The Other Within: White Shame, Native-American Genocide

Abstract

In this article, the author asks about the genocidal history of the United States, and the forms of reparation and recognition that can be found in white racial shame and white racial guilt. Examining the history of white supremacy in the United States, the author queries the differential practices of twin racial regimes: African-American slavery and the extermination of Indigenous peoples. Because of these differential practices of persecution, the “vanished Indian” will enter white psychoanalysis through the evocation of “creative racial shame”; whereas African-American slavery has entered that psychoanalysis through depressive white guilt. Much as psychoanalysis has distinguished pathological guilt from the depressive guilt that leads to reparation and remorse, the author distinguishes pathological shame from a creative form of shame that allows us to see the Other whom whiteness has vanished.