Refusing the White Dream: Anti-adaptation and Black America Katherine Glanz Ph.D. Candidate Political Theory Department of Political Science Johns Hopkins University 2937 Saint Paul St. Apt. 3 Baltimore, MD 21218 Email:
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[email protected] Telephone: (512) 423-4931 Refusing the White Dream: Anti-adaptation and Black America This paper addresses the tensions between American ego psychology, a practice based on adaptation, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, a technique for social critique. I highlight the ways in which critical psychoanalytic theory works toward a theorization of social movements that underscores their potential to dismantle race-based systems of dispossession. Specifically, I focus on the recent uprising in West Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man killed while in police custody. Turning to Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the American Psychological Association in 1967, I elaborate on his notion of “creative maladjustment” to reject the media’s depiction of the Baltimore uprising as indicative of pathology within the community. Instead, through a critical psychoanalytic lens, I theorize the event as conducive to ethical social change. Through King’s notion of “creative maladjustment” and a Lacanian notion of ethics, I contend that the Baltimore protestors have directly challenged the normalcy of structural racism, initiating a transformation in America’s approach to race- based dispossession, state violence, and mass-incarceration. Keywords: Martin Luther King Jr., Freddie Gray, Baltimore, psychoanalysis, urban uprising 1 Recent urban uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, condemning the murder of black Americans by police officers, have drawn national attention to the state-supported dispossession and violence faced by poor black communities in cities across America.