Why Smudge Race?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dr. Gerhardt’s use of the word smudge is taken up to build on Fanon’s critique of the effects of discourse and recognition. The descriptions of Dr. Gerhardt’s clinical encounters with three patients are used to raise questions about the discursive smudging of terms/categorical representations such as caste, class but most particularly the smudging and erasure of race. Using Fanon’s critique of the cultural specificity of discourses as well as forms of recognition that build on and perpetuate colonizing relations, questions are addressed concerning how white innocence, as described by Wekker, repeatedly smudges possibilities for the kind of focus that this paper approaches theoretically but repeatedly misses or avoids clinically. Discursive contributions from Fanon, Gaztambide, Stephens, in particular, and others are suggested as directions for how the psychoanalytic paradigm might be renovated with an expanded lens to include what Fanon called the sociogenic, its effects on recognition of self and other, and what Freire described as conscientizacao, i.e., the conscious awareness of the impact of one’s socio-political-economic history on one’s present unconscious as well as conscious experience.