology. Taking the widespread influence of whiteness into account, the remainder of this essay seeks to explore two questions. These two questions are related to the quotes that opened this essay. The first quote is taken from Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking work, Playing the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. In that book, she undertakes the task of trying to understand the people who have crafted the image of whiteness (and blackness) that she sees abound in American literature. In her view, whiteness in American literature is parasitical, nourishing itself on the imagined oppositeness of blackness. Whiteness is made superior by the supposed inferiority of blackness. It is made great by the degradation of its counterparts. Whiteness has the same function in the psychological imagination. It penetrates the psyches of all people, regardless of race and ethnicity, with white supremacy. White people-whether or not they internalize this cultural domination, actively engage in racism or racial microaggressions, or exploit people of color for economic prosperity-benefit from the image of whiteness in the psychological imagination. However, what does the other side of the coin look like. In other words: “What are the benefits and costs of whiteness in the psychological imagination for white people?”

Whiteness in the psychological imagination offers white people purpose, power, and protection. It offers purpose by making white people’s mental health and lived experiences foundational. White people are constructed as prototypes whose psychological experiences are the starting point from which all other people’s experiences begin to be understood and the desired endpoint, which all other people must reach to be considered healthy or human. This purpose intersects with the power bestowed upon them.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination imparts an authority to and a preferencing of white people’s experiences. Even when the topic of study is pathology, white people’s pathology is still held as the standard for what deviations from “normative” behavior should look like. Therefore, even white people’s unhealthy behaviors are considered more desirable. No matter what they do, prosocial, asocial, or antisocial, it is still considered better. Therefore, there is no way for white people to ever be in any position but at the top of a constructed psychological hierarchy. Psychology has given white people power through its empirical support for the demonization, marginalization, and stigmatization of people of color. It is a shackle for people of color and a throne for white people.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination protects white people from grappling with how their embodiment of whiteness is cancerous. It does not require them to consider the lives of people of color and the deleterious effects of whiteness. Their survival is not dependent on such knowledge. The centering of white people’s experiences allows white people to be blind to the experiences of people of color. They can remain oblivious to, ignore, forget about, erase or render historical-and thus, make irrelevant-the exploitation, domination, and disenfranchisement of people of color. This privilege of ignorance perpetuates their focus on themselves and the marginalization of others. White people have the option to advance in a world delusionally believing there are no consequences for their actions.

The belief that whiteness does not scar the person who embraces it is erroneous and perverted. The costs of the psychological imbuement to whiteness of purpose, power, and protection are a sense of heightened threat/defensiveness, emptiness, and loneliness/disconnection. People at the top of a hierarchy need others to be placed beneath them. Otherwise, their status at the top is meaningless. A surplus of exploited and disenfranchised people is a necessity for whiteness to have any benefit. It is the exploited and disenfranchised people who white people measure their whiteness against. It is these people through whom they can work out their own self-image and put to work for their own financial, psychological, and social benefit. However, this positioning is tenuous and always will be, as human nature is not meant to be exploitatively hierarchal. Imbedded in whiteness is a zero-sum mentality that believes that if one person or group possesses a thing or trait the other person or group cannot also share that possession or trait. Thus, there is a heightened sense of threat that the benefits of whiteness can be taken away at any time. Defensiveness develops to guard those benefits. This defensiveness is seen in the backlash against psychological research that attempts to move away from white-centered discourses and racial comparative research to an indigenous paradigm that preferences narratives of people of color. It is seen in the psychological genocide that is carried out by whiteness in its centering of definitions and policies-in media, educational institutions, financial markets, health services, and governmental agencies-that are diametrically opposite and detrimental to peoples’ of color images and interests (Kambon, 1980). A constant sense of heightened threat and defensiveness-conscious, subconscious, or unconscious-keeps people at arms-length. People with such defensiveness find themselves living a life of paranoia and hypervigilance.

The sense of purpose that whiteness in the psychological imagination provides for white people is empty. It is inextricably tied to the meaning of their whiteness. However, the centrality of whiteness is a distorted mental machination. It is a superficial prize that inflates the ego with a fictitious substance. If a purpose and identity is built upon a distortion that sets it as opposite and superior to others, what happens when whiteness is discovered to be a fraud? Again Toni Morrison’s words come to mind. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 1993 she spoke about the hollowness of race and its racist use. She stated,

“But if the racist white person-I don’t mean the person who is examining his consciousness and so on-doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race, it’s also constructed, it’s also made, and it also has some sort of serviceability. But when you take it away, if I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out, and all you’ve got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? You still like yourself?”

White people who embrace whiteness are completely dependent on it and they are seldom aware of their addiction and delusion, and if aware constantly suppressing and denying it. In its attempted cooptation of humanity, whiteness renders white people inhuman. It transforms white people into an ideal of perfection. This ideal is unrealistic and hollow.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination deprives white people of a concept of themselves as interdependent members of a human family with many diverse members. Critical psychological elements of whiteness such as competitiveness, power-dominance drive, assertiveness-aggression, and anxiety avoidance pit them against their human brethren (Kambon, 1992, 1998). These values foster loneliness/disconnection. This is because, often, whiteness erases itself from the psyche of white people and replaces it with a universalism that centers their experiences as the only legitimate experiences. Therefore all they see are reflections or iterations of themselves. When confronted with people of color, they view these folks as people to be ignored, appropriated, or eliminated (Lorde, 1984) and not as human beings with whom to commune as equals. Whiteness in the psychological imagination alleges that people can survive on their own with rugged individualism and materialism, separated from the spiritual and psychological collective.

The second question, to be addressed in this section, is inspired by James Baldwin’s quote at the beginning of this essay. Baldwin’s quote highlights the reflective nature of definitions. The qualities and worth that one confers to someone else is of direct proportion to the qualities and worth one confers to her/himself. If one marginalizes another’s experience, in actuality she/he is forcing something of her/his own experience (own being) out of view and possibly out of consciousness. This is a detrimental thing because it creates fractional, unhealthy human beings that are narrowed and egotistic, cut off from themselves and others. It seems, to me, that this is only remedied when one values her/himself enough to recognize the humanity of another as just as inextricably tied to her/his own and just as significant. So my second question is, “How does one go about freeing her/himself from whiteness in the psychological imagination to live a more whole, integrated life?” While, I have posed this question, I will not answer it. Too often, people of color are as asked to provide the suggestions for how white people can begin to grapple with and overcome their whiteness. I refuse to do the work for people who are afflicted (willingly or otherwise) with whiteness. I will leave that work to them.

If white people knew who they were, they would not need to define themselves in relation to others. They would not feel a need to stifle the breath of others to suck in air. They would let go of their zero-sum mentality and realize that their survival is inextricably related to the survival of all of the colored peoples of the world. White people are a statistical minority. There is no way that they can survive through sheer whiteness alone. Whiteness is a delusion that has created a race of schizophrenics separated from themselves and others. But that is because so many white people do not recognize their inherent worth. Their ideas of supremacy are grounded in the machinations of their whiteness and separateness, not their humanness or connectedness. There is no need for this. If white people can let go of their whiteness, educate themselves-and not rely on or requests that others do so-commune without ulterior motives, they can begin to embody the fullness of humanity that is based in the reality of community and not the illusion of superiority and materialism. When white people can let go of whiteness, they will recognize themselves as human and not need to dehumanize others and co-opt people of color identities, land, and cultural creations to lionize themselves. White people are not dumb; they are not evil. Whiteness, however, is evil. It is an arrogant ignorance. It is a poison that must be rejected in the psychological imagination and in the minds of all people-those with white and melanized skin.

The centering of whiteness in psychology is not only a cancer to society but also a detriment to the field of study. It renders psychology fraudulent in its claims to understand the human psyche. As discussed before, the overwhelming body of psychological research marginalizes people of color who constitute the majority of the human species. Whiteness in the psychological imagination paints an erroneous picture of psychological phenomena, limits the psychological knowledge base, and stifles a more true understanding of the complex, multifaceted experience of the human.

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