White psychodrama

Abstract

One might hope that philosophy could reconcile us to our social world and each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical enquiry that shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, allows us to see it all as in some sense rational. Hegel is no doubt the great exponent of this ideal, his system promising to trace history's patterns and conceptual development, while he is so optimistic as to believe that, at its end, we would achieve the perspective whereby every agent's own actions and situation can be made intelligible to themselves and others. This was meant to be true for us the readers, so we would be able to see for ourselves how what we do makes sense, given our circumstances, and is plausibly tending towards a good end.1 Of course, the problem is that there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognize it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare. Hegel hoped to reassure us that the existence of that clarificatory perspective is guaranteed; as free agents, once we achieve self-awareness we necessarily mutually recognize one another as engaged in a fundamentally cooperative project tending towards justified ends.2 But, alas, not all of us have been convinced, and a kind of existential anomie can befall a thoughtful person who surveys our present socio-cultural situation.3 What if there really just is no excuse for how things are, and no good reason for me to carry on? We ought then to make the social world worthy of reconciliation. The guiding idea here is that the ideal of reconciliation underlying Hegelian social thought is desirable, and if it is not yet possible given present social arrangements, we are called upon to change those arrangements until the ideal can be attained. To be clear, this is not a disagreement with Hegel's system at its deepest level; he may have jumped the gun on what a rationally reconcilable social order looks like, but in some sense that is a mere detail compared to his deeper point that we proactively seek a coherence that we can be reconciled to. Social and political philosophy can then play a dual role of identifying points at which our social order will throw up obstacles to attaining a coherent and reconcilable view of one's life, and suggesting means by which these obstacles can be removed.4 I shall illustrate these rather abstract ideas by constructing and analysing a narrative of the historical situation leading up to the current culture war; especially as it plays out concerning race, and black–white relations even more especially, among the middle class of the USA. The US being a culturally dominant global hegemon, the terms and structure of its culture war tend to be exported, so they are worth understanding even for those of us who are not US citizens. The pastime of the chattering classes, the culture war can be understood as a set of symbolic and political conflicts over emotionally highly charged issues du jour. Even if the particular topic of discussion is fleeting, the ultimate resolution to these debates can have drastic effects on the lives of citizens. How we decide to understand and enforce norms around gender and sexuality, for instance, touch upon some of the most intimate and important aspects of our lives. Here I am interested in how our peculiar socio-economic conditions shape the contours and possible points of resolution in the cultural debate around issues of race. We shall see that characteristic responses to our social order, which I shall describe through stylized character archetypes, make it impossible for participants in the culture war to achieve any lasting reconciliation. Instead, our responses both generate and constitute a kind of racialized psychopathology that I describe as white psychodrama. Given this analysis of the social order and its sources of psychic incoherence, I will suggest a way forward. My hope is that this will at least help people of colour caught in the midst of this to work towards a world we can live in and, by seeing ourselves as so working, to reconcile ourselves to our actual present social activities. We cannot, and ought not to, reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, any more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house. But we can come to see ourselves as knowingly and self-consciously working to resolve those contradictions, quenching that fire, and laying the foundations for a better structure wherein we may all live comfortably. Once upon a time the United States of America was a de jure racist society. As was much of the world beyond its borders, controlled as it was by racist European empires. There was a broadly understood and explicitly codified and enforced racial organization of who could live where, how individuals could interact, what sort of jobs were appropriate for whom, how law and order would operate—or wouldn't.5 The science,6 sport,7 and artistic culture8 of the day were largely carried out in conformity with, if not support of, racist norms. Gross or subtle as it may have been in any given instance, the colour line ran through everything and one crossed it only at great personal peril.9 But mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth. Time passes and the world changes. So it was that eventually this de jure racist system went the way of all things. The Civil War overthrew the slave regime. Racial immigration laws were repealed. The Civil Rights Act made various sorts of explicitly racist laws and practices impermissible. By the latter half of the twentieth century, it was clear an officially endorsed de jure racial caste system was no longer to hold sway in American life. Likewise abroad, the great European empires fell, and in their place sprang up a plethora of nations governed by formerly colonized peoples. All things considered, the twentieth century saw de jure racism suffer a world-historic defeat. Along with these legal and institutional changes went cultural changes. Casual use of the most highly charged racial slurs became limited to the worst bigots, and nowadays one can hear the sentiment expressed that overt expressions of bigotry ought to disqualify someone from public office.10 Over the twentieth century, Americans steadily reported much less opposition to interracial marriage between blacks and whites.11 Careers which previously operated an absolute colour bar opened up to non-white people.12 Various of black Americans' artistic contributions came to define not just American, but much of the globe's popular culture.13 Mainstream right politicians ceased to explicitly identify as defending white dominance or white interests,14 a norm change which even President Trump made some nominal effort to respect.15 American social attitudes thus seemed to adjust in line with the twentieth century's legal changes. But change was not total. The twentieth century kicked off with an economist lamenting the black middle class's merger access to capital.16 The twenty-first century began the same way, as the gap between total wealth and assets owned by black versus white Americans was once again increasing.17 Black assets were then hit especially hard by the 2008 crash.18 Even setting the crash aside, the fact that what black wealth exists is often tied up in housing property is its own source of racial vulnerability. Black property tends to be worth less19 amid continuing residential segregation.20 This segregation can concentrate social difficulties that further hinder black Americans' life chances.21 And the rarity of interracial contact induced is no doubt related to the persistently low rates of racial intermarriage.22 All of which compounds the fact that inheritance law allows for intergenerational wealth transfers that maintain economic segregation;23 thus intergenerational mobility from being propertyless into wealth is difficult and rare.24 What's more, finally, the backdrop for all this is a global economy where the ability to inherit wealth increasingly determines one's life chances.25 Whatever else changed, the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by. In this way American domestic politics mirrored the broader global trends of a post-imperial world.26 The European empires despoiled and depopulated nations.27 What they left in their wake were often underdeveloped economies28 and institutional structures ripe to be taken over by local elites who could simply continue the pattern of authoritarian wealth extraction.29 But the end of formal colonization did not generally lead to reparations. For the most part, agents based in the former colonial metropoles retained ownership of key resources and even infrastructure,30 and, if anything, inefficiencies in the credit market have led to a net capital flow from the former colonies to the former colonizers.31 Neither domestically nor internationally did a change in cultural attitudes and legal permissions correlate with a change in racial patterns of ownership. As such, many of the material patterns of inequality from the bad old days of de jure racist regimes have survived the demise of their former ideological superstructure. Returning to the US, these persistent material inequalities have consequences for occupational inequality. The legacy of de jure segregation plausibly goes a long way to explaining wealth and income gaps between black and white Americans.32 And contemporary de facto segregation generates social networks that concentrate access to opportunities for work and education among the already prosperous, further disadvantaging blacks.33 What's more, fulfilling and legal employment for ‘less skilled’ workers was already drying up by the early twenty-first century.34 In so far as there has been a coherent social response to this collapse in opportunity, what has stepped in to the place of those jobs has been the prison system.35 The rapid rise in the population of incarcerated persons has, of course, disproportionately affected black people,36 and despite mass incarceration being a persistent public concern, the American political establishment has been unable to effectively react.37 Finally, even if explicit appeal to white interests withered away, race continues to be in fact a powerful predictor of how Americans vote.38 The liberalization of social attitudes has not led to the total disappearance of overtly racist stereotypes.39 And the political intelligentsia are still largely white, which has arguably affected the content and focus of their work.40 This, then, is where history has placed us. The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions—it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level, this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself. After much struggle, this world has publicly declared, and in some sense sincerely come to believe, that racial hatred is a social failure and a horrid character defect. We now welcome forms of love, friendship, and cooperation that were once unthinkable. And yet we carefully divide up the pie to ensure former slaves are kept poor and ashamed. The inevitable social discord generated by this immiseration are dealt with by brutality and caging. And the lingering suspicion remains that all this is the former slaves' fault. How then do people respond to the facts relayed in this historical narrative, and what does it mean for their ability to reconcile themselves to their own social order? The character archetypes are stylized representations of typical responses to the status quo. Each of the types below is assumed to be driven by some fairly normal psychological motivations—they do not wish to feel guilty, they would prefer to have more stuff rather than less—and respond accordingly to the evidence, incentives, and institutional structures their society presents them with. To that extent one can think of these as something like publicly available social roles which facilitate intentional action,41 or as agents for whose behaviour I am giving a structural explanation.42 In either case, allowing for the overly neat appearance of any stylized picture, what follows is meant to be a descriptively plausible picture of reactions by many actual politically switched-on agents to life in a society shaped by the circumstances of the historical narrative just relayed. They are caricatures for sure, but ones which I expect many readers will see resemblances to within their own lives. The agents we discuss are highly polarized people fighting a culture war. There is empirical evidence available which lets us situate what sort of person this would be. Partisanship has largely been a phenomenon only among wealthier and more politically engaged voters.43 These are mutually reinforcing categories; home ownership, for instance, predicts being more politically involved.44 Polarization encompasses far more than just party or policy preference.45 It includes, significantly for us, what news media and commentariat figures people listen to and engage with.46 This association with media consumption and lifestyle differences makes the polarization highly affectively charged.47 White people are more likely to be politically engaged48—if anything, black voter turnout is systematically over-reported.49 And, as already discussed, whites are also more likely to be wealthy. So all this means that the culture war categories I focus on will primarily be elite agents, and will largely (though not entirely) focus on various white responses to the status quo. Despite culture war polarization largely being a fight between whites, issues of race still turn out to be very important to how it plays out. Measures of racist attitudes still do a good job of predicting Americans' attitudes to candidates and policies.50 Since the 2008 election of Barack Obama, measures of white Americans' level of racial antagonism have spiked.51 And voters report racial issues as some of those on which they are most divided.52 Plausibly, at least some of the cultural divides now wracking this section of elite white America arose from differing responses to the changing social meaning of whiteness following the end of de jure racist regimes.53 So I shall rationally construct character types which allow one to appreciate how the sort of elite white agent engaged in a culture war revolving around race might behave and ideologically understand themselves.54 These responses may not always strike you as plausible or fully coherent. But I think that is to be expected in a situation where people are having to make sense of a society shaped by contradictory forces.55 That, after all, is why this is a story of psychodrama. The conflict between an ideology of racial egalitarianism and a material reality of strict hierarchy generates such a tension, and it is the desire to keep one's status atop that hierarchy (or make one's way within it) while avoiding guilt which thereby drives the culture war archetypes. One common type among the white majority may be called the Repenter. This character straightforwardly responds to our story with an overwhelming sense of guilt. They see the group they identify with as having committed horrible crimes globally and domestically, and they are ever so aware of the ways in which present material conditions generate continued deprivation for black people alongside relative comfort for many white people. They believe in racially egalitarian ideologies which tell them this ought not to be, and hence feel unhappy with themselves and the state of things. The Repenter would deeply, deeply, like to do things to alleviate this guilt. And their form of repentance involves trying to change their interpersonal habits and consumer choices so as to minimize their contribution to the broader social issue, and help the particular black people they interact with. In this way, by doing that sort of self-work, they hope to be able to live in a world that is admittedly unjust while making it that little bit better, and through such efforts be able to honestly maintain a positive self-image. So the Repenter invests in lessons on sophisticated etiquette around interracial interactions.56 They are keen for their workplace to celebrate diversity, and satisfying their desire for both a tolerable workspace and various consumer goods drives what commentators call ‘woke capitalism’.57 They seek out and do their best to appreciate the work of non-white thinkers and artists.58 Sometimes all this can be rather ostentatious, and one rather suspects the moral kudos for being seen to do as much is playing rather too large a role in their motivations. But we need not be so cynical; these may well be the result of a heartfelt sense that such behaviour is required by justice, given the genuine guilt which their group membership and historical situation has placed upon them. Another common type among the white majority may be called the Represser. Much like the Repenter, they are aware of our broad historical situation, and not immune to pangs of guilt. But the Represser feels this is largely unreasonable—too much focus on the negatives rather than the positives, and prone to generating an irrational self-hatred in themselves and among their fellow whites. The Represser does not deny the central points of the earlier narrative, but they would like to change the focus away from the potentially guilt-inducing elements. Progress has been made and there are, after all, good things that have happened in our history too. They do not wish to return to de jure racism, but instead hold out hope for a society that is, in some sense, considerably more relaxed about race, and less prone to fixate on the historic crimes of white people. Such a society could do better at learning from the past, by considering it with an air of cool detachment. So far as we can now draw on the past's lessons, salient to the Represser is that the success cases for progress seem to be ones wherein race was previously central to how we organized things (say, immigration law) but is now de-emphasized or suppressed. So the Represser seeks out intellectual support for the idea that our narrative is altogether too cynical.59 They seek to implement colour-blind policies and norms that avoid drawing attention to race. And through their consumer choices they try to encourage media that embodies race-neutral virtues. In a sort of mirror image to the Repenter, one can sometimes get the impression that the wish to avoid discussing race is a second-best alternative for a person who simply dislikes guilt and wishes to remain ignorant of anything that may induce it,60 or, worse, harbours anti-black animus, but lacks the courage to explicitly challenge anti-racist social mores. But, again, it need not be, and the Represser strategy can be the result of a heartfelt conviction that the path to just unity goes via de-emphasizing differences and stressing the encouraging progress made in learning to get along. Before moving on to our third type, let's be clear about a few things. First, the Repressers and Repenters are diametrically opposed. The Repenter's response to our situation crucially depends on playing up exactly the things the Represser wants to play down. They are exactly opposed strategies in responding to a Du Boisian social problem. These are cases wherein one finds ‘the failure of an organised social group to realise its group ideals, through the inability to adapt certain desired lines of action to conditions of life’.61 Repenters and Repressers alike are responding to their failure to realize racially egalitarian group ideals, but one wants to adopt lines of behaviour that acknowledge this failure and alleviate guilt and the other wishes to suppress discussion of the failure. It is near enough psychologically impossible for the same person simultaneously do both, and it is thus difficult for Repressors and Repenters to share spaces and resources. Second, the above two types by no means exhaust even elite majority group responses to the situation outlined in the narrative. For one thing, most people are simply checked out of politics. For another, (for example) explicit white supremacists would fit into neither group. But among the chattering classes of the whites, I believe the Represser and Repenter character archetypes capture many of the most important personas. Third, and finally, neither's strategy for responding to the narrative involves large-scale changes in the distribution of ownership of stuff, including housing and living arrangements. Repenters and Repressers are engaged in a fundamental conflict, but it is a conflict over how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society, not a conflict about how or whether to reduce that material inequality. Of course, the rest of us do not simply sit by and watch the whites duke it out among themselves. If nothing else, they still have ownership of the stuff and a democratic majority, so most of us are dependent on them for making a living. How, then, have the PoC intelligentsia—people of colour sufficiently engaged in politics to be tapped into the white culture war and the historical narrative underpinning it—responded to the opportunities and challenges presented thereby? With a dextrous entrepreneurial spirit! Which is to say, by cashing in. In institutions like academia, more dominated by the Repenter type, there has been the opportunity for mediocre if sharp-eyed young PoC intelligentsia to present themselves as bearers of black thinkers' insight.62 It is considerably harder to pull this off from within academia as an advocate for Represser views. But where there is demand, there will be supply. And there is a large audience keen for a black thinker to give voice to an intelligent version of the Represser narrative. Sufficiently talented black thinkers have been happy to oblige.63 Various media organizations and political groups likewise provide opportunity for similar pseudo-spokespeople for PoC intelligentsia catering to both Repressers and Repenters. The white majority's superior wealth easily translates into control over cultural institutions. They are the bulk of the consumers of newspapers and intelligentsia magazines, their children the largest racial demographic in elite colleges; they write the cheques that form the basis of the endowments, and tend, in fact, to be the ones sitting in positions of upper authority in newsrooms and university administration. And among this white majority there is demand for a PoC intelligentsia. It is a vital part of Repenter strategy for alleviating guilt that they listen to such voices. Repressers are not as tied to this strategy, but if one is troubled by accusations of racism (and these may come from within), the fact that black thinkers agree with your perspective will be salient and interesting. Those PoC intelligentsia who are able to catch and retain the attention of one of the white bourgeois factions thus gain access to their resources and the institutions they control for promoting their own view. They thereby attain a kind of leadership status which is not related to having the skills required for such a job,64 nor popular legitimacy with the people they purportedly speak for.65 A PoC intelligentsia thus emerges, without ownership of its cultural situation,66 and catering to white tastes while giving the impression of representing PoC perspectives. 'The actual work is for you to deconstruct the things within you: whiteness,’ Rao said. 'Whiteness harms people of color, but worry about yourself. Stop worrying about us—that's paternalistic, too.’ Bond echoed this sentiment. 'This idea that we, as white people, need to go out and make these big external actions—that's just white supremacy,’ she said. 'This internal work is the hard work; it's the work that never ends.’ They see the deconstruction of whiteness as a prerequisite for true anti-racist work. Jackson explained, 'Until you deal with your inner stuff—until you can say, “I'm coming from a place where I recognize that I have these thoughts, and I'm working on it”—everything else is performing.’67 And, more generally, there has grown up a small but profitable industry of racial self-help gurus, who extract money from Repenters in exchange for helping them alleviate guilt without challenging the fundamental material inequalities underlying the situation.68 Of course, it should be clear that the PoC intelligentsia are, to a certain extent, simply playing the hand life dealt them. As per our narrative, they do not tend be independently wealthy or come from family backgrounds that permit self-support. For the most part, they occupy institutions in which they are the minority, and the taste-makers and the persons with the ability to direct resources of those institutions will largely be drawn from the white bourgeoisie's chattering class, which is to say will very often be Repenters or Repressers. They have to eat, and which of them we see and hear from is filtered by the tastes of the white majority. If their behaviour seems disappointing, then one ought to consider the circumstances which birthed them rather than engaging in moralistic personal critique. The sad fact is that once patterns of racial interaction become entrenched, they become very hard for individuals to deviate from.69 We need a kind of structural change, one that changes the causes of behaviour embedded in the social environment we are all responding to, generating mass rather than individual behavioural changes.70 To gain a more concrete sense of how these archetypes present themselves in everyday life, let us imagine a hypothetical culture war racial flashpoint. Considering how the character archetypes thus sketched might respond to it will be instructive. So let us suppose that the nation is responding to yet another extra-judicial killing of a black man by a white police officer. What sort of behaviours should we expect from the character types given what we have said about them? The Repenter is driven overwhelmingly by guilt, a desire that their personal behaviour and environment not be associated with racism or racial social ills, but has no great desire to change the material basis of the society in which they live. A brutal reminder of black vulnerability to death at the hands of the state will thus first and foremost activate that guilt in a visceral way, leading to heartfelt distress. They will wish to signal their extreme disapproval of police behaviour and induce organizations they are associated with to do the same—for instance, perhaps their workplace could be made to issue a statement affirming that black lives matter, or some such, while committing to uphold anti-racist practices in its own behaviour. They will look to prominent PoC intelligentsia for intellectual leadership on the question of what should be done at a social level, but since they are largely drawn from society's upper echelons, they are liable to be uncomfortable at practical actions deemed extreme—that is, which could actually upset the ability of the police to perform the social function of protecting their lives and property. Hence, beyond sloganeering and support for piecemeal reform (supporting candidates who combine radical slogans with piecemeal reform policy will be especially tempting), Repenters are unlikely to engage in any sustained push for large-scale change. Guilt is assuaged so far as possible by their personal actions towards the good and the disassociation of their organizations from racist animus. They listened to PoC intelligentsia voices and made some efforts towards acting upon what they were told. When the next police killing causes outrage, the cycle may be repeated. The Represser is driven by a desire to avoid unnecessary guilt-inducing focus on race, to ensure there is recognition of progress made so we do not lose what is valuable, and to avoid any suggestion that they are personally responsible (or responsible qua white person) for the ills of black people they have never interacted with. Any framing of the police killing as racist, or which focuses on racial disparities in treatment by the police, is hence liable to annoy. If the Represser can be satisfied that there is no proof that specifically racial animus motivated the police officer, they will likely bemoan the public rushing to judgement on this point, and offer alternative (race-neutral) explanations for the police officer's behaviour. They will decry any comparison between present events and past explicitly racist atrocities such as lynchings, and highlight the absurdity of suggesting that contemporary police officers still behave anything like their equivalents in the bad old days of de jure racism.