I the Addiction of Transparency: Observations on the Emotional

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The Addiction of Transparency: Observations on the Emotional Neurophysiology of Whiteness

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

Charles Birge

Graduate Program in Comparative Studies

The Ohio State University

2019

Thesis Committee

Maurice Stevens, PhD, Advisor

Melissa Curley, PhD

Franco Barchiesi, PhD

Copyrighted by

Charles Birge

2019

Abstract

In The Addiction of Transparency, I address the question of why the oppressive qualities of whiteness function with simultaneous force, tenacity, and subtlety, and on an unconscious level, such that whiteness takes the appearance of an existential structure or transcendent principle that totally overdetermines social life. I suggest that whiteness takes on these qualities because it operates through a set of largely unconscious neurophysiological structures that get organized into a collective pattern of racialized denigration, abuse, and addiction. I demonstrate this by reading two humanistic accounts of whiteness—theologian Thandeka’s study of white childhood and cultural theorist Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s philosophical genealogy of race—through the neurophysiology of emotions theorized by trauma clinician Bessel van der Kolk. I suggest that while these patterns are incredibly tenacious, operating with both minute subtlety and spectacular force, they can be reorganized using therapeutic and contemplative techniques, and I imagine what such a “therapy” for whiteness might look like.

iii

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my family, my parents in particular, for laying a foundation of love and support without which I would never have arrived at the kinds of questions I am now able to grapple with. Ultimately I hope to build on this foundation, even as my work offers critique of our racial positionality. Thanks also to my spiritual mentors and guides, Mark Nunberg, Alex Haley, and

Merra Young, for teaching me the emotional and spiritual techniques and perspectives that underlie much of this thesis. I am also grateful for the theoretical foundations, very much alive in the present work, I received from my undergraduate mentors: Prof.’s Peter Rachleff, SooJin Pate,

Juliana Hu Pegues, Duchess Harris, and Kiarina Kordela. I am also indebted to friends who have indulged my theoretical ramblings over the years, sometimes encouraging me, sometimes calling me on my crap. This includes James Olson, Laura Johnson, John Seng, Steve Quam, Dan

Bomberg, Meg Reid, Jess Holler, and Anh Ho—thanks especially to James and Dan for providing feedback on drafts of this thesis. Finally, many thanks to my thesis committee: Prof.

Franco Barchiesi, for pushing me to stare into the abyss of racial antagonism; Prof. Melissa

Curley, for asking challengin questions and forcing me to clarify my thinking; and my advisor,

Prof. Maurice Stevens, for offering generous guidance in navigating this strange world of graduate school, and for encouraging me to think of theorizing as a process of sinking into questions as much making claims.

Vita

Personal Information

Master of Arts student in Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, August 2017 – May 2019. Thesis title: “The Addiction of Transparency: Observations on the Emotional Neurophysiology of Whiteness.”

Bachelor of Arts (May 2015) in American Studies, Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, August 2018 – May 2019.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Comparative Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract...... iii Acknowledgments ...... iv Vita...... v Introduction...... 1 Whiteness: from social construction to existential structure ...... 8 Turning to emotions and neurophysiology ...... 16 Notes on methodology: the problems and possibilities of neurophysiology ...... 23 Chapter 1: The Emotional Neurophysiology of Whiteness ...... 29 Emotional nourishment strategies and the dispositions of the emotional brain ...... 29 The logic of the emotional brain...... 35 A note on agency and cultural-political conditioning...... 40 Learning to Be White...... 42 Can the white emotional brain account for the existential structure of whiteness?...... 48 Therapy for whiteness?...... 57 Chapter 2: The Addiction of Transparency ...... 60 The transparency thesis...... 60 Transparency’s existential structure of race ...... 63 Transparency as nourishment strategy, whiteness as addiction...... 70 Therapy for whiteness, reconsidered ...... 76 Bibliography ...... 82

Introduction

My family lived in Cincinnati, Ohio until just before my sixth birthday. On weekends I’d sometimes ride the bus downtown with my father, and he’d tell me not to pay attention to the “freaks and weirdos” (the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicts) on the bus, many of whom were black. I also remember walking with my mother to her art studio, which was also near downtown in a neighborhood where a lot of poor and working class blacks lived, or at least hung out. I can remember her discomfort in their presence. She also once mentioned an incident that upset her. Although we lived in a generally middle class, white neighborhood, there was an intersection nearby where some black people lived.

Once, when she was walking across this intersection a group of black people threw a firecracker into the street and it exploded right next to her. She was startled and frightened, and the black people all laughed at her. She said she felt really humiliated and hurried away as quickly as possible.

After my family moved to Minnesota, I remember them mentioning to some friends how much less racial tension St. Paul/Minneapolis had compared with Cincinnati.

And yet, I also remember that the same subtle but visceral discomfort would arise in them when we encountered black people—especially if they seemed working class, poor, or homeless. It was only that we encountered them less often in Minnesota.

*** 1

By the time I got to elementary school, I had a pretty clear sense that something about blackness was bad or dangerous. I noticed that my black peers were treated differently than I was. My teachers assumed my intentions were good, but the black students seemed to cause more trouble and were disciplined more often. Consequently, I didn’t like working in groups with black kids and avoided playing with them on the playground. They seemed scary and tough. Sometimes when I actually got to know a black peer, I’d realize they weren’t so scary and that we could get along, even become buddies at school. But this was the exception, not the rule, and it shows that my prejudice was automatic—it required effort or special circumstances to overcome it.

I came to understand this implicitly, through unspoken affect. My parents and teachers never openly told me that black people were dangerous. In fact, they told me the opposite: that people of all races were equal, and, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, we should judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

But it seemed as if the color of your skin determined the content of your character, and so people ended up getting judged for the color of their skin anyways. And regardless of what the adults around me said, their visceral, embodied affect seemed to suggest that blackness was dangerous. Why this was, exactly, was never stated, but the message was clear enough.

***

I attended St. Paul’s Central High School, a racially diverse public school: about one third white, one third black, and one third Asian—most of whom were Hmong.

When I was about to transition to high school, I worried that I would get bullied by black kids. This never happened. To the contrary, in high school blackness actually became cool. White kids who hung out with black kids seemed cool--to other white kids, at least-

-and they were even cooler if they smoked weed with them, or partied with them, or dated them. But even if you didn’t know any black kids, “talking black” could make you slicker and funnier.

Hip hop was the soundtrack to all of this. For some white kids, hip hop was about authenticity--keeping it real. The black voices and rhythms of rap somehow gave these kids an outlet to express real feelings of frustration and anger they had toward the school regime, their parents, their boyfriend or girlfriend, or just general teenage angst. But for me and many of my friends, listening to hip hop was more about being cool. Even if it didn’t serve as full-blown catharsis, it provided a particularly exciting release from the seemingly lame disciplinary regime that high school--and middle class whiteness, generally--asked of us: be on time, sit still, be quiet and listen, do your homework, don’t do drugs, control your sexuality. We felt hip hop in our bodies: in the abandon of a basement dance party or a first drinking binge, in a friendly handshake or fist bump, in looks of admiration from our peers and looks of disapproval from our teachers and parents.

But despite the coolness of blackness, in high school it continued to be disciplined more than whiteness, and there was no doubt that our school was racially segregated and unequal.

*** 3

As an undergraduate I encountered critical theories of race through American and ethnic studies classes. I was captivated by the way these theories peeled back the surface of social life to reveal an underlying oppressive logic, suggesting a way to move toward a more just society, and they made sense of what I had observed in high school. I declared an American Studies major and involved myself with planning and facilitating events related to social justice and multicultural inclusivity. However, despite my seemingly good intentions, I said harmful things that alienated some of my peers of color. For example, I remember joking about how I used to look down on our college’s Pow Wows:

“Wow, that was racist of me,” I said with a laugh. But the moment those words left my lips, I noticed an indigenous peer in the room; she was not amused. This was not my only mistake, and every time I let one slip I felt really ashamed--like a total fraud. I wondered why this kept happening. It seemed like the forces of racism kept spilling out of me even as I tried to understand them in classes and workshops.

***

After graduating, I worked for a non-profit organization that offered cultural and historical programming. I was assigned to do research for a project aimed at re- interpreting a historic century military fort. The organization had interpreted this fort as a place of patriotic pride and enjoyment, where families could come learn about military history and the trials and tribulations of frontier living. But in the nineteenth century the officers at the fort held slaves, and the fort once functioned as an

4 internment/concentration camp for hundreds of Native people who were then exiled further west.

I recall watching a promotional video for the fort’s new interpretation. Cinematic music accompanied dramatic aerial view footage of the fort and surrounding wilderness, along with Ken Burns-inspired pans of historical photos. “For some, this was a place of pride,” the narrator proclaimed as uniformed men marched to a drum and saluted the

American flag. “But for others, this was a place of tragedy.” Here the video cut to a black-and-white photograph of a Native woman with a haunting expression of deep despair. The video came to a triumphant conclusion: the fort would be re-interpreted as having “many stories” that would appeal to “diverse audiences.”

The video represented our organization as a savior of the site, reclaiming it so that everyone--white veterans, descendants of black slaves, exiled indigenous people--could enjoy it. But of course, the video did not touch on the fact that this new interpretation was an attempt to come to terms with our organization’s long history of bad blood with indigenous people. For decades the institution refused to acknowledge the military violence inflicted on Native peoples at this fort. On top of this, the institution had held indigenous human remains in its collections for decades, against the wishes of the peoples to whom those remains belonged. I wondered why the institution couldn’t just admit that they were flawed and had made mistakes. Why cling to this narrative of greatness?

***

Leading up to the 2016 election, I was bothered by how the Clinton campaign’s vision of multicultural America had to be articulated as a grand dream that was being held back by a “basket of deplorables”--bigots who held onto outdated prejudices. It seemed like this rhetoric only made Trump supporters more virulent, because they already perceived multiculturalism as something alienating and elitist. I was in favor of liberal policies that attempted to undo institutional racism, but why did articulating an anti-racist vision have to involve shaming and denigrating people that held onto racist views? Was this really helping anyone?

After the election many critics pointed this out, but it seemed like these critics were stuck on framing the white working class as downtrodden heroes whose racism was either nonexistent or only a function of economic resentment and insecurity. Why couldn’t these critics acknowledge the oppressive force of both liberal elitism and the actual racism of conservative whiteness? The conversation around whiteness seemed too rigid--swinging between poles of shame and heroism, good non-racists and bad racists, victims and predators.

And, to make matters worse, no one seemed interested in addressing the depth of actual racial violence. Clinton’s multicultural vision was hardly radical, and she represented an establishment that would likely perpetuate much of the racial violence upon which our country depends. So it seemed like her campaign’s vision was doubly dangerous: it covered over liberal racism while stoking conservative racism.

***

I offer these anecdotes and reflections both to situate myself personally in my project and to point to the strange, oppressive patterns of whiteness that I try to make sense of in the following pages. Why did my white parents and teachers say that race did not matter, and yet their visceral affect suggested otherwise? Why was the aggressive, rebellious, and erotic spirit of hip hop so infectious to me and my white teenage friends?

Why, despite my professed commitment to social justice, did I keep blurting out harmful things in my college classes and workshops--and why did each blunder leave me with a crippling feeling of shame? Why couldn’t the mostly white organization I worked for simply admit its racist history and attempt to move forward in good faith? Why did the liberal rhetoric of the 2016 election seem to sew the seeds of its own undoing? Putting all of this together: why is whiteness marked by strangely contradictory forces, such as simultaneous fear and desire? Why is it that these forces can operate with the subtlety of a glance or the brutality of a gunshot? How can whiteness seem so fragile and yet remain so deeply entrenched? And, most importantly: how do these strange, contradictory, and oppressive forces get set in motion, and how might they get undone?

These are the questions I take up in this thesis, and I offer what follows as a kind of thought experiment in which I suggest a possible answer: that whiteness might obtain its strange, contradictory qualities because it operates through a set of reflexive neurophysiological structures that, in their attempt to obtain emotional affirmation, get organized into a collective pattern of racialized denigration, abuse, and addiction. While these patterns are incredibly tenacious, operating with both minute subtlety and

7 spectacular force, they can be reorganized using therapeutic and contemplative techniques, and I imagine what such a “therapy” for whiteness might look like.

Of course, I am not the first person to consider these questions, and my thinking is informed by many scholars of race who have offered different perspectives on whiteness.

So, before diving into my intervention I offer a brief intellectual autobiography that highlights the specific problems I seek to address. While this will serve as my literature review, I acknowledge that there are many critics of whiteness whose work I simply have not read, and so I offer the following not as a comprehensive account of the scholarship but as a review of significant trends that frame my thinking.

Whiteness: from social construction to existential structure

I have been particularly influenced by the somewhat rag-tag assembly of scholarship referred to as “critical whiteness studies,” an offshoot of critical race theory that enjoyed something of a heyday in the 1990s. Critical scholars of whiteness cross disciplinary lines, hailing from legal studies to sociology to political economy. One of the field’s first and most influential texts is David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991, 2007). Roediger examines how white racism molded the American working class from the late eighteenth century through

Reconstruction, placing himself in a genealogy of critical (particularly Marxist) historians, who, following W.E.B. Du Bois, have attempted to understand the

“psychological wage” of whiteness that has consistently caused the white working class to side with white elites against black workers and slaves. (Roediger, 6-9, 12-13) Another

8 crucial text is Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1997), which seeks to understand how race influences white women’s lives. Frankenberg argues that “whiteness refers to a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination.” (Frankenberg, 5-7) Further, she observes that in their dominance the practices that constitute whiteness remain racially unmarked. Thus she names whiteness to displace it as a universal, dominant norm and assign white people a position in the racial hierarchy. From this, she claims that ultimately the discursive strategies of race can be named and reworked by staying attuned to the racial dimensions of daily life. (241-242)

Two other influential works of critical whiteness studies include legal scholar

Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” (1993) and sociologist George Lipsitz’s The

Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

(1998). Harris argues that American law has consistently treated whiteness as a kind of property that confers political and legal power and privilege. Thus, she argues for instituting affirmative action policies to deny this privilege and encourage a more racially just distribution of resources. Along similar lines, Lipsitz argues that American social policy has consistently invested in the economic and political benefit of white people while using pathologizing, racist narratives to justify the adverse effects these policies have on communities of color.

In theoretical terms, critical whiteness studies examines race as a kind of

Gramscian game: a set of social constructions that compete for hegemony and naturalize

9 or mystify the underlying arrangement of political-economic power. These scholars argue that whiteness is one of these social constructions, and that it serves the interests of phenotypically white people. Thus, critical whiteness studies proposes that deconstructing whiteness requires provincializing its habits and practices, revealing them as one competing construction among many rather than a transparent or natural condition.

Next, the critic places the dominant racial narratives of whiteness (such as color-blind meritocracy and other tropes that deflect blame for social problems onto people of color) in their broader historical and political context, revealing the political-economic motives that drive them: namely, the racially unequal distribution of resources they sustain.

Finally, this can open space for competing narratives to articulate subversive demands that redistribute resources more justly. Thus, for critical whiteness studies deconstructing whiteness is a process of conscious denunciation, analysis, subversion, and retistribution.

I also turned to visual culture critic Richard Dyer’s White (1997). Like critical whiteness scholars, Dyer argues that there is a need to “dislodge [whites] from the position of power,” which can be partially accomplished by analyzing whiteness and its representation in its particularity. (Dyer, 1-4) Embodiment is crucial for Dyer’s study because it is bodies that are the subjects of visual representation. He argues that the embodiment of whiteness is deeply related to Christianity and projects of enterprise and imperialism. Dyer notes that Christianity is obsessed with the body, but also delineates spirit as something separate from it. However, spirit is nevertheless “embodied” in the exceptional and transcendent figures of Mary and Jesus, whose bodies are filled with the

Divine. Dyer is particularly interested in how this paradoxical dualism animates a never-

10 ending striving toward salvation that is deeply embedded in European culture. Indeed, he argues that this logic of striving manifests in modernity’s concept of race, which seeks to describe the cultural, historical, and biological supremacy and purity of white-skinned human beings. Thus racial discourses places whiteness in the paradoxical position of being both a particular, superior race, and the un-raced epitome of universal humanity.

(15-23) Dyer observes that whiteness also embodies enterprise and imperialism, which is, again, a result of whiteness’s peculiar “spirit”—its goal of achieving transcendent purity.

This manifests as economic enterprise, capacity, ambition, and the drive to rule over others, hence imperialism and colonialism, and introduces a new paradox to whiteness: it seeks to conquer all but its identity as conqueror always requires something new to conquer. (32-36)

While Dyer’s analysis also deconstructs whiteness by demystifying its racial hegemony, he hints at something that goes beyond this approach. Dyer suggests that whiteness is a form of representation and embodiment that mediates the existential paradoxes of pre-modern and modern Europe: the paradox of Divine spirit and earthly flesh, the paradox of universal humanity and its particular races, and the paradox of the capitalist colonial project, which always requires something beyond it even as it attempts to mark stable boundaries. Thus, he hints that whiteness is a project of existential grounding, an attempt to find security and identity in the midst of existential uncertainty and contradiction, rather than a mere ideological foil for political and economic interests.

Put differently, Dyer suggests that whiteness provides a deeper existential security, rather than merely political and economic security.

Dyer’s observations point to a hunch I had as I continued to reflect on the significance of whiteness: I was not convinced that white supremacy could be undone by provincializing its habits and practices, revealing their hidden power interests, and providing alternative narratives. There seemed to be something deeper going on. This was due in part to my experiences (mentioned above) in American/ethnic studies classrooms and non-profit meeting rooms, in which, despite the repeated deconstruction and denunciation of race as a power-laden social construct, white people (including myself) continued to make conversations about race difficult and frustrating. The oppressive qualities of whiteness seemed to be lurking in nooks and crannies left untouched by the conscious demystification offered by critical whiteness studies--as if white people’s sense of themselves and the world was overwhelmed by murky forces that remained stuck in patterns of racism.

My hunch was also informed by other scholars who analyzed race as a system of existential grounding. For example, in “Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and

Isolation” (2011), legal scholar john a. powell argues that in the Enlightenment, the very notion of having a coherent, individual, and human self was conflated with whiteness.

Here he follows Dyer and Harris but goes further, noticing that this conflation was only made coherent against a notion of blackness as not having a human self--of blackness as an ontological void of “social death.” Thus, the fear of racial otherness is not merely a fear of losing resources or being threatened by an exterior other, it is also the fear that the ontology of the self is unstable, and that if the supremacy of whiteness were to crumble, the white self would fall into a state of ontological vertigo and social death. In Playing in

12 the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), Toni Morrison observes a similar structure in American literature, as numerous white authors use blackness to meditate on the limitations and possibilities of their own condition. Thus, blackness functions as a “surrogate self,” an ontological void on which the white literary imagination parasitically depends in order to safely participate in the drama, terror, and promise of American civilization.

This deeper structure of race is more fully elucidated by the theoretical perspective of Afro-Pessimism, which has also greatly influenced my thinking on whiteness. Afro-Pessimism arose out of the innovations of black scholars Orlando

Patterson (1982), Hortense Spillers (1987), and Saidiya Hartman (1997), and has been elaborated by Frank Wilderson (2010), Jared Sexton (2008), Christina Sharpe (2010,

2016), and Fred Moten (2003), among many others. While “Afro-Pessimism” is not a monolithic term, and not all of these scholars identify with it, all of them explore similar territory: they theorize blackness--both past and present--as a condition of absolute (or nearly absolute) captivity in which the expectations, norms, and laws of human relationality (e.g., gender, kinship, personhood) do not apply--the black slave is, again,

“socially dead.” This means that blackness is beyond the purview of Human ethical institutions such as the state, the law, civil society, and politics writ large (even revolutionary politics).

Moreover, this condition of social death is the ground against which the modern notion of Humanity indexes itself; that is, in the modern world, Humanity only knows itself in all of its capacities (the ability to reason, to have emotions, to enter into intimate

13 and civil relationships) against the absolute incapacity of black slaves. Thus, Afro-

Pessimism argues that black enslavement is not merely a tool of economic exploitation; it serves as a symbolic position against which the existential and psychological security of

Humanity is obtained--a condition which persists in the present day. In psychoanalytic terms, then, it functions unconsciously to sustain the psychic health of the Human. While the positions of Human Mastery can be occupied by various non-black peoples depending on the needs of the structure, it is most closely correlated with whiteness. So, for Afro-

Pessimism whiteness is not merely a social construction that secures the hegemony; whiteness is an existential structure, instantiated in the unconscious, the very nature of which is to parasitically prevent racial others--blackness in particular--from accessing the agency needed to participate in the struggle for hegemony.

The Afro-Pessimist analysis resonated with me. Given how easily white supremacy seems to resist conscious denunciation, it seemed sensible to argue that the nature of whiteness was to parasitically suck dry the agency of people of color, blackness in particular. However, Afro-Pessimism also has a problem: it is, by definition, abstract and essentialist, leading to difficulties and confusion when discussing how it functions phenomenologically in everyday life. Challenging questions abound: if blackness is theorized as so totalizing that formations such as gender and class lose their significance, can it provide an alibi for black patriarchy and class elitism? And if whiteness is so totalizing, does it mean that white people can simply dismiss the possibility of political engagement and responsibility as out of their control? How would one theorize the diverging interests of a wealthy black man and a poor indigenous woman--is she still

14 privileged in her contingent Humanity over his absolute enslavement? In a quasi- theological fashion, Afro-Pessimism risks outsourcing the demands, nuances, and agency of everyday life to an abstraction that seems transcendent.

Some Afro-Pessimist scholars attempt to address this problem. Sexton (“People- of-Color Blindness, 35-36), for example, analyzes ontology politically, rather than philosophically or theologically; he argues that the ontology of race is not actually a transcendent principle, but it is so deeply entrenched that it takes on the appearance of one. Wilderson (following Sexton) theorizes that race functions as a “libidinal economy” of unconscious psychic identification (with the mastery/capacity of whiteness) and abjection (of enslaved blackness) that structures “the whole of psychic life.” (Wilderson,

9) But both of these political and libidinal explanations still rely heavily on a near- transcendent structural analysis, theorized as absolutely unconscious and always already present; they do not suggest how they might be be accessed by conscious awareness, and there is no specific moment or condition in which they begin, other than the Middle

Passage. But didn’t the Middle Passage arise out of certain conditions? And couldn’t undoing those conditions also undo the existential structure of whiteness? And what about the unconscious--is it really impossible to access? Sexton and Wilderson do not offer much practical guidance here, other than their unwavering commitment to stare down the structural antagonism of race.1

1 I acknowledge that other scholars working in or adjacent to Afro-Pessimism do offer practical tools for resisting existential anti-blackness. See for example, Sharpe, In the Wake (2016), Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), and Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death” (2011). These scholars, though, mostly offer practical suggestions for how black people should survive and navigate the existential structure of race. Here I make an attempt to suggest how white people might deconstruct this structure despite its apparent overdetermination. 15

Afro-Pessimism thus sharpened the theoretical stakes of the questions that I pose above about the strange, contradictory forces of whiteness. I began to wonder about how whiteness gets constructed, specifically on the phenomenological level, such that it functions as an unconscious structure of existential security, taking on the appearance of a transcendent principle in which the agency of whiteness depends on the non-agency of its racial others, blackness in particular. Put differently, how does whiteness function with simultaneous force, tenacity, and subtlety, and on an unconscious level, such that it both overdetermines the struggle for hegemony and flies under the radar of a Gramscian analysis?

Turning to emotions and neurophysiology

I noticed a possible answer to these questions in the work of two other black intellectuals: James Baldwin and theologian Thandeka, both of whom examine how the oppressive forces of whiteness manifest at the level of emotion and embodied affect.

Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1963) tells the story of several white people tormented by profound loneliness. But these characters run from their loneliness by seeking recognition and love among black people, using the excitement of interracial encounter to compensate for their insecurity. And yet, they cannot hide their true motivations from their black friends and lovers, who come to hate and pity them for their insecurity and cruelty. This adds to the weight that the black characters feel under the heel of an anti- black world that only recognizes them as an object or fetish, leading them to darker depths than their white friends. Further, Baldwin brilliantly captures how all of this plays

16 out on the level of emotion and embodied affect: the oppression of whiteness is communicated through an averted gaze, a fearful or tenuous tone of voice, a feeling in the gut that one is being lied to, a sexual encounter marred by insecurity or anger. And while

Baldwin is able to trace these toxic emotional patterns, the characters themselves do not understand their suffering; they abuse themselves and each other again and again, feeling they are pushed around by forces beyond their control.

While Baldwin’s characters are fictional, Thandeka’s Learning to be White (1999) traces similar patterns in the lives of real whites. Thandeka analyzes personal, historical, and sociological accounts of whiteness, paying particular attention to the manner in which whiteness is haunted by a sense of shame. As white children learn to become white adults, white “ethnic” immigrants assimilate to WASP society, and white workers learn to conform to the demands of industrial capitalism, all of them become ashamed of parts of themselves that they must repress in order to belong, or at least survive, in white dominated communities and power structures. They then soothe over their shame by comparing themselves to a denigrated blackness, which provides a fragile narcissism.

Like Baldwin, Thandeka captures how this plays out on the level of subtle, sometimes unconscious embodied affect and emotion. For example, the white people she interviews recall how their parents communicated their disdain for blackness through a contemptuous tone of voice, a fearful glance, or a visceral sense of discomfort, and that this affect haunted their encounters with the color line going forward.

The emotional patterns observed by Thandeka and Baldwin seemed promising in explaining how whiteness arises phenomenologically as a seemingly transcendent

17 structure that exceeds a social constructionist analysis. First, these emotions could explain why conscious deconstruction of whiteness would fail; such analysis attempts to deconstruct racism simply by revealing its constructed nature and the politics that underlie it, while here it arises out of murky, largely unconscious feelings that often manifest in very subtle forms. Moreover, if a deep sense of insecurity animates these feelings, their undoing might require facing demons that many would prefer to keep locked away--demons easily avoided in an analysis of political economy. These emotional patterns also mirrored the existential structure theorized by Afro-Pessimism: in

Afro-Pessimism, the agency of whiteness is obtained by parasitically sucking dry the agency of blackness, and in Baldwin and Thandeka the emotional affirmation (or lack thereof) of whiteness is intimately linked to the emotional abuse of blackness. Thus,

Thandeka and Baldwin’s emotional patterns seemed to account for the unconscious, tenacious, and subtle forces of whiteness. But, unlike Afro-Pessimism, Baldwin and

Thandeka also point to specific emotional conditions where one might tease out the arising of the existential structure of race (a child’s first encounter with the color line, an immigrant’s assimilation) on the phenomenological level, gesturing to the possibility of its undoing.

I was especially intrigued by this “emotional phenomenology” because it resonated with my personal experience deconstructing tenacious emotional patterns.

Using the tools of Western (Theravada-informed) Buddhist insight meditation and integrative mind-body medicine, I learned to deconstruct patterns of suffering by paying careful attention to them and investigating them to understand where they came from and

18 what they were trying to accomplish--that is, probing their unconscious logic. Gradually,

I was able to bring some of this unconscious logic into consciousness by quieting my awareness and entering into a kind of dialogue with these deeper, hidden/ignored

“voices” in the mind or heart, slowly addressing their concerns until they were able to see that their anxious and depressive patterns ultimately served little purpose in obtaining happiness. I was then able to let them go. I wondered if this approach could be applied to take apart the patterns observed by Baldwin and Thandeka, and, therefore, whiteness itself.

To investigate this further I needed a methodology that could examine the emotional patterns of whiteness in terms of its underlying logic and elucidate the specific conditions and mechanisms through which it might arise. Through my continued explorations in integrative mind-body medicine, I seemed to find such an approach in the neurophysiology of emotions presented by trauma clinician Bessel A. van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

(2014).

In The Body Keeps the Score van der Kolk claims that often our emotions get organized around a more fundamental desire: the desire for emotional affirmation and recognition, which he argues is one of the most powerful forces in our emotional lives, responsible for some of our most profound feelings of pleasure (when this desire is satisfied) and pain (when this desire is frustrated). Thus, when we fail to obtain this recognition, we experience extreme distress, which can lead us to adopt emotional and behavioral patterns that are very harmful for ourselves and those around us. This logic

19 matched the intimate correlation Thandeka and Baldwin notice between white peoples’ frustrated quest for affirmation and their adoption of racism. Van der Kolk also describes how these patterns get inscribed into a set of neurophysiological functions and mechanisms, “the emotional brain,” which develops a bundle of perceptions, associations, and memories that emotionally and physically motivate us to act in line with what they perceive will lead to emotional nourishment or not. According to van der Kolk these dispositions are extremely powerful. First, they operate reflexively and largely unconsciously, jumping to conclusions based on what the emotional brain perceives will lead to nourishment or not, pushing our mind and body around with their incentives and motivations. These incentives can arise both subtly, influencing even our our most seemingly “rational” calculations, and spectacularly, hijacking our mind and body in extreme ways (e.g. fight-or-flight). Finally, because they attempt to orient us toward some of the most powerful emotional nourishment we seek, they become deeply rooted in the heart, mind, and body; they cannot be explained away or reasoned with without accessing the deeper forces and moments that set them in motion. In light of all this, it seemed possible that the emotional patterns of whiteness were instantiated in the emotional brain, which would account for their largely unconscious power, tenacity, and subtlety.

But, van der Kolk also explores how the patterns of the emotional brain can be changed. Although they operate with subtle and unconscious logic, we can use our limited degree of conscious awareness and cognition to pay attention to and analyze them in new ways, gradually increasing our capacity to observe them as they arise and pass

20 away without reacting to them. This also involves paying attention to them as physical sensations and adjusting our body to diffuse their physical power--accomplished through physical techniques such as breathing exercises and yoga. Once our capacity to not be pushed around by the emotional brain increases, we can investigate its patterns, exploring the initial memories, perceptions, and associations that set them in motion, and picking them apart in terms of their underlying logic. Van der Kolk claims that with enough patience, stability, and gentleness, the emotional brain’s patterns can be changed by providing new perceptions and associations that sooth or satisfy its underlying desire for safety and affirmation. Thus, if the patterns of whiteness operated through the emotional brain, it seemed possible that these patterns could be undone using the therapies van der

Kolk suggests.

I spend most of chapter one examining in detail how van der Kolk’s neurophysiology could account for the emotional patterns of whiteness, and by extension its existential structure. However, when I consider how van der Kolk’s therapies might deconstruct whiteness, I arrive at a problem. While these therapies can attend to the reflexive insecurity and fear of whiteness, they have little to offer regarding its affirmative and pleasurable qualities: the emotional affirmation that Thandeka and

Baldwin observe as parasitically dependent on the abuse of blackness. This leaves part of the structure of whiteness intact, and raised another important issue: what is this pleasure and affirmation of whiteness? And could this pleasure also be deconstructed so as to unmake whiteness? This returned me to the existential analysis of Afro-Pessimism, which

21 suggests a fairly clear answer: the absolute denigration of blackness produces the pleasure of absolute capacity enjoyed by an exalted Human subject.

I explore this pleasure of mastery in chapter two, and to begin I set aside my neurophysiological analysis and scale back up to the level of existential structure. I turn to cultural theorist Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s (2007) penetrating account of how the structure and pleasure of whiteness arise through a post-Enlightenment philosophical concept that she calls calls the transparency thesis. This is the sense of absolute mastery and freedom that post-Enlightenment European thought obtains by attempting to understand the entire universe in line with ostensibly sovereign, universal, and rational principles. As I demonstrate through Da Silva, the racial structure of the transparency thesis can account for whiteness’s insecurity and fear in relation to blackness, suggesting that it might also account for the pleasure animating the emotional neurophysiology of whiteness.

But, because Da Silva’s analysis operates at an extremely high level of abstraction, it is difficult to determine its phenomenological manifestation. In an attempt to bring her analysis down to the level of emotional neurophysiology, I engage in a final thought experiment to consider how the transparency thesis might operate as a system of emotional recognition--a nourishment strategy that could become inscribed into the dispositions of the emotional brain. I suggest that the affirmation and pleasure of transparency could function with great ubiquity and power, opening the possibility that it functions as a kind of addiction. Thus, in order to unmake whiteness, white people would need to not only deconstruct the patterns of racialized fear and insecurity inscribed into

22 their emotional brains; they must also “sober up” from the toxic pleasure of the transparency thesis and learn how to obtain nourishment in other forms. I imagine what this might look like in my conclusion.

Notes on methodology: the problems and possibilities of neurophysiology

I acknowledge my use of neurophysiology is unorthodox for scholarship in the critical humanities, and I ask the reader’s patience in digesting my introductory chapter on van der Kolk’s observations. I also realize that I am working parallel to affect theory and psychoanalysis, and that translating my work into their terms might aid in making it more legible. However, I simply have not had the time to familiarize myself with these theoretical perspectives to the extent that I can put my work in conversation with them.

This could be a productive direction to take my work moving forward.

More importantly, my use of neurophysiology inevitably opens up the possibility of reducing the richness of human emotional and social life to the workings of fixed biological laws, particularly the evolutionary imperative of “survival of the fittest”. This assumption--often referred to as Social Darwinism--has and continues to serve as the basis of numerous oppressive projects; naturalizing, for instance, eugenics2 and patriarchal violence.3 To address this concern, I turn to feminist theorists Elizabeth Grosz and Elizabeth Wilson.

2 For an extended discussion of how the narrative of “survival of the fittest” has been grafted onto social discourses toward violent ends, see Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. 3 See, for example, Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, in which the authors argue that rape is an evolutionarily advantageous behavior, and men basically cannot help but rape women. This argument 23

In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011),

Grosz examines Charles Darwin’s notion of “sexual selection,” which stands alongside natural selection as a force that accounts for the development of variation in biological life. While natural selection arises out of the competition among individuals for survival based on genetic fitness, sexual selection arises out of the competition among individuals to attract a sexual partner by arousing pleasure and excitation. While this can involve brute competition (e.g., males fighting one another for female attention), it can also involve purely aesthetic seduction that has nothing to do with fitness—a selection of beauty for beauty’s sake. Grosz (following Darwin) observes this in many natural phenomena: for example, brightly colored flowers that attract honey bees, or the magnificently colorful feathers sported by some male birds to attract a mate. In both of these cases, the selected traits have nothing to do with genetic fitness: birds and bees’ attraction to bright colors does not help them survive, and brightly colored petals or feathers do not help flowers or birds survive. (Grosz, 118-122)

For Grosz, this has profound implications: the substance of life exhibits aesthetic taste and creativity, and the selection of pleasure and beauty for pleasure and beauty’s sake is a driving principle in the development of organic variation. This opens up the possibility that natural selection’s survival imperative actually serves life’s drive for possible pleasures, rather than the other way around. Moreover, we can expand this principle to human life in all of its aesthetic and pleasurable dimensions: the enjoyment of food, the beauty and excitement of music, the profundity of philosophy and art, the

has been thoroughly debunked by Brown et al. in Evolution, Gender, and Rape, and their cautions inform my concerns here. 24 pleasure of emotional intimacy, the satisfaction of solving a math problem or writing an essay, the exhilaration of sport, and so on. Indeed, Grosz notes that Darwin theorized that language, music, and art may all have their basis in aesthetic tendencies derived from sexual selection, meaning that it is possible to say that biological matter already involves cultural construction. (19, 133-136)

Wilson (2004) takes a similar tack in Psychosomatic: Feminism and the

Neurological Body. Wilson notes that Darwin hypothesized that human reflexive neurological capacities are correlated with a variety of culturally-informed tendencies.

For example, blushing, a function of the autonomic (reflexive) nervous system, cannot be induced by a physical event; rather, it results from intersubjective, psychological experiences that involve embarrassment or shame in particular social circumstances. For

Wilson, this demonstrates how reflexive neurological action is itself culturally conditioned. Thus, it would be incorrect, or at least injudicious, to claim that the workings of culture and politics are merely epiphenomena of biology, because, as Wilson puts it, “psychocultural tendencies are at play in the microstructure of all neurophysiological events—even the most reflexive.” (Wilson, 75-77) This means that if we can think differently about our the workings of culture and politics, we can change the movements of reflexive biology.

So, as I discuss human emotions from the perspective of evolution, I do not assume that they function exclusively in accordance with fixed physical laws, such as the law of survival of the fittest. Rather, I assume that our emotions, along with their attendant pleasures and pains, are expressions of both our desire/ability to survive and

25 this purely aesthetic taste and creativity--expressions that co-arise and intertwine such that one cannot be reduced to the other. For Grosz this means that it is possible to actually read Darwin against eugenic narratives, because sexual selection considerably widens the scope of behavioral and cultural characteristics that might emerge from biological evolution as “fit” for selection; that is, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to say that one cultural formation (and thus one “sub-species” of human beings) is evolutionarily

“better” than another, because evolution selects for cultural aesthetics in addition to fitness. (Grosz, 136-140)

Going further, I am not even convinced that consciousness (and therefore emotions, culture, and cognition) can be reduced to an epiphenomenon of more fundamental material processes--even if these processes are as dynamic as Grosz and

Wilson postulate. This is cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter’s approach in “Towards the

Sociogenic Principle,” (2001) in which she elaborates Frantz Fanon’s notion of

“sociogeny.” For Wynter and Fanon, sociogeny describes how cultural systems and meaning operate as things in-themselves within consciousness, actually exerting influence on consciousness’s correlating biological structures, such as the chemistry of the brain. For example, she examines subjective accounts of racial preference and prejudice alongside neuroscientific readings of the brain’s pleasure-incentivizing structures, arguing that the epistemological structures of different cultures create different patterns of neural activity. However, Wynter (and Fanon) do not eschew the insights of biology altogether, but argue that they should be studied alongside cultural-

26 epistemological structures and the immediacy of subjective experience—a suggestion I attempt to follow. (Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle,” 54, 60)

Finally, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s (2010) Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred levels an even more striking refutation of materialism. A scholar of comparative religion, Kripal explores a significant archive of paranormal, psychical, and other supernatural phenomena throughout the intellectual history of the West: from

Aristotle’s interest in precognition, to Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer’s discussions of mysticism, to Freud and Jung’s encounters with telepathy to the masses of anecdotal and ethnographic evidence that simply cannot be explained away in materialist terms. (Kripal,

10-16) Kripal thus claims that the existence of consciousness without the brain and body is a well-documented phenomena, accepted by the world’s religions for millenia and only recently “forgotten” in modern secularism. He further postulates that biological hardware functions as a kind of filter through which immaterial consciousness or Mind relates to the itself and the world. (25-29)

Although I am not entirely convinced by Kripal’s grand thesis that supernatural phenomena demonstrate a unified “hermeneutical” ontological domain or “Mind,” I am convinced by his paranormal archive that supernatural phenomena, and thus the possibility of immaterial consciousness, ought to be taken seriously. This, along with the insights of Wynter, Fanon, and Wilson, suggests that human subjectivity should not be reduced to the machinations of physical matter; rather, these scholars suggest that it might be the other way around: consciousness--and therefore the motivations, intentions, and choices--can exert a real influence on matter. Or reading Kripal and Wynter

27 alongside Wilson and Grosz, at least we might concede that there is a dialogic relationship between consciousness and physical matter.

Chapter 1: The Emotional Neurophysiology of Whiteness

In what follows, I first explain in detail Bessel van der Kolk’s observations that are most relevant for examining the emotional patterns and structure of whiteness. I also offer further remarks on the possible problems of employing universal theories of human psychology and neurophysiology to discuss politically and culturally inflected issues such as race. I then apply van der Kolk’s theories to Thandeka’s study of white childhood, showing how his emotional neurophysiology can: first, elucidate the emotional patterns of whiteness in terms of an underlying logic, pointing to specific mechanisms in which these patterns get instantiated; and, therefore, account for how whiteness takes the appearance of an overdetermined structure or transcendent principle, gesturing to how this structure might be undone.

Emotional nourishment strategies and the dispositions of the emotional brain

Bessel van der Kolk observes that one of the most powerful forces that organizes human social and emotional life is the desire for affirmation, recognition, and reciprocity.

We deeply yearn to be seen and heard by others, and to feel that we belong. Van der Kolk explains that, from an evolutionary perspective, we seek emotional affirmation because it helps us get “in sync” with whatever group, or groups, we belong to. This helps us respond to one another’s needs while collectively modulating and regulating the level of

29 emotional arousal needed for carrying out different activities required for the group’s well-being. For example, if a threat appears, such as a dangerous predator or members of an enemy group, we need to be able to quickly and collectively intuit that something is wrong and as a group mobilize to take action. The better coordinated we can be in carrying out the various tasks required to mobilize and respond, the more likely we will be able to survive. Similarly, we need to get in sync energetically and emotionally to successfully carry out other group activities such as feeding, resting, nurturing young, and sexual union. (Van der Kolk, 74-88) However, recalling Grosz’s discussion of sexual selection, we do not need to reduce the pleasure of social and emotional synchrony to the imperative of biological survival; we can consider this pleasure an end in itself. Or, even if group synchrony does function in service of biological survival, we can recall that, given life’s aesthetic and pleasure-seeking proclivities, the survival imperative itself might result from our desire to sustain continued access to various forms of pleasure.

Van der Kolk observes that our quest for emotional nourishment is a quest to be repeatedly and reliably met with affirming embodied affect, which I define (following van der Kolk) as body language, facial expression, and tone of voice. Examples of affirming embodied affect include: a friendly wave or handshake, a kind embrace, or a welcoming posture; a friendly, patient, joyful, or forgiving face; a gentle, soothing, friendly, or happy tone of voice. When we are met by bodies, faces, and voices that energetically and emotionally communicate to us that they will respect and/or contribute to our well-being and the well-being of our group, we obtain a sense of emotional nourishment. Conversely, un-affirming embodied affect (an angry face, a hostile word, or

30 simply being ignored) makes us uncomfortable, and motivates us to take action to restore synchrony and reciprocity. (Ibid.)

Our quest for emotional nourishment is very complicated because we seek it in different forms. Among our closest relations (e.g. spouses, children, siblings, closest friends and relatives), we seek deep affirmation along with both emotional and physical intimacy; we hope that our affirmation among these individuals involves all or many aspects of ourselves, making it almost unconditional. Among more distant relations

(distant relatives, peers, colleagues), we do not necessarily seek such profound intimacy but we hope to uphold a feeling of mutual good will. We can even obtain a sense of emotional nourishment from people we do not know: van der Kolk notes that group activities such as playing sports or music provide an opportunity to exchange emotional and energetic affirmation with strangers, simply by harmonizing our bodies and minds toward an enjoyable collective end. (Ibid.) Further, we cannot be merely passive recipients of emotional affirmation; we have to learn how to provide nourishment to others, establishing mutually beneficial relationship. And because these various scenarios follow different emotional patterns, requiring us to behave in different ways, we develop

“emotional and perceptual maps” of what actions lead to emotional nourishment and well-being, and what actions lead to emotional malnourishment and suffering among different people and in different situations. (Van der Kolk, 56-57.) I refer to these emotional and perceptual maps as our nourishment strategies.

According to van der Kolk, the lessons we learn about how to obtain emotional nourishment are coordinated by a set of neurophysiological structures that he refers to as

31 the emotional brain, which encompasses the brain stem, the limbic system, and a vast network of nerves connecting the brain with various parts of the body—in particular the gut, facial muscles, and vocal mechanisms. The emotional brain is responsible for our capacity to reflexively discern the emotions and embodied affect of others. In turn, it generates an internal response, which takes the form of both affective tone and physical sensations and adjustments. In general, when we are met by affirming embodied affect we feel emotionally at ease and we physically calm down and relax—this is the feeling of emotional nourishment. When we are met by un-affirming embodied affect we feel uncomfortable emotionally and our body tenses up. Importantly, the emotional brain carries out these activities on a reflexive, un- or preconscious level; its activity happens automatically and mostly beyond conscious control. (Van der Kolk, 56-57, 80-82)

Our nourishment strategy is composed of the “bundle” of habitual associations and dispositions inscribed into our emotional brain through the emotional/embodied give- and-take we engage in with others. That is, the emotional brain has a function of memory that stores the lessons we learn about how to obtain emotional nourishment and avoid malnourishment. It then reflexively recalls these lessons as it encounters similar situations and stimuli, generating internal cues and motivations that match the initial pattern. (Van der Kolk, 56-57)

While the dispositions of our emotional brain (and thus our nourishment strategies) shift and adapt throughout our lives, their foundational patterns are laid down

32 in infancy and childhood through our relationship with our primary caregivers.4 At this stage our emotional brain is attempting to orient us toward a source of nourishment on which we are entirely dependent, so the habits, memories, and perceptions that it picks up about how to reliably obtain this nourishment are quite powerful and have a lasting

(though not necessarily permanent) influence on our emotional and behavioral patterns.

Let us consider some examples of how this plays out in a particular circumstance: the manner in which a child’s emotional brain gets conditioned to respect her parents’ valuable possessions. When a child inappropriately plays with or breaks her mother’s valuables, her mother expresses frustration with her. The child’s emotional brain thus learns to associate certain behaviors with potential emotional malnourishment. It learns to generate a reflexive association of caution in relation to her mother’s valuables; every time she encounters one of these objects, her emotional brain automatically generates a sense of heedfulness, warning her that treating this object carelessly might lead to emotional malnourishment. However, let us also suppose that every time this child crosses such a line and upsets her mother, her mother soon forgives her and explains why she got upset: that she has valuable possessions that must be treated with care. She also explains to her daughter that she can use or play with these valuables if she asks her mother and treats them in a respectful way. The child’s emotional brain thus also learns to associate an alternative set of behaviors with emotional nourishment. It learns to

4 While I use original examples in my discussion of how the patterns of the emotion brain get set in motion during childhood, the patterns I observe are cobbled together from van der Kolk, “Getting on the Same Wavelength: Attachment and Attunement,” and “Trapped in Relationships: the Cost of Abuse and Neglect” in The Body Keeps the Score. Because van der Kolk presents this information in a different order in service of explaining the specific logic of child abuse and neglect, I cannot cite specific page numbers for my account here. 33 generate reflexive motivations that affirm treating her possessions with respect and asking her about when she can use them and how. And, because her mother forgave her, the daughter’s emotional brain’s cautionary impulses are imbued with a sense of confidence; even when she does make a mistake her mother’s nourishment is sustained.

Through these interactions, the daughter’s emotional brain develops a set of memories and associations that contribute to a larger pattern of mutual emotional nourishment with her mother. This then becomes part of the daughter’s larger nourishment strategy with others; her emotional brain’s reflexive impulses motivate her to respect the belongings of others and understand how she should expect others to treat hers—all in a manner in which both parties mutually nourish one another.

Let us now consider the same circumstance, but suppose that the child is not met with affirmation but with abuse. When the child inappropriately plays with or breaks her mother’s valuables, her mother expresses frustration with her, as before. However, this frustration is harsh, possibly including hostile words or physical punishment. Moreover, the child’s mother does not offer forgiveness for some time, if at all, and the mother does not clearly explain why this behavior is a transgression and what behavior should take its place. In this case, the daughter’s emotional brain will also develop a reflexive sense of caution in relation to her mother’s possessions, motivating the child to avoid behavior that leads to emotional malnourishment and distress. However, these motivations will be imbued with uncertainty and severe stress, because the child is fearful of harsh retribution and does not discern a reliable pattern that allows her to sustain her mother’s affirmation; her most important source of nourishment has become insecure and possibly even

34 dangerous. This distress and insecurity might lead to a number of coping strategies, in which the emotional brain incentives taking desperate measures to obtain affirmation: the daughter might angrily lash out at her mother, or repress her painful feelings in the hope that ignoring them will make them go away, or she might redirect blame at herself in order to sustain her mother’s benevolence in her imagination. But these coping strategies do not resolve the situation, and may even aggravate it, causing further distress for the child.

Through these patterns the daughter’s emotional brain develops a set of memories and associations that contribute to her larger nourishment strategy. When the daughter enters into relationships beyond her mother, her emotional brain generates distressing, insecure, and uncertain impulses that might make her more likely to run away from the generosity of others (for fear of being betrayed) or become jealously over-protective

(following her mother’s example). Or, if her mother failed to explain how to ask permission to use the possessions of others, the daughter might steal or use others’ things inappropriately. All of this could lead to continued emotional malnourishment for both the daughter and possibly those she interacts with.

The logic of the emotional brain

Van der Kolk argues that the emotional brain operates mostly unconsciously, below our capacity for self-conscious awareness, control, and rational cognition. This is because incoming sensory information travels with faster speed to the structures of the emotional brain than to the structures associated with conscious awareness/cognition (the

35 neocortex), and because the emotional brain analyzes incoming sensory experience using rough similarities and approximations, jumping to conclusions about what actions to incentivize based on the lessons it’s learned about how to obtain emotional nourishment.

When these impulses are strong they can completely overwhelm us, temporarily hijacking our mind and body and shutting down our capacity for self-conscious awareness/control/cognition. This is the case with unresolved imprints and memories of traumatic experiences. When the emotional brain encounters something that reminds it of the initial trauma, it generates powerful emotions and sensations that can be extremely distressing and painful (e.g. rage, panic, or total collapse), inducing mental and bodily actions beyond our control. However, these impulses do not need a traumatic origin to take over our emotions, behaviors, and ability to reason. For example, the abused daughter in the example above might repeat the ill-tempered covetousness she picked up from her mother simply because her emotional brain has never learned an alternative--to her this is merely the natural way to behave. Finally, sometimes these impulses are so subtle, we barely even notice how they influence our body and mind. (Van der Kolk, 57-

72)

Yet even at their most subtle, the dispositions of the emotional brain have a profound influence on even the most self-conscious and seemingly rational decisions we make. (Van der Kolk, 64-65) For example, suppose a teenager’s friend invites him to sneak out at night to drink beer in the park with some kids from school--kids whom the teenager perceives as cool and popular. His emotional brain generates a strong sense of motivation to accept his friend’s invitation because hanging out with the cool kids will

36 provide the nourishment of social recognition. However, he knows that if he gets caught his parents will be extremely upset, so his emotional brain also generates a sense of fear around sneaking out, because he does not want to jeopardize the nourishment he receives from his parents. Thus, his emotional brain disagrees with itself: part of it wants to sneak out to party with the cool kids, and part of it wants to play it safe and not rock the boat with mom and dad. Rational, self-conscious awareness receives these competing impulses from the emotional brain and has to decide which to follow through with. This requires sifting through a large amount of contextual information: how likely is it that he’ll get caught? what’s the worst possible punishment he might receive from his parents? will that cute classmate he’s been crushing on be at the park? can he afford to be hungover tomorrow? So, while this teenager has to make this decision through his capacity for self-conscious reason, he evaluates his options through the values assigned to experience through the emotional brain. He will determine what seems “reasonable” (or not) in line with what will best satisfy his nourishment strategy, his sense of which arises out of the dispositions of the emotional brain. Thus, although these motivations can be experienced as very subtle, they can have a significant influence on very important decisions.

Van der Kolk also stresses how tenacious the dispositions of the emotional brain are, especially those laid down in our relationship with our caregivers. Returning to the abused daughter, she may realize that she reflexively and jealously guards her possessions, and she may be aware that this creates problems for her relationships and that alternative behavior patterns are possible, but simply knowing this fact will not

37 change the patterns inscribed into her emotional brain from childhood. To reiterate, this is because conscious awareness does not penetrate the emotional brain’s reflexive, pre- or unconscious dispositions, which are based on its own associations, memories, and perceptions that attempt to obtain nourishment. Thus, conscious knowledge of its patterns and associations will not prevent the emotional brain from continuing to act as if these patterns and associations are still relevant, even if we recognize that they lead to harmful actions. (Van der Kolk, 129-132)

However, van der Kolk also emphasizes that the dispositions of the emotional brain can be changed, but that this requires paying attention to and analyzing them in very particular ways. This is the general thrust of his trauma therapies, which involve using our limited degree for self-conscious awareness, self-regulation, and rational analysis to gradually dissolve or redirect the reactive patterns of the emotional brain toward different habits. For example, the abused daughter might enter into counseling as an adult to help work through her patterns of fear and possessiveness. She might learn to pay attention to these patterns in a new way, trying to observe them neutrally as they arise and pass away, or questioning them: “is someone really trying to take away my things right now? does this situation really warrant this emotional reaction?” She might also notice how they manifest in the body as physical sensations, and attempt to counteract their physical distress through breathing exercises or yoga. Then, as she gains some distance from these impulses, she might be able to explore the initial emotional memories and perceptions that underlie them by talking through her childhood experiences with her mother. This could bring to the surface other buried emotions that

38 animate her emotional brain’s distressing patterns: perhaps sadness at being treated so harshly for her mother, or anger toward her mother. (Van der Kolk, 132-136, and

“Healing from Trauma: Owning Yourself,” The Body Keeps the Score)

As her capacity for emotional stability increases--that is, her capacity to not be pushed around by the distressing impulses of her emotional brain grows stronger--she can attend in new ways to the initial perceptions and memories that set these patterns in motion. She might be able to approach herself as that scared little girl that only wanted be loved and let her know that now it’s ok--the initial danger has passed and she does not have to be so afraid anymore. Or she might express her anger toward her mother in a righteous way, finally giving voice to the part of her that knows she is worthy of being treated with respect. Or she might even open up in empathy for her mother’s situation, understanding that she herself was acting out patterns that she picked up from difficult circumstances. (Ibid.)

Through therapeutic techniques such as these, the daughter’s emotional brain can learn that the threat it perceived no longer exists, and that this particular defense strategy is harmful--it ultimately gets in the way of obtaining emotional nourishment despite its intentions otherwise. However, the daughter can also use this discernment to re-train her emotional brain to develop new, skillful patterns in their place, gradually dissolving its distress with stability, compassion, and forgiveness. Developing these new emotional patterns often requires the support of another’s affirming affect (e.g., a trusted friend or therapist), which helps communicate to the emotional brain that it is safe. Eventually, though, the daughter can learn to provide this affirmation to herself. (Ibid.)

A note on agency and cultural-political conditioning

In my overview of van der Kolk’s analysis, I have stressed the importance of how a child’s emotional dispositions are molded in response to how it is attended to by its caregivers. This might suggest that children are merely passive recipients of the patterns subjected to them by their caregivers. However, as anyone who works with children (or anyone who remembers their own childhood) would probably testify, children do have their own dispositions and desires apart from their caregivers, along with the capacity to make their own choices. They do not come into the world as pure, “blank slates” that get entirely molded by their environment. The point that I wish to emphasize is that the manner in which a child is met by its caregivers will emphasize certain tendencies, creating conditions in which certain patterns become more likely to emerge. Whether or not certain patterns do actualize will also depend on the child’s agency, although this agency is circumscribed when they still depend on their caregivers.

Second, I admit that my discussion follows van der Kolk’s example of speaking about emotional affirmation, the habituation of the emotional brain, and the child-primary caregiver relationship as culturally and politically un-marked, theorizing a primary layer of emotional/ neurophysiological conditioning that only later gets conditioned by culture and politics. For example, in my discussion of how a child’s emotional brain might become habituated to respect its caregivers’ valuables, I treat the norms of individual ownership as if they are part of a “natural” child-caregiver relationship, uninfluenced by culture and politics. But of course, the power-laden politics of ownership and value are

40 already present here, influencing what the mother considers “good parenting” and how she reacts to and shapes her daughter’s behavior. In a different cultural-political context, another caregiver might adhere to a totally different set of norms that lead to very different caregiving behavior and modes of emotional nourishment, and thus, different conditioning for their child’s emotional brain.

But I suggest that van der Kolk’s model can account for power-laden cultural- political conditioning, even if van der Kolk himself does not consider this. We can imagine that the emotional brain, along with its quest for nourishment, merely gets organized in (sometimes radically) different ways depending on cultural/political circumstances. However, despite these differences, I stand by some underlying principles as general, perhaps even universal: that human beings seek a sense of affirmation and belonging from others; that a child’s desire for affirmation from their caregiver(s), on whom they entirely depend, is especially potent; and that children develop reflexive associations, perceptions, and memories about how to obtain the affirmation of their caregivers, and that these patterns are closely correlated with the neurophysiological structures van der Kolk calls the emotional brain. These principles can still hold even as they are totally bound up with culture and politics, and I suggest that culture and politics are not outside of these processes, either—they all co-arise on the level of both emotional neurophysiology and cultural/discursive formation, which interact as a dynamic, dialogic system. This returns us to Wynter and Fanon’s notion of “sociogeny” and Wilson’s point that “psychocultural tendencies are at play in the microstructure of all neurophysiological events—even the most reflexive.”

But ultimately, I cannot prove that these principles are general or universal. So, I only ask the reader to judge their usefulness as provisional, pragmatic, and intuitive in revealing the logic and causal mechanisms that underlie the structure of whiteness. To this end, I now turn to Thandeka’s study of white childhood.

Learning to Be White

Thandeka begins her book Learning to Be White by recounting a peculiar series of racial incidents. She arrives at a new position at a New England college, and while at lunch a white colleague asks her what it is like to be black. In response, Thandeka invites her colleague to play the “race game,” in which she must explicitly name whiteness whenever it appears in conversation. For example, if the colleague were to mention her white friend Bob, she must actually refer to him as “my white friend Bob.” Thandeka hypothesizes that, because whiteness often remains the “great unsaid,” this game will give her colleague a sense of what it is like to constantly navigate and be aware of race, and thus help her answer the question of what it is like to be black. However, Thandeka never hears from her colleague again; apparently, the race game made her profoundly uncomfortable. Intrigued, Thandeka invites other whites to play the game, and again and again they respond with shame, fear, anger, indignation, defeat, or refusal. To figure out why the race game is so intolerable for whites, Thandeka conducts dozens of interviews with white people, aiming to uncover “what feelings lay behind the word white that were too potent to be faced.” (Thandeka, 1-4)

Thandeka’s interviewees are mostly middle- to upper-class church-goers and academics; as a scholar and theologian, these are the circles in which Thandeka travels most. Most of them identify as non- or even anti-racist. Thandeka first asks her interviewees to recall their earliest memories of encountering race, and she recounts several anecdotes that follow a similar pattern. Here are a handful of examples:

Frank remembers putting a coin in his mouth when he was five. His mother disgustedly told him not to put coins in his mouth because “niggers keep them in their underwear.” Frank said he felt both confused and wrong. He knew that he would have to be more careful about what he did in the future.

Mike, at age four or five, was walking down the street with his father and uncle. They passed by an interracial couple. The man was black, the woman white. Mike’s father and uncle began a series of critical statements about the man and descriptions of the kind of woman his companion must be. Mike remembers feeling uncertain and confused. He now knew that there was a certain way he must act when he grew up, but he was unsure what it was and whether he could do it.

In high school, Jackie talked about one of her teachers so often as someone who was playing a formative role in her education that her parents encouraged her to invite him home for dinner. Jackie remembers her mother’s flushed and astonished face when she opened the door and discovered that the teacher was black. After he left, Jackie’s parents were outraged that she had not told them of his race, making Jackie feel that she had done something wrong, that she had broken a rule that until that moment she did not realize existed. She was sorry she had embarrassed her parents and knew she must be careful not to embarrass them again in the future.

At age sixteen, Sarah brought her best friend home with her from high school. After the friend left, Sarah’s mother told her not to invite her friend home again. “Why”? Sarah asked, astonished and confused. “Because she’s colored,” her mother responded. “That was not an answer,” Sarah thought to herself. It was obvious that her friend was colored, but what kind of reason was that for not inviting her to Sarah’s house? So Sarah persisted, insisting that her mother tell her the real reason for her action. None was forthcoming. The indignant look on her mother’s face, however, made Sarah realize that if she persisted, she would jeopardize her mother’s affection toward her. This awareness startled Sarah because she and her mother were the best of friends. Nothing—Sarah had always believed until that moment—could jeopardize their closeness. But now, she had glimpsed the unimaginable, the unspeakable—the unthinkable. Her relationship with her mother was not absolutely secure. It could crumble. Horrified by what she had just glimpsed, Sarah severed her friendship with the girl. But the damage had already been done. Sarah’s mother was no longer her best friend because Sarah now knew she could no longer count on her mother’s absolute allegiance. Her mother’s affection was 43 conditional. It could be lost. After Sarah recounted her story to me, she said she had not thought of this incident in twenty years. She also said that until now, she had never consciously said to herself that for her the deepest tragedy in this incident was her loss of trust in her mother’s love. Sarah … began to cry.”

Sally’s parents, strong civil rights supporters, preached racial equality both at home and in the streets. Sally was thus flabbergasted when her parents prevented her from going out with a high school friend who came to pick her up for a Friday night date. He was black. The parents sent him away and forbade her to date him. “What will our neighbors say if they see you on the arms of a black man?” Sally was furious with them and thought them hypocrites. But she submitted to their dictates. “What was I going to do?” she asked rhetorically. “Rebel? Not in my household. They would have disowned me.”

When Jack was five, his parents gave him a birthday party and invited his relatives with their children. He remembers going to the gate of his backyard and calling his friends over to join them. His friends, black, entered the yard. Jack became aware of how uncomfortable his parents were with the presence of his friends among them. He knew he had somehow done something wrong and was sorry.

Jay’s parents took him on a car tour of the black area in his city when he was four. His parents knew he had never seen black people before and did not want him to embarrass the family by staring at “them” when the family went to New York on vacation the following month. Jay, now an attorney, told this story to me during dinner at his sister’s home. His sister Fran, a colleague who had invited me to dinner, expressed surprise as she listened to the story of her older brother’s formal induction into whiteness by their parents. “You never told me that,” Fran protested. Jay smiled weakly and shrugged as if to say, “What was there to tell?” Nothing more was said.

Dan, a well-heeled Boston Presbyterian minister, grew up in a New England town in which only a few African Americans lived. Dan and I had worked on several interfaith committees together, and whenever I was in town, we would get together for lunch. He told me his early memories as we lunched together in a small, elegant restaurant near Beacon Hill. When he was very young, his father, who was an alcoholic, told Dan: “Black people are inferior.” Dan did not believe him. His dad lied about many things, so why should be right about this? Dan next remembered going to Wahsintgon in 1952 with his classmates for their eighth-grade graduation trip. En route, Dan saw “colored” and “white” signs posted on bathroom doors and hung on the walls behind the public drinking fountains. Never having been in the South before, Dan found these signs both odd and troubling. He believed, however, that he was the only one in his group who had noticed them and sensed that there was something terribly wrong, because no one said anything about the signs—not even his teacher. So he buried the troubled feelings that had been prompted by these signs. At age fourteen, Dan was certain only he knew that something was radically wrong. America’s racial policies thus became his personal secret—or so he thought. … [Dan] said that he came to realize that each sign indicated the benefits accrued to the whites. The facilities designated for this group were clearly superior in comfort, upkeep, and convenience to those for the coloreds. The signs clearly indicated that there was no

middle ground of safety for the onlooker. Seeing them, Dan realized that one was either colored or white. As Dan’s recollections continued, he told me the story of the fraternity incident (recounted at the beginning of this chapter) in which he told his colored fraternity brother to leave their fraternity house. After telling that story, Dan began to cry. The couple at the next table tried not to notice Dan’s breakdown. The waiter avoided our table. As Dan regained his composure, I retained mine. I could see his pain. I felt empathy for his suffering but was troubled by his lack of courage. Dan’s tears revealed the depth of the compromise he had made with himself rather than risk venturing beyond the socially mandated strictures of whiteness. I realized that being white for Dan was not a matter of racist conviction but a matter of survival, not a privilege but a penalty: the pound of flesh exacted for the right to be excluded from the excluded. As Dan’s tears revealed, the internal price exacted from him for his ongoing membership in the “white” race was psychic tension and discomfort. (Thandeka, 5-8)

Thandeka observes that while Dan’s distress might be explained as racism, racial prejudice does not completely encapsulate the feelings that mark his encounters with the color line. The deeper feeling that underlies Dan’s induction into whiteness is, as

Thandeka notes above, fear of exile. First, Dan is afraid to speak up about the Jim Crow signs in Washington because no one else seems to notice anything and he does not want to cause a scene about nothing, and later, he goes along with his fraternity brothers’ wishes to reject the black pledge because Dan himself fears rejection. (Thandeka, 8-9)

While Thandeka does not provide as detailed an analysis of the other cases, similar dynamics are at play. Frank innocently puts a coin in his mouth, which his mother finds detestable because black people apparently keep coins in their underwear. That is,

Frank’s behavior is detestable because it puts him in proximity to detestable and disgusting blackness. Her disgusted tone warns Frank that if he behaves in a way that his mother associates with “dirty black people,” she might revoke her love, leading possibly to exile. Mike’s case is similar. His father and uncle’s critical statements toward an interracial couple left him “feeling uncertain and confused” because “[h]e now knew that

45 there was a certain way he must act when he grew up, but he was unsure what it was and whether he could do it”--again, a subtle fear of exile. Both Frank and Mike become aware that certain behaviors are expected, and that not fulfilling these expectations might lead to scorn or rejection by their communities. While these behaviors are not explicitly stated, they seem to have something to do with black people.

For Jackie, Sarah, and Sally the encounter is more direct, involving relationships with actual black people. Jackie’s parents encourage her to invite her favorite teacher over for dinner, but when they discover that he is black, they harshly reprimand her for not warning them about his race. This leaves her feeling “she had done something wrong” and “had broken a rule that until that moment she did not realize existed.”

Further, “[s]he was sorry she had embarrassed her parents and knew she must be careful not to embarrass them again in the future.” Jackie’s encounter with blackness leaves her feeling slightly uneasy about how to stay in her parents’ good graces in the future, because she discovered a line that she did not know existed and that, when crossed, could lead to dire consequences. Sarah has a similar experience. When her mother tells her that she can no longer invite her friend over, she provides no explanation other than her race.

When Sarah questions her further she receives only an indignant look. As Thandeka notes, what is most painful for Sarah is the realization that her mother’s love was less secure than it originally appeared; it could be revoked, and association with blackness was one such condition that might lead to exile. Sally is shocked to discover that her civil rights-supporting parents refused to allow her to go out with a black peer. She resents their hypocrisy but is forced to submit to them; “’What was I going to do?’ [Sally] asked

46 rhetorically. ‘Rebel? Not in my household. They would have disowned me.’” Like Jackie and Sarah, Sally acquiesces to her parents’ racist demands out of a fear of exile.

Jack and Jay’s cases are more subtle. When Jack spontaneously invites his black friends to his fifth birthday party, he notices that this makes his parents very uncomfortable. Unlike the previous cases, Jack is not explicitly reprimanded for crossing the color line; rather, he simply realizes that blackness, or association with blackness, somehow threatens the goodness, integrity, or well-being of his caregivers. This threat was never stated explicitly; he stumbled on it by accident. Nevertheless, “[h]e knew he had somehow done something wrong and was sorry,” realizing that if he wasn’t careful he might further threaten the well-being of his caregivers, and, by extension, himself.

Thus Jack does not experience a direct threat of exile, but the possibility of the failure of his caregivers--something equally dangerous. Jay’s parents take him to a black part of town to see black people so that he would not stare at them when they took him to New

York City, communicating a message of disavowal: notice them in order to be able to not notice them. (Thandeka, 10) Rather than threatening Jay or losing their composure in the presence of blackness, Jay’s parents taught him to simply deny the color line with mute silence. But behind this, too, lies an implicit threat: staring at black people is wrong and might get you into trouble.

Thandeka argues that this demonstrates how the white child “is a racial victim of its own white community of parents, caretakers, and peers, who attack it because it does not yet have a white racial identity,” (13) and she refers to these attacks as “white racial abuse.” (20) For Thandeka this explains the failure of the race game; when the white

47 adult is forced to name whiteness explicitly, the aspects of herself that she painfully set aside to remain in good standing with her white community resurface, causing her to feel ashamed because she realizes she still may not be “white enough.” (13)

Can the white emotional brain account for the existential structure of whiteness?

So, if the patterns that Thandeka observes are analogous to the patterns of child abuse observed by van der Kolk, could this mean that the racialized encounters of

Thandeka’s interviewees might inscribe painful, racialized dispositions into their emotional brains? And if so, could this account for the unconscious, tenacious, subtle yet violent nature that characterizes the larger structure of whiteness? I now consider this possibility.

When Frank puts a coin in his mouth, his mother responds with disgusted affect, expressed through her tone of voice, which communicates to Frank that this behavior threatens one of his most important sources of emotional nourishment. Thus, his emotional brain collects one “data point,” or memory/association, in its larger strategy of how to stay in his mother’s good graces: it will now generate a sense of cautionary fear in order to prevent Frank from acting out this behavior in the future. Further, Frank’s mother expresses her disgust for his behavior by equating it with detestable blackness

(“niggers keep [coins] in their underwear”), so his emotional brain also begins to associate blackness with danger. It may now generate a sense of fear around black people, or around ways of being that Jack’s community associates with blackness.

Thandeka’s other examples follow the same pattern. When Mike’s father and uncle make “a series of critical statements” about an interracial couple, with particular disdain for the white woman, his emotional brain develops a memory of blackness as something that, when associated with, might lead to scorn from his caregivers. As with

Frank, this primes his emotional brain to generate fear toward blackness. When Jackie,

Sarah, and Sally are reprimanded for associating sympathetically with black people, their emotional brains are also primed to associate blackness with danger. Similar patterns might be set in motion by the manner in which Jack’s parents tighten up in visceral discomfort around his black friends, or the muted silence of Jay’s parents and Dan’s peers in relation to racial difference and injustice.

However, as Thandeka demonstrates these encounters are not only fearful, they also involve shame, as these children discover that some aspects of themselves

(behaviors, desires, interests) have the potential to be deemed detestable by their caregivers and/or cause their caregivers to feel shame and discomfort--an equally upsetting experience. Frank and Mike realize that they might have seemingly innocent behaviors and desires that transgress unwritten rules, leading to caregiver scorn. When

Jackie’s parents harshly reprimand her for inviting her black teacher over for dinner, embarrassing them, she feels “she had done something wrong”; her innocent appreciation for her teacher becomes a source of pain and shame. When seeing her mother’s indignant expression, Sarah discovers an aspect of herself--her desire for interracial friendship-- that, if followed through with, will jeopardize her mother’s love. Sally discovers that wanting to date a black man is shameful, because her parents justify their prohibition

49 based on the impression that this might give the neighbors. After inviting his black friends over, Jack realizes his innocent desire to hang out with his black friends contains the potential for shame because of his parents’ visceral discomfort, and Jay is taught that staring at black people is wrong and therefore shameful. Thus, the fear that the emotional brains of these children associate with blackness is also imbued with a deeper, existential quality. It is not only the fear of external threat; it is also a fear of internal failure, betrayal, and abuse: these children learn that if they associate with blackness they might become shameful to those who ostensibly love them most, and that their caregivers might collapse into patterns of hostility, visceral discomfort, or helpless embarrassment.

Moreover, this fear is heightened by a sense of insecurity, because in none of these cases is the danger of blackness explained; its threat arises unexpectedly and without coherent reason. After his mother scolds him, Frank knows he has to behave more carefully, but feels confused about how to do so; Mike feels the same way after his father and uncle denigrate the interracial couple. Jackie feels she “had broken a rule that until that moment she did not realize existed,” leaving her feeling uneasy about how to behave in the future. Sarah’s mother offers no explanation other than race for why she cannot invite her black friend over, which to Sarah is not convincing. Although Sally’s parents explain their prohibition on interracial dating as a way of keeping up appearances, they are also Civil Rights supporters, rendering this prohibition contradictory and incoherent. Jack’s parents never explain why they became uncomfortable in the presence of his black friends, and the silence that Jay and Dan meet lets them know that certain

50 topics are not up for discussion, meaning there might be other such dangerous topics hidden from view.

Consequently, the racial fear inscribed into the emotional brains of these children is haunted by a sense of uncertainty and mistrust. Blackness can arise as a threat to emotional nourishment without reason, so it must be treated with automatic suspicion. At the same time, because the emotional brains of these children also associate blackness with internal failure and/or caregiver betrayal, they also learn that they cannot trust themselves and/or their caregivers around blackness. Moreover, if blackness arose as an unpredicted threat, there may be other hidden and equally-dangerous fault lines that might lead to the failure of their emotional nourishment. Thus, the encounter with blackness imbues their entire nourishment strategy with a subtle sense of fear and insecurity.

Recalling some of the strategies that children (and their emotional brains) develop to cope with abuse, we can also imagine how these encounters set in motion a range of other contradictory emotional associations with blackness. Because blackness triggers the possibility (and in some cases the actuality) of wanton abuse, these children might develop a sliver of resentment toward their caregivers. Sally’s example hints at this when she expresses how angry her parents’ behavior made her. However, because of the reflexive association of blackness with danger, these children might come to resent black people instead, blaming them as the instigators of their caregivers’ abuse/failure rather than blaming their caregivers or themselves. Blackness might also become a zone of unconsummated desire. These children may seek to express the parts of themselves

51 deemed shameful by their caregivers, and by projecting these parts of themselves onto blackness they can participate in these shame-laden qualities without fear of embodying them. These children may also desire a caregiving community that does not place painful conditions on accessing emotional nourishment, and because blackness exists outside of their community, they may project this quality (which could take different forms, such as a sense of emotional freedom or authenticity) onto it. 5

While my reading of Thandeka through van der Kolk only provides a tiny snapshot of the emotional patterns of whiteness, let us imagine what the implications of these patterns would be if they were part of a widespread structure, in which the emotional brains of most white children6 continually learn to associate blackness with existential threat. Indeed, as Thandeka’s interviews demonstrate, this could be learned by observing even the subtlest details of the embodied affect of any authority figure. For example, I discussed the feelings of fear and discomfort I noticed not only with my parents, but among white teachers and administrators from elementary to high school, patterns I would have picked up again and again through subtle affective cues. This fear is also constantly presented in authoritative media reports on inner city crime, and by politicians who peddle this fear to advance their agendas. This fear is also hypervisible in popular media, which exaggerates, even celebrates, blackness as something threatening and angry. Thus, it is plausible that the emotional brains of white children are thoroughly

5 While Thandeka does not discuss these patterns of resentment and desire in her discussion of white childhood, she discusses them extensively in her discussion of white class exploitation and immigrant assimilation. See “Abuse,” “Class”, and “Loss” in Learning to Be White. 6 And perhaps the emotional brains black children and other children of color--although this is a topic beyond the scope of the present analysis. 52 and collectively conditioned to reflexively relate to blackness with existential fear, which, as discussed above, sets in motion a whole range of other contradictory but equally oppressive emotional associations.

This would mean that white people collectively have an automatic sense, deeply felt in their bodies and minds, that blackness is extremely threatening. Some manifestations of this might include the visceral discomfort I noticed among my parents and teachers, the widespread believe-ability of stereotypes such as the

“criminalblackman” (Alexander, 107), and account for the speed and urgency of white flight away from the racial diversity of the inner city to the homogeneity of the suburbs, among other racist phenomena. Second, it suggests that white people have a deep desire to blame black people for various social and psychological problems; this not only follows rationally (and emotionally) from the fear of blackness, it also allows white people to misrecognize or project the source of danger away from their white community and onto blackness. This could account for the harsher disciplining of black children I observed in school, and for the ease with which stereotypes of blackness as greedy and entitled--such as the “welfare queen” or the unqualified affirmative action recipient--are adopted. It also suggests that white people have a deep, paradoxical desire to commune with blackness as something that affirms what they must repress in order to fit into the strictures of whiteness. This could account for the “coolness” and “authenticity” of blackness and hip hop that I observed in my high school days, and it could explain why blackness gets so closely associated with hypersexuality (Collins); sexuality is an

53 extremely powerful form of emotional affirmation that is also subject to discipline and control.

And yet, in the post-racial era, in which overt racism has become taboo among a large segment of the population, whites must carefully manage and contain these reflexive, visceral feelings of racial animosity and desire. Thandeka notices this, theorizing that the shame conjured up by the race game is not only the result of buried feelings of failure and betrayal rising to the surface; it is also a function of professed non- racist whites realizing that both they and their caregivers have failed to live up to their color-blind ideals. (Thandeka, 14-16) This might account for the rigid, internal boundaries of self-defense that whites put up around even the possibility that they are complicit with racism--the phenomenon referred to as “white fragility” by anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo. (2018) Perhaps this fragility occurs when one of the emotional brain’s nourishment strategies (the desire to appear non-racist) blocks off, or disavows, the nourishment strategy of fearing blackness. However, as DiAngelo notes, the flip side of this defensiveness is guilt and shame: the crippling realization that one is a “bad racist.” This could account for the shame I felt as an undergraduate when I enacted racism, and could explain the inability of the organization I worked for to own up to its racist past. Another strategy to manage the racism of the emotional brain could be what philosopher Shannon Sullivan (2014) calls “dumping on white trash,” in which middle and upper class whites project racist agency onto purportedly ignorant poor or working

54 class whites.7 In my introduction, I observed the same pattern in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Finally, liberal white people might also disavow their reflexive fear of blackness through a desire for blackness that upholds the dream of post-racial democracy, expressed through the white celebration of successful blacks such as the

Obamas and Oprah Winfrey.8

Recall that the dispositions of the emotional brain subtly but powerfully influence even our most rational evaluations. This could explain why the ostensibly rational workings of the law and policy, mostly controlled by white people, are influenced by this collective sense that blackness is an existential threat in need of containment, assimilation, or destruction. This would lead to policy decisions and court rulings that view blackness as a priori threatening and pathological. However, we can also imagine how this racialized fear and resentment might build and build among whites who have daily interactions among blacks, particularly in high-stress environments, such as the police, and that these dispositions might explode, hijacking white minds and bodies in the spectacular episodes of rage, panic, and violence on display in police brutality.

Moreover, these dispositions would be incredibly tenacious because, again, the emotional brain operates according to its reflexive logic, jumping to conclusions based on what it perceives will help or hinder its nourishment strategy. Thus, even if white people

7 See generally Sullivan, “Dumping on White Trash,” Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism 8 Using psychoanalytic terms, cultural theorist Amber Jamilla Musser refers to this as the “desire for recognition from the Negro vis-à-vis the white democratic superego.” (Musser 2014, 51) For Musser, this is closely related to the masochistic fantasy of the sexual coercion, even rape, of whites by blacks observed by Fanon, which triggers a sense of white victimhood that can be used to justify further racial aggression. This provides a deeper, more sexualized interpretation of how resentment gets instantiated in the emotional brain, but from a psychoanalytic perspective. 55 consciously understand that they are implicated in systemic racism, their emotional brains will likely still perceive blackness, at least in some forms, as a threat, because they have not attended to this as yet unconscious logic. For example, a white businessman might attend an office training on diversity and inclusion, after which he realizes how systemic racism plays out in corporate hiring practices. While before he shrugged aside efforts to recruit employees of color, now he might be glad to undertake efforts toward affirmative action. But despite this (not insignificant) change of heart, this man might still feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable when visiting a working class black neighborhood, or encountering homeless black people near his downtown office. This discomfort could persist because deeper dispositions or “voices” of his emotional brain still perceive blackness as a threat, and this could still motivate actions that contribute to the broader ecosystem of racism: he might still fall for politicians that pathologize “inner city” blackness to gain political capital; or he might still feel the need to project this discomfort onto working class “white trash,” stoking their resentful perception of multicultural elitism that goes hand-in-hand with their overt racism.

So, when imagining my neurophysiological reading of Thandeka as part of a larger pattern, we arrive at a seemingly all-encompassing system in which whiteness, at almost every turn, relates to blackness reflexively as a threat, as pathological, as a fetish.

This structure would be deeply and tenaciously instantiated in a set of neurophysiological mechanisms that operate largely unconsciously, producing oppressive emotions of both spectacular force and minute subtlety. This resonates with the Afro-Pessimist “libidinal economy” of unconscious anti-black identification (with whiteness) and abjection (of

56 blackness), and theories that explore the peculiar and violent temporality of black life, a temporality that reflexively loops back to the structure and logic of enslavement, troubling any narrative of emancipation.9 In sum, the racialized emotional brain could account for how whiteness is constructed such that it takes on the appearance of a transcendent principle.

Therapy for whiteness?

This implies that van der Kolk’s suggestions for how to change the dispositions of the emotional brain might apply to whiteness, opening the possibility of deconstructing it on this deeper level. What might this look like? First, it would require that white people learn to observe their racist dispositions arise and pass away without acting them out. For example, a white policeman might learn to notice how her body and mind react in stressful situations involving black people, stepping back from this reaction rather than letting it explode. Then, she could use breathing exercises to calm down her mind and body, de-escalating the situation. Or, a white teacher might learn to observe his reflexive impulse to discipline black students more harshly, and similarly contain and let go of this reaction. Perhaps a white judge might even learn to see how her ostensibly rational judgment as colored by racial fear and animosity, influencing the rulings she delivers.

She, too, could learn to step back from these dispositions and reconsider her rulings in light of possible racial bias.

9 Christina Sharpe (2016) calls this “the wake” of slavery, and Saidiya Hartman (2006) refers to this as slavery’s “afterlife.” John Murillo, III (2016) calls this the “untimeliness” of blackness, likening the temporality of blackness to that of a black hole, warping linear time back to the “singularity” of enslavement. Sharpe initially coined the term “singularity” in relation to the temporality of blackness. See In the Wake, 106.) 57

But, stepping back from and de-escalating these dispositions would only be the first step. Truly undoing them would require a much deeper dive into the racialized perceptions, associations, and memories of the emotional brain. This would involve revisiting the kind of memories that Thandeka’s interviewees recount--the initial perceptions that set the emotional brain’s patterns in motion--with a patient, stable, and gentle presence, possibly soothing the “inner child” that is afraid of blackness because it was punished for associating with it. This might allow this part of the emotional brain to let go of its fear, realizing that the threat is not as pronounced as originally perceived. At the same time, this “therapy for whiteness” might also require giving this “inner child”

(or its parent) a stern talking-to for the racism it adopted, encouraging a sense of ethical heedfulness and responsibility going forward--reminding it that even its most reflexive and subtle actions have consequences that need to be carefully attended to. However, this kind of therapy would likely be extremely difficult given the painful nature of these dispositions, requiring white people to open to something deep within themselves that they would probably prefer to ignore, especially given the powerful taboo (and attendant fragility) against overt racism in the post-racial era.

However, it is important to note that these dispositions are set in motion as part of a nourishment strategy, and that ultimately the nourishment of whiteness remains relatively secure; returning to Thandeka’s cases, the potential trauma of crossing the color line paradoxically pushes these white children back under the wing of their white caregiving community, even as they learn that this community may not be as safe as it initially appeared. And, this is the very affirmation that appears to parasitically depend on

58 blackness, thus leaving part of the structure of whiteness intact. This creates a problem for using van der Kolk’s therapies to deconstruct whiteness, because his therapies are aimed only at deconstructing patterns of fear, insecurity, and anger, leaving the pleasure of affirmation untouched. For example, a white inner city teacher might engage deeply with her early fearful memories of blackness to undo their hold on her emotional brain, helping her to treat her black students with less hostility. But, she might still return home to her suburban home where she enjoys the recognition of serving on her city council--a governing body that has not yet reckoned with how the community’s existence depends on racist urban/suburban policies and ordinances.

This suggests that undoing whiteness requires more than deconstructing racial fear, insecurity, and hostility; it would also require deconstructing its affirmative, nourishing, and pleasurable qualities. But Thandeka does not discuss the affirmative qualities of whiteness other than in the most general terms of wanting to belong to a community. This opens another question: what is this pleasure and affirmation of whiteness? This returns me to the existential analysis of Afro-Pessimism, which suggests a fairly clear answer: recall that the absolute denigration of blackness produces the pleasure of absolute capacity enjoyed by an exalted Human subject. But, again, Afro-

Pessimism only theorizes this at a very high level of abstraction, so how might we detect this pleasure on the level of emotional neurophysiology, and thus possibly deconstruct it using therapeutic and contemplative techniques? I explore these questions in the following chapter.

Chapter 2: The Addiction of Transparency

Here I examine the pleasure and affirmation of whiteness, theorizing it as a kind of addiction. I rely on Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s account of race as an “onto- epistemological” structure that emerges from post-Enlightenment though, which involves scaling up to a very high level of philosophical abstraction. Because I attempt to reconcile very different scales of analysis, I admit that I collapse an enormous amount of time and space into a limited set of variables (and number of pages), using a sometimes odd and disjointed assortment of examples to illustrate my points. Thus, like the previous chapter, and probably to an even greater degree here, I can only offer what follows as a series of (sometimes rough) observations that round out my thought experiment.

Nevertheless, this final experiment feels worthwhile: as I hope to demonstrate, Da Silva’s existential analysis of whiteness has significant resonance with the emotional/neurophysiological patterns I observe in chapter one, opening the possibilities that the philosophical pleasure she describes does indeed function as the broader pleasure of whiteness.

The transparency thesis

In Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) Da Silva begins with the Enlightenment premise that the universe is subject to universal, sovereign, and rational laws. (Da Silva,

1-4) This creates a paradox for human beings. On the one hand, as bearers of reasoning minds humans seem to have the capacity to understand these laws, thereby controlling the universe and subjecting it to their will--an optimistic possibility of freedom and self- determination. On the other hand, humans are part of the universe and are possibly constrained by these laws if they exceed our capacity for understanding and control--a pessimistic, even nihilistic possibility that humans have little or no control over the world or their destinies. (Da Silva, 19-20) For Enlightenment philosophers, this created two

“stages” in the “play of reason,” which Da Silva refers to as interiority and exteriority.

Interiority refers to the capacity of human beings to use reason as a self-determining force, while exteriority refers to the capacity of nature to determine human beings externally through its constraining order. (xvi)

Of course, many Enlightenment European philosophers attempted to resolve this paradox in favor of interiority, preserving the onto-epistemological primacy and integrity of human reason and self-determination. (Da Silva, 30-31) But Da Silva argues that no

Enlightenment philosopher was able to resolve the paradox as well as their post-

Enlightenment successor, Hegel. Hegel expands the stage of interiority into a transcendental “Spirit,” which realizes its interior capacity against exteriority as a domain of incapacity--a domain constrained or regulated by sovereign laws. Interiority then subjects exteriority to analysis, control, appropriation, and transformation in order to repurpose exteriority in line with human needs and desires; this can involve both physical labor (e.g. the building of a dam) and intellectual labor (e.g. the knowledge of physical laws required to build a dam). This is the process of engulfment, through which

61 interiority, qua Spirit, resolves the threat of exteriority. (Da Silva, 71-79) Thus, Hegel uses the quality of exteriority that presents a threat (outer determination by sovereign laws) and transforms it into an opportunity to flex interiority’s rational capacity. And because interiority realizes itself by coming to understand the absolute, universal, and sovereign laws of nature, engulfment is, in a sense, “divinely” authorized--a process that must be carried out because the principles that underlie it are absolute.

At the same time, in Hegel’s schema the relationship between interiority and exteriority takes on a paradoxical quality of simultaneous difference and interdependence. On the one hand, interiority needs exteriority to be something other than itself: the patterned but ultimately lifeless ground against which it comes to know its self- determined capacity. On the other, interiority needs to assimilate exteriority, incorporate it as part of itself, in order to transform it so that it no longer poses a threat.

Da Silva refers to the absolute goal of Spirit as the transparency thesis, in which humanity comes to entirely know the world and itself in accordance with the sovereign and universal principles of reason. This opens the possibility that for humanity qua Spirit everything can be known and mastered, leading to a condition of absolute mastery and freedom--a condition under which everything becomes transparent in line with the universal principles of reason. (Da Silva, 4) For Hegel, the progression of Spirit towards transparency plays out through the history of human civilization, in which humanity gradually awakens to the universal principles of reason as it comes to understand and control (i.e. engulf) both nature and itself.

This process culminates in Renaissance, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment

Europe, which realizes the transparency thesis through social and epistemological configurations that ostensibly privilege reason and self-determination over any other principle. (Da Silva, 80-90) For example, the democratic nation state privileges everyone’s capacity to reason and think through their political interests, freely voting for a candidate that best represents them. The will of the government and the law thus represents the rational will of the people in line with a rational form of compromise: the majority rule, augmented with checks and balances. The free market economy privileges the rational principles of supply and demand, reducing goods and services to abstract values that can be quickly and easily exchanged and accumulated among self-consciously rational economic agents, resulting in a rational distribution of goods and services.

Schools, universities, and libraries produce and manage the knowledge of transparency, especially through the disciplines of history and science: history archives and interprets the teleological journey of Spirit from ancient to modern times, while science subjects the exterior laws of nature to experimentation, analysis, and control (again, engulfment).

Thus, the transparency thesis proposes organizing everything according to Spirit qua humanity’s capacity for reason and self-determination; for humanity, absolute mastery of reality is possible, if not already achieved.

Transparency’s existential structure of race

Da Silva argues that while post-Enlightenment European socio-epistemic configurations understood their exalted character as particular to themselves, the

63 universal aspirations of the transparency thesis gave rise to the onto-epistemological framework of the “Global,” which attempts to understand and dominate the entire world under its unified set of rational principles. (76) And Da Silva demonstrates that the process by which transparency actualizes its Global aspirations is closely correlated with the emergence of the modern concept of race.

For example, Da Silva examines the racial discourse of nineteenth and early twentieth century biological anthropology. These theorists elaborate on Darwinian evolution, in which human beings are seen as biological organisms whose form and functions have been produced by the law of natural selection: a brutal struggle for existence always progressing toward better, more “fit” forms. In the Darwinian schema

European peoples side-step the exterior regulation of natural selection through their advanced rational faculties, providing their adaptive advantage over the “savage races” who remain subject to the constraints of fixed biological laws--unable to overcome their

“savage” instincts. (Da Silva, 107-111) Anthropologists link this competitive advantage to the physical characteristics of the skull and brain: the skull/brain of the others of

Europe become the cause of their affectable consciousness, while the skull/brain of

Europeans become the cause of their transparent consciousness. (Da Silva, 120-125) This establishes two kinds of minds or consciousness: the transparent consciousness of self- determined, rational Europe, and the affectable consciousness of its “others,” the “savage races” affectable both by the external laws of nature and by the superior power of transparent consciousness. (Da Silva, 117)

Da Silva claims that this logic continues into the present, as the biological discourse of race gives way to cultural discourses in the twentieth century: transparency comes to know itself though cultures that uphold the values of reason and self- determination, while viewing cultures that uphold other values as affectable. (131-134)

For example, Da Silva discerns this structure in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, in which the United States perfects the ideals of Enlightenment Europe through its exceptional culture of revolutionary liberalism, which carries forth the structural imperative to assimilate, obliterate, or contain (i.e. engulf) the affectable cultures of

Native Americans, blacks, and various immigrant groups. (197-219)

In the transparency thesis’s conception of race, Da Silva discerns the logic of

Hegelian engulfment, in which interiority and exteriority arise in paradoxical interdependence. European whiteness indexes its capacity for transparency (i.e. absolute interiority) against a form of consciousness constrained by the natural law (exteriority), so it needs its affectable others as (part of) the lifeless ground against which it understands itself. This is one of the central points outlined by Afro-Pessimism in my introduction: if whiteness/transparency is a position of absolute human capacity, this capacity depends on the absolute incapacity, or affectability, of blackness. However, because exteriority/affectability also poses a threat to interiority, it must also be worked over in order to metabolize, contain, or obliterate its danger. In a racial context, this is accomplished by various racial projects that assimilate (e.g. cultural assimilation), put to work (slavery and exploitation of labor), or obliterate (genocide) the affectable consciousness of racial others. And, because engulfment is ostensibly carried out in line

65 with the absolute, sovereign law of nature (represented in a racial context by natural selection or cultural exceptionalism), these racial projects are not merely a ruthless grabbing of power and resources (although they are that, too); as strategies of engulfment they are the natural expressions of universal reason as it moves toward absolute self- consciousness--the realization of Spirit in the transparency thesis.

Thus, on a structural/existential level the transparency thesis relates to racial otherness, blackness in particular, with a kind of abusive dependency, authorized by sovereign laws; transparency needs racial otherness, but only as something to be consumed or destroyed in lines with its own needs. As Frantz Fanon puts it: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. … His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.” (Fanon, 83) Or more viscerally: “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.” (86) This is the racial cost of the exalted status of the transparency thesis.

And yet, some critics argue that despite its apparently exalted character the very nature of the transparency thesis requires it to remain haunted by a sense of existential insecurity. In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944, 2002),

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer make this point in their critique of Enlightenment positivism, which anticipates the transparency thesis. They argue that because of its absolute and universal aspirations, transparency necessarily comes to fear itself: for example, they observe that human beings realize that they themselves might be, or

66 already are, reduced to the fungible abstractions that they have applied to nature in order to control it; they have reduced themselves to cogs in a machine, mere commodities.

(Horkheimer and Adorno, 11-22) We can also imagine more basic insecurities. As embodied by actual human beings, the transparency thesis might fear aspects of its own humanity that fail to conform to its exalted goal of sheer self-determined rationality: such failures might include illness, old age, death, and the forces in human life not subject to total rational control, such as powerful emotions and bodily sensations/functions.

Of course, the transparency thesis already has a tool to manage and soothe these insecurities: engulfment. Illness and old can be “engulfed” by medicine, clinics, and retirement communities, powerful emotions can be engulfed by boxing them into certain narratives and norms (e.g. the heteropatriarchal model of the family), and death can be engulfed through memorials and monuments. Again, as Hegel theorized, through engulfment these threats to interiority/ transparency can be transformed into opportunities to celebrate its capacity. But I suggest that the existential ennui, bordering on horror, of transparency can never be entirely soothed because these threats can never be absolutely managed--they always remain as a fact of life. And this only reveals that the absolute claims of the transparency thesis are something of a sham, only increasing its sense of existential insecurity, possibly leading to a sense of shame and self-hatred.

We can imagine that cultural relativism also produces such existential insecurity, because if other cultures have legitimate forms of knowledge that exceed the knowledge and culture of transparency (i.e., they know something that transparency does not), this means that transparency is fallible, again deflating its exalted self-understanding as the

67 pinnacle of humanity. This means that racial others are not merely an external threat, they remind transparency of its internal insecurities and potential failures. And again, as Afro-

Pessimism argues, this is particularly true of blackness in its relegation to a kind of absolute otherness, and further accounts for the reflexive severity with which its otherness is policed, assimilated, and contained.

But, as Saidiya Hartman argues, when blackness is reduced to a kind of commodity par excellence--a totally fungible substance that can serve any purpose--it provides an empty screen onto which the transparency thesis can project and sooth its various insecurities in a kind of distorted therapy. (Hartman, 21) Toni Morrison makes this point about the white American literary imagination: “American Africanism … provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.” She continues, arguing that “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the [white] writerly conscious.

It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.” (Morrison, 7, 17) Roediger makes a similar point about blackface minstrelsy: white workers anxious about the encroaching constraints of capitalism (i.e., anxious about being reduced to a commodity) project their insecurity onto a seemingly indolent and slavish blackness--the minstrel--, reassuring themselves that they belong in the fold of whiteness (i.e. transparency). This also provides an outlet to express their repressed desire for freedom through the raucous performance of a seemingly carefree

68 blackness. (Roediger, 118-119) This only adds to the range of strange, contradictory, and violent forces through which the transparency thesis relates to blackness.

So, Da Silva’s analysis (augmented by Adorno/Horkheimer, Hartman, Morrison, and Roediger), demonstrates that the manner in which the transparency thesis relates to blackness on an existential/structural level resonates with the emotional patterns I observed in chapter one. The transparency thesis understands blackness as a threat of both external destruction (as affectable consciousness ruled by dangerous laws), and internal failure (in reminding transparency of its insecurity), just as it arises in the emotional brains of Thandeka’s interviewees. And in both cases, the threat of blackness arises without coherent reason, marking the future with murky uncertainty: for the transparency thesis, blackness (both real and imagined) eats away at its insecurities, holding open the possibility that its exalted dream might collapse at any time; for the white children, blackness jumps up as an incoherent threat that leaves open the possibility of future failure, betrayal, or abuse. Finally, the transparency thesis also desires blackness, both as affectable substance against which it indexes its capacity, and as an empty vessel that can provide therapeutic mediation and relief. And although Thandeka’s interviewees did not provide evidence that they desire blackness, recall that their existential fear could set in motion feelings of desire, as blackness becomes associated with the desires they must repress in order to conform to the strictures of their own community--how I theorized my high school’s obsession with hip hop and blackness.

This resonance between the emotional and existential structures of whiteness returns us to the question of whether the pleasure of mastery secured by the transparency

69 thesis could animate the neurophysiological patterns I theorized reading Thandeka through van der Kolk. But because my (and Da Silva’s) analysis of the transparency thesis operates at a very high level of abstraction, and emotional neurophysiology operates at a very low level of abstraction, this is a difficult question to answer. However, it is possible to reframe this problem in a manner that allows us to explore it further.

Recall that the racialized dispositions of the emotional brain are part of a nourishment strategy: they push Thandeka’s interviewees toward the emotional nourishment of their white communities. This opens up a new question through which to explore the resonance between Thandeka and Da Silva: is the transparency thesis also a nourishment strategy, which, through its racialized associations becomes the nourishment strategy of whiteness? Considering this possibility requires analyzing transparency as a structure of recognition and emotional affirmation, to which I now turn.

Transparency as nourishment strategy, whiteness as addiction

If the transparency thesis were a structure of recognition and affirmation, it would orient us toward obtaining recognition as a subject capable of reason, self-determination, and mastery--a subject of transparency. This kind of recognition is discernible in the

Hegelian master-bondsman dialectic, which begins with two individuals who confront one other, each desiring recognition from the other as a subject capable of self-conscious mastery. In order to obtain this recognition, each individual is willing to risk their life in a life-and-death struggle. However, once the struggle escalates one of them gives up, because to sacrifice his life would entail losing his capacity for recognition. Thus, he

70 submits to the other, becoming her bondsman as she becomes his master. In this moment of the dialectic, the master receives recognition from the bondsman as a self-conscious subject. However, the glory of this recognition soon fades, because the struggle has ceased and she realizes her source of recognition is now her inferior--thus his admiration is not worth as much as it was in the moment of struggle. Further, in his position of inferiority, the bondsman must work for the master, and in the process of laboring he makes a mark on the external world. And because his labor is carried out in service of the human, self-conscious desire of his master, his labor and its mark on the world are recognized as self-conscious human activity; in the end, the bondsman also achieves recognition as a self-determined, rational human subject. (Hegel) Thus, every moment of the dialectic--struggle, submission/mastery, labor, recognition of labor--is driven by a struggle for recognition, and both actors attempt to obtain recognition by proving their capacity to exemplify the aspirations of the transparency thesis.

A more contemporary theorization of how recognition is obtained through transparency is Althusser’s notion of being hailed or interpellated by ideology, in which one is recognized in one’s individuality before an abstract or universal principle.

Althusser’s classic example is to be hailed on the street by a policeman, through which one is recognized (and recognizes oneself) as a subject of the principles of governance and law embodied by the police. (Althusser, 163, 170-186) While Althusser’s example demonstrates the state’s capacity to punish, an oppressive form of recognition, we can easily imagine its affirmative counterpart. A particularly clear example of this is the

World War I propaganda poster of Uncle Sam pointing his finger at the viewer, looking

71 him right in the eye, while beneath his image the words “I WANT YOU FOR U.S.

ARMY” are written. Here the potential recruit is individually recognized in his capacity to contribute to America’s World War I ideal of “making the world safe for democracy”-- an explicit and concise articulation of the transparency thesis if there ever was one. Here the interpellated subject does not merely receive recognition from Uncle Sam and the

U.S. Army; he receives the nourishment of the whole American nation as an agent that carries out the ideal of transparency to its exalted pinnacle. This is recognition of reverential, exalted, even ecstatic, proportions.

While these examples discuss the recognition of transparency in abstract terms, we can elaborate on the World War I example to consider how such recognition is obtained concretely through the kind of embodied, affective/emotional affirmation discussed by van der Kolk. If the young World Was I recruit’s family supports the war, they would affirm him in his decision to join the military through approving embodied affect, communicating their pride for him through embraces, affirming words, handshakes, etc. Then, basic training would involve the affirming experience of harmonizing with literally thousands of other bodies in various drills and formations--an experience of becoming one body among the collective body of the transparency thesis: the collective body that “makes the world safe for democracy.” And while basic training would likely involve its fair share of discipline and punishment, the flip side of this un- affirming affect would be the pride achieved when mastering the drills and gaining the respect of one’s superiors. Finally, once they complete their training, the newly minted soldiers would embark on military parades around the nation, in which they would bathe

72 in the praise of patriotic crowds. In each of these moments, the World War I recruit is affirmed through embodied affect specifically as a subject of transparency.

We can imagine other possibilities for how individuals obtain concrete emotional affirmation as subjects of transparency. For example, in a graduation ceremony, each graduate shakes the hand of a dean or school principal before an approving audience.

When the dean shakes the graduate’s hand and gives her a diploma, the graduate is recognized and affirmed as a subject of transparency--a self-determined rational subject who has proven her capacity by mastering the tasks assigned by the education system.

Through the audience’s approving cheers, they too recognize and affirm the graduate as a subject of transparency. In turn, the members of the audience recognize themselves as subjects of transparency by both providing the nourishment of approval and basking in the harmonious affect of the exalted occasion; they too are capable of achieving the mastery on display, or at least they contribute to its possibility. Similar patterns are discernible in Academy and Nobel award ceremonies, political rallies, and inaugurations, as individuals recognize and affirm one another as as masters of the arts, sciences, and/or the political process. Again, this recognition is incredibly pleasurable, providing an intoxicating sense of mastery and connection to a larger aspiration of religious proportions.

And yet, the affirmation of transparency is not confined to grand occasions.

Children who attend schools organized by the Western model of education can obtain continual affirmation as subjects of transparency by teachers, peers, and their families for academic success (or receive un-affirmation for failing), which can be communicated

73 through many subtle moments: the approving glance of teachers and peers, or the happiness of a parent when their child gets good grades. These more subtle forms of affirmation are also circulated constantly by the media: the daily news attempts to provide a sense of mastery over the dramas of politics and economics, upholding political, legal, financial, and medical expertise as our guide to understanding the world-- something we should aspire to achieve recognition for. And a huge amount of popular entertainment celebrates various heroes of the transparency thesis: politicians, soldiers, police, scholars, doctors, scientists, etc.

This suggests that the recognition of transparency can be incredibly diffuse, operating through innumerable everyday moments, gestures, and encounters. In a sense, then, it might function as a kind of atmosphere, saturating the emotional ecosystem--at least in locales where the institutions of transparency dominate. This would cause it to appear totally natural and universal (in line with its aspirations), as a common sense index for whether one is worthy of affirmation or not. Thus, it might appear as if there is no other way to to obtain emotional nourishment except through the affirmation of transparency. It is therefore possible that many individuals could become emotionally dependent on this affirmation: first through the powerful pleasure of its exalted aspiration, and second through the sense that it is the only possible source of recognition.

Consequently, we can imagine how the transparency thesis might thoroughly instantiate itself as a nourishment strategy in the emotional brains of many, many people

(again, at least in places dominated by the institutions of transparency). This would mean that the collective emotional brain would generate a very powerful sense of motivation to

74 uphold transparency’s integrity, attempt to live up to its ideals, defend against its threats, and sooth its insecurities. And this motivation could function with the same unconscious, tenacious, simultaneously spectacular and subtle logic of the racial patterns observed in chapter one. So, we might think of the nourishment strategy of the transparency thesis as a kind of addiction, sometimes latent and diffuse, sometimes spectacular, to transparency’s exalted nourishment--such that without it the addicted experience a kind of emotional/existential withdrawal.

Returning to transparency’s racial dimension, this could mean that the addictive pleasure of its recognition serves as the pleasure of whiteness on the level of emotional neurophysiology. This could explain the potency of whiteness as a “psychological wage,” observed by Du Bois and Roediger, why whiteness is so jealously guarded as a form of property, as Harris remarks, and why there is such a powerful “possessive investment” in policies that benefit white people, as theorized by Lipsitz. This could also further explain

Thandeka’s case studies; although we cannot empirically determine whether her interviewees, and more importantly, their caregivers, depend on being recognized as subjects of transparency, it would be almost impossible for them not to depend on this recognition given its diffuse, ubiquitous, yet intoxicating nature. This would account for the reflexive manner in which the parents and peers of Thandeka’s interviewees reflexively fall into incoherent patterns of abuse, visceral discomfort, and fear when their children come in proximity to blackness. At a higher level of abstraction, transparency’s racial dimension could also explain the reflexive need to police, contain, assimilate, consume, and/or obliterate blackness, as its mere presence reminds subjects of

75 transparency, and therefore whiteness, of the insecurity of their/its addictive feeding patterns. This, of course, returns me to my original question of why whiteness functions with such strange, contradictory, and violent forces.

So, if the pleasure of transparency is indeed the pleasure of whiteness, can this side of its emotional neurophysiology also be deconstructed using therapeutic and contemplative techniques that reorganize the emotional brain? I conclude my thesis by imagining what this might might look.

Therapy for whiteness, reconsidered

In the previous chapter, I considered how the white emotional brain might release its oppressive dispositions through contemplative and therapeutic techniques usually used to treat anxiety, depression, and trauma. Here, though, I consider a therapeutic program that would allow the white emotional brain to release its pleasurable but addictive habits of obtaining nourishment through the transparency thesis. Because of the simultaneous ubiquity, tenacity, and subtlety of the feeding habits of transparency, I can only offer these reflections as speculations, possible tools to be experimented with.

First, white people would likely need reframe the pleasure of absolute rational mastery as something dangerous so as to “sober up” from its intoxication. For example, a white person could disinvest from the heightened pleasure provided by the exalted promises made by politicians, reframing these promises as necessarily incomplete and even dangerous when taken as absolute solutions. This does not mean that this person simply refuses to participate in politics; rather, they participate from a place of sobriety,

76 understanding that politics does have real influence on people’s lives, but only to a limited degree. A similar sober skepticism and disenchantment could be applied to the exalted claims of all of transparency’s institutions: from journalism to science. Again, this does not mean that one should reject these institutions outright; deconstructing transparency would likely still require staying informed about the news and respecting scientific findings, such as climate change. I am instead suggesting that white people should not fall for the heightened pleasure that is possible to obtain through the posture of mastery these institutions often take, realizing that this pleasure has its dangers, for themselves and especially those around them.

This sobering up could be aided with the previously discussed meditative techniques, allowing white people to observe the emotional brain’s pleasure-driven motivations arise and pass away without following them and going for another “fix” of transparency. Then, from a place of greater stability, the white person could reframe the pleasures of transparency in terms of its actual trajectory (i.e. racialized insecurity and oppression), realizing it ultimately does more harm than good and is not worth getting caught up in.

Next, because the addiction to transparency also serves as a form of recognition, white people might also need to give up some of the affirmation they receive, particularly at an institutional level. For example, in the cultural non-profit I mentioned in the introduction, the white upper management of the institution could have admitted the organization’s flaws (its unresolved history of racism) openly, which might anger some supporters and cause the institution to lose face--with some possibly losing their jobs.

Conversely, white people might set up alternative spaces and institutions that provide emotional nourishment not routed through the transparency thesis. While this would be difficult given the ubiquity and subtlety of transparency, such spaces might be constructed at least among like-minded friends and family.

Further, because the pleasure of transparency is so ubiquitous and diffuse, and because some of the sacrifices required to disinvest from it are not insignificant, any therapy for whiteness would need to provide alternative sources of nourishment and pleasure that are less dangerous--otherwise whiteness might merely give up and return to its old habits. These forms of nourishment might include very simple things, such as enjoying nature, the company of family of friends outside of the institutions of the transparency, or the various contemplative and embodied practices van der Kolk mentions, such as meditation, yoga, dance, sport, and musical ensemble. While none of these activities are removed from politics, they might be used as skillful substitutes for more obviously harmful habits. Suppose, for example, a white person meditates for twenty minutes in the morning instead of getting fired up watching MSNBC; this substitutes a pleasure of the transparency thesis with a pleasure that possibly allows this person to unhook from the transparency thesis--practicing the kind of stable awareness needed to examine the subtle, tenacious, and unconscious patterns in their own heart and mind. Of course, this person’s meditation practice would need to be oriented in an ethical direction, framed by a larger project of deconstructing oppressive habits rather than undertaken as a mere relaxation exercise.

I acknowledge that most of the therapeutic techniques I have suggested, both here and in the previous chapter, imply that undoing whiteness is mostly internal work. And I do stand by the claim that if whiteness is to be deconstructed white people must take a long look in the mirror and patiently attend to the deeply buried demons that animate their (our) destructive habits. However, this work need not preclude outward engagement and activism. In fact, outward work might actually catalyze inner work, as it could bring forth racist dispositions that would otherwise lay dormant and therefore entirely unconscious.

Before closing, I offer one more important observation about the the transparency thesis, drawn from Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of

Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” Here Wynter places the transparency thesis in a genealogy of pre-Enlightenment European thought and culture. She observes that in late medieval

Europe, the Christian laity were subordinated by the divine authority of the clergy, but that throughout the Renaissance the laity turned to an increasingly secular notion of

“Man,” through which they wrested power from the heavenly heights of the clergy and brought it down to the Earthly realm of humanity. This investment in immanent human capacity is correlated with the Renaissance and Enlightenment rise of rational (as opposed to divine) sovereignty, leading to the construction of the transparency thesis outlined by Da Silva above. (Wynter, “Unsettling,” 262-263) However, Wynter’s pre-

Enlightenment genealogy of “Man” demonstrates that the kind of absolute mastery celebrated in the transparency thesis did not arise only with the Enlightenment; throughout the European Middle Ages the church authority claimed such absolute

79 mastery (over both nature and humanity) through divine authorization. We might say that this created a religious version of the transparency thesis, in which interiority was expanded to the absolute, self-determined will of God, who “engulfed” the exterior world by assimilating it into heaven or damning it to hell.

Wynter’s observations suggest that the pleasure of transparency is not only the result of a particular worldview or “episteme,” such as post-Enlightenment rationality.

Rather, it is the writing of an episteme as absolute, which facilitates a moment of transparency in which everything becomes known through (i.e. reducible to) a particular set of principles. This opens the possibility that the transparency thesis is not singular; perhaps there are multiple transparency “theses.”

For example, we can discern this possibility in Thandeka’s cases. Thandeka observes that her interviewees feel ashamed when recounting how they acquiesced to their parents’ racism, and that they themselves may have picked up these habits, making them a “bad racist.” We might think of this white guilt as arising out of a conflict between two competing transparency theses: first, the transparency of post-racial democracy, in which overt racism has been overcome and is now taboo--a vestige of an outdated past; and second, the transparency of actual white mastery and dominance that continues to be passed down on the level of emotion and embodied affect despite its disavowal. The white guilt would thus arise out of a kind of “tug-of-war” between two dispositions of the emotional brain that aspire to competing but irreconcilable visions of transparency: one disposition desires the pleasure and recognition of upholding post-

80 racial democracy, so it must forcefully and painfully repress the other disposition, which seeks recognition before the transparency of tacit but actual white supremacy.

So, this suggests the pleasure and addiction of whiteness and transparency is not dependent on a particular set of principles, but possibly arises out of the manner in which these principles are held and used--a set of qualities of heart and mind. This would include a sense of absolute, rigid mastery, along with the desire to be recognized as a subject who exemplifies this mastery’s universal and exalted aspirations (be they religious, secular, conservative, liberal, etc.), all of which sets in motion patterns of existential insecurity, terror, rage, and desire in relation to whatever exceeds this sense of mastery. This would mean that any principle, including radical principles such as critical theories, could be held as a kind of rigid, intoxicating mastery that animates the emotional and existential structures I have observed throughout this thesis. Consequently, whiteness would need to carry out its anti-addiction work with great care and diligence, so as to avoid falling into the same old patterns of mastery and insecurity, but under new guises that claim to debunk these very patterns.

While this may seem like a tall order, I end with a note of cautious optimism. I suggest that unhooking from the addiction to transparency and mastery would actually be freeing for whiteness. It would no longer need to feel so insecure and fearful, in a sense

“growing up” into a state of both emotional and existential maturity, standing on its own two feet instead of standing on the backs of others. While I do not know exactly what this looks like, I hope my analysis of the emotional neurophysiology of whiteness offers some possibilities.

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