Race, Rage, and Resistance

Philosophy, Psychology, and the Perils of Individualism

David M. Goodman, Eric R. Severson, Heather Macdonald, David M. Goodman, Eric R. Severson, Heather Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429561023
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society's modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures.

Experts from a range of disciplines offer a complex understanding of how humans are shaped by history, tradition, and institutions. Drawing upon the work of Lacan, Fanon, and Foucault, this text examines cultural memory, modern ideas of race and gender, the roles of symbolism and mythology, and neoliberalism's impact on psychology. Through clinical vignettes and suggested applications, it demonstrates significant alternatives to the isolated individualism of Western philosophy and psychology.

This interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for clinicians and anyone looking to augment their understanding of how human beings are shaped by the societies they inhabit.

1

OPEN WOUNDS

Discerning, Owning, and Narrating Deep History

Mark Freeman

It seems only fitting to begin this chapter with some words penned by James Baldwin.

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.¹

A premise of this chapter is that beneath the veneer of commonly shared knowledge about one’s cultural background is some measure of either unseen or unacknowledged cultural history. Following on this basic premise, this chapter goes on to underscore the importance of moving beyond the exterior of common knowledge about the cultural past, toward the deep history that lies beneath. More specifically, drawing on the idea of the “narrative unconscious,”² this chapter addresses the importance of discerning, owning, and narrating deep history. Discerning means opening oneself up to the untold stories of the cultural past. Owning means integrating and metabolizing these stories into cultural identity. Narrating means making these stories visible and public and thereby casting off the shroud of secrecy heretofore in place. This triune process need not eventuate in enhanced health and well-being. On the contrary, it may well eventuate in a deep and thoroughgoing sense of shame or the supposition that there is no making right the wrongs of the past. Whatever the outcome, there will have been some measure of substantial social transformation, and with it, the seeds of both personal and cultural growth.

In what follows, I focus my attention on the situation of African Americans in the United States. On the surface, it would appear—or it would have appeared—to many both within and outside the United States that the racial hostilities and violence that had existed before the civil rights era had largely passed. This is not to say that there weren’t remnants or that all the troubles of the past had simply vanished. Far from it. All it meant, or appeared to mean, is that we in the States, especially upon electing the country’s first Black president, had moved to a different stage. Judging by what has gone on over the course of the past few years, some of which will be considered shortly, some of this “progress” has been cast into question, and wounds that many had thought to be closed have turned out to be quite open. With this, some of our own blindness—to our history and to its sundry manifestations in the present—has become frightfully more apparent. In what follows, I shall try to make sense of this turnabout, drawing especially on the aforementioned concept of the “narrative unconscious.” Before doing so, it may be useful to provide a sketch of the empirical landscape within which some of these ideas have taken shape. I shall do so in the form a brief enumeration of the “cases” in question.

Erasure

In some ways, it seems fitting to begin with a case that happened long ago, back in 1955. I am referring to the well-known case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, who was mercilessly lynched for having allegedly “molested” a young white woman at a local grocery store. As Timothy B. Tyson writes in his (2017) book The Blood of Emmett Till, “The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal” and “reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control.” Indeed, by all indications, “Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.”³ This would seem confirmed by the fact that the “victim” herself, nearing 80, finally confessed that some of what she had said in the trial that took place to prosecute Till’s killers—including the alleged molestation—was simply untrue.

For present purposes, the main thing to be emphasized is that, appearances notwithstanding, the United States remains in the clutches of much the same sort of hostility, if not outright savagery, that brought Emmett Till to his untimely death. As Tyson writes,

If we refuse to look beneath the surface, we can simply blame some Southern white peckerwoods and a bottle of corn whiskey. We can lay the responsibility for Emmett Till’s terrible fate on the redneck monsters of the South and congratulate ourselves for not being one of them. We can also place … some percentage of the blame on Emmett, who should have known better, should have watched himself, policed his thoughts and deeds, gone more quietly through the Delta that summer… . That we blame the murderous pack is not the problem; even the idea that we can blame the black boy is not so much the problem, though it carries with it several absurdities. The problem is why we blame them. We blame them to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.⁴

I don’t know whether “pretend” is the right word here. One way or the other, there is no question but that the Emmett Tills of the world are very much with us still.

First, there was Trayvon Martin: a 17-year-old African American gunned down in Florida by one George Zimmerman, a kind of vigilante volunteer policeman, who had apparently taken upon himself the responsibility of ensuring that his streets would remain emptied of the sort of riffraff that always seemed to be lurking about. Martin was wearing a hoodie; that seemed to signal danger. A tussle ensued, culminating in his being shot dead. Was he culpable in some way? Might he actually have posed a threat—a sufficient enough threat that Zimmerman had to spring into action in self-defense? I don’t know. No one does. But Zimmerman’s profile points in the direction of the killing being “overdetermined,” shall we say, fueled by motives other than his and his community’s safety.

Then there was Michael Brown, of the now-infamous Ferguson, Missouri: an 18-year-old man who had allegedly tried to steal from a convenience store and who, in view of the threat he supposedly posed, was eventually shot multiple times, the final bullet to his head sealing the deal. Brown had been unarmed and, as a recently released video showed, he hadn’t actually been stealing; he had returned to the convenience store to retrieve some “cigarillos” that were rightfully his. Rather than Brown being the “demon” that had been described by the (white) police officer who shot him, who said he had “felt like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan” (Brown was 6-foot-4, 292 lbs.), he seems to have been another victim, scary and threatening enough to be erased. Was he culpable? Had he done some things that posed a real threat to the policeman who gunned him down? Perhaps; it is difficult to say. But not unlike the other cases, there is also compelling reason to assume that there was a disconnect between the “crime” and the horrible magnitude of the punishment.

The list continues. That same year, there was 43-year-old Eric Garner, father of six, who had been suspected of selling loose cigarettes on a street corner in Staten Island, New York City, only to be put in a chokehold on the ground. Garner, asthmatic and obese, had apparently cried out “I can’t breathe!” some eleven times; and in relatively short order he was gone, the victim of what was eventually ruled as a homicide. And Freddie Gray, 25, arrested in Baltimore, Maryland, for allegedly carrying an illegal switchblade, who died of injuries to his spinal cord, sustained while in the back of a police van. And Philando Castile, 32, in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, who had informed the shooter-policeman that he was licensed to carry a weapon and who, upon reaching into his pocket for his ID, was shot seven times. And 37-year-old Alton Sterling, shot several times at close range in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while held down on the ground by two (white) policemen.

We have heard mainly about the plight of Black men, but there have been women too—for instance, Renisha McBride, 19, who, having crashed her car, knocked on someone’s door and was blown away with a shotgun in Dearborn Heights, Michigan; and Marlene Pinnock, a 51-year-old homeless woman who had been severely beaten by a California Highway Patrol officer for walking barefoot on a highway. Unlike the others, Pinnock lived, but she was irreparably damaged.

I could go on. As I have already suggested, there were complications in several of these cases and different sides to the story. One could also argue that this spate of killings over a period of two years or so is just a random cluster, an unfortunate series of tragic coincidences that may not be as revealing as many have assumed. Finally, it may be the case that, during this same period of time, comparable numbers of white men met their untimely demise in much the same way, their own deaths buried in obscure columns of local newspapers. These sorts of “qualifications” notwithstanding, there was something extremely alarming about this sequence of killings, something that called attention to wounds mistakenly thought to have been a thing of the past.

This brings us back to Tyson’s contention that things haven’t changed quite as much as we “pretend”—or at least would like to believe. Consider the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged in the States and the demonstrations that eventually took place following this recent spate of killings. “Much like the Emmett Till protests of the 1950s,” Tyson writes,

these demonstrations raged from coast to coast and fueled scores of local campaigns. Police brutality against men and women of color provided the most urgent grievance but represented a range of festering racial problems: the criminalization of black bodies; the militarization of law enforcement; mass incarceration; racial injustice in the judicial system; the chasms of inequality between black and white and rich and poor; racial disparities in virtually every measure of well-being, from employment and education to health care.⁵

All of this had been going on since the Till era, but surreptitiously somehow, under the collective radar. “Yes,” Tyson acknowledges, “many things have changed; the kind of violence that snatched Till’s life strikes only rarely.” But “America is still killing Emmett Till, and often for the same reasons that drove the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s,”⁶ not the least of which is the fact that “we have not yet killed white supremacy.”⁷ As for what is to be done, “all of us,” he asserts, “must develop the moral vision and political will to crush white supremacy—both the political program and the concealed assumptions.” And to do so, “We have to come to grips with our own history.”⁸ Until then, there will be open wounds, gaping at times, and what Michelle Alexander has referred to as the new Jim Crow era will continue apace.⁹

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin has written, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Intergenerational Strains
• 1. Open Wounds: Discerning, Owning, and Narrating Deep History
• 2. Frantz Fanon and Psychopathology: The Progressive Infrastructure of Black Skin, White Masks
• 3. American Cultural Symbolism of Rage and Resistance in Collective Trauma: Racially-Influenced Political Myths, Counter-Myths, Projective Identification, and the Evocation of Transcendent Humanity
• 4. Neoliberalism and the Ethics of Psychology
• 5. Black Rage and White Listening: On the Psychologization of Racial Emotionality
• 6. Jouissance and Discontent: A Meeting of Psychoanalysis, Race, and American Slavery
• 7. The Nasty Woman: Destruction and the Path to Mutual Recognition
• 8. Another Voice from Radical Ethics: Denmark’s Knud Løgstrup
• 9. Identity-as-disclosive-space: Dasein, Discourse and Distortion
• 10. Finding the Other in the Self
• 11. After the World Collapsed: Two Culturally Embedded Forms of Service to Others Following Wide-Scale Societal Traumas
• Index