The psychology of racism
Some years ago, after I had given a lecture at a philosophy conference, I engaged in personal chit-chat with some of the senior philosophers seated in the front row. One of them asked me, presumably based on my name, where I was from. Iran, I replied, without elaboration. My colleagues fell silent for about five seconds. Then, the wife of one of the philosophers remarked, “Well, that’s a conversation stopper.” Moments like these take me back to when I was a vulnerable 13 year old, in 1979, right at the time when revolution came to Iran and hostage-taking to the American embassy there. This may sound like ancient history, but it is alive and well in my soul, and it would appear, unfortunately, in the American body politic, with all the continued discord between the US and Iran.
So this discussion of racism is about Black and White, but it is also broader: it is about White and everything else.
I will compare Martin Luther King Jr and Frantz Fanon on their views about the psychology of racism, and their proposed solutions, which would seem to conflict — nonviolent and violent. But as one enters this material in more detail, one finds more and more resonance between the two men.
Let’s start with Fanon. I have always marveled in this man, partly because he was identified with the black, and Third World, and vaguely Marxist revolutions of the 1960s. As the son of a vaguely Marxist father, I was attracted to that part of him. But another aspect always appealed to me, for Fanon was a doctor, like me, and a psychiatrist at that: A revolutionary Third World black psychiatrist: what a great mix!
I read most of his works in college, and when I applied to psychiatry residency in the Harvard programs in Boston, I had the poor judgment to mention my admiration for him in an interview with a highly respected full professor of psychiatry and anthropology. I thought Fanon might have something to teach us at that intersection. I remember how horrified that professor was when I compared the rantings of this Marxist to his own scholarly work. Needless to say, I didn’t get admitted to that residency (though I did later serve as faculty in that same hospital).
Fanon is famous for his espousal of violence, perhaps most associated with his book The Wretched of the Earth. There, the story line goes, Fanon argued that the colonialist oppression of non-white peoples produced a deformation of the personality of the African and the Caribbean black. These deformed blacks could only cleanse themselves and their messed up personalities in a violent reaction against the white colonialists. Violent revolution not only was justified on the usual political and economic and social grounds, it was justified in the interests of the individual psychological health of oppressed persons.
I re-read that book after psychiatry residency and noticed something rarely commented upon: it has a number of case histories at the end of basically PTSD in colonial victims of Western oppression but also of a few French colonizers. The data that underlie the theory was about how colonialism causes psychological damage for all involved.
Wretched of the Earth was a hit in the early 1960s, just before Fanon’s premature death. But he had also written in 1952 a book in French, when still rather unknown, later published in English first in 1967, called Black Skin, White Masks. There we see a different Fanon, or perhaps a different side to him, one where he is not an exhorter of revolution, but a clinician of pain:
“These things I am going to say, not shout. For it is a long time since shouting has gone out of my life….This book should have been written three years ago. But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned. These truths do not have to be hurled in men’s faces. They are not intended to ignite fervor. I do not trust fervor. Every time it has burst out somewhere, it has brought fire, famine, misery…and contempt for man.”
This Fanon hardly even mentions violence, much less defends it. He rather seems only to seek to empathize, and to do so with everybody. His methods seems clearly existential.
Fanon restates the original observation of W. E. B. Dubois, now informed by more psychiatric wisdom, the view that DuBois noted about the “double-consciousness” of the American black: “[The world gives the American black] no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…”
Fanon says “White civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on the Negro….what is often called the black soul is the white man’s artifact.”
WEB DuBois commented that people, in many different ways, indirectly ask him, as a black man in the South, the same question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” I have had the same experiences; well-meaning friends often say, “It must be difficult for you to be an Iranian in the United States after 9/11 (or before 9/11).” Which means: How does it feel to be a problem? This is the racial, indeed existential, dilemma: one’s mere existence is a problem, not something that you can take for granted, or that is acknowledged as acceptable by those around you: your mere existence, you, just being here, is a problem.
Fanon starts where psychoanalysis starts: with the family. He notes that normal White adults are raised in families in which they receive a normal amount of attention and care and love. They then enter a society in which they and their family’s experiences are validated by everything they see around them: everything — their religion, politics, habits, virtues and vices — they are all validated as normal and acceptable. They are normal.
Not a single Black man or woman, or for that matter, not a single immigrant or immigrant’s child, has any chance at that kind of normal. All Blacks are fated to abnormality. As Nietzsche said: Man’s tragedy is that he was once a child. No matter how sheltered or how cultured the upbringing of non-Whites, they will enter a foreign world, one which does not recognize them, and in which they does not see themselves.
They then have two choices:
Either they reject themselves and accept the world; or they reject the world, and turning inside themselves, fall out of the world altogether. They disappear.
Fanon wants to break this cycle by offering a way beyond this false choice: “As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find valued for what is bad….In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution…in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal. When the Negro dives — in other words, goes under — something remarkable happens.”
Fanon the psychiatrist says there is need for “combined action on the individual and the group.” As a psychoanalyst, he wants to help his patient become conscious of some of his racial inferiority feelings, but also wants to empower him to change the social structure that his causing those feelings. “In other words, the black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear.” Fanon will not seek to help the black man to adjust to what white society wants of him, but rather “to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict — that is toward the social structures.” Note that by including his innocuous parenthesis, Fanon does not argue that one must oppose racism actively; rather one might choose to acquiesce in it. As a psychiatrist, Fanon is not telling his patient what to do: he just wants to make him more free to choose what to do.
So Fanon’s view is that there is a complex dialectic here between what society does to the individual, and what the individual allows society to do to him. “I have ceaselessly striven to show the Negro that in a sense he makes himself abnormal; to show the white man that he is at once the perpetrator and the victim of a delusion.”
Fanon is not seeking to elevate Blackness, or to simply blame Whiteness, nor does he think that there is any possibility of being color-blind. We are not wed to the past, he argues forcefully, but we are who we are, and our society is built on the past, with its prejudices as well as its glories. So color-blindness is no more possible that blindness: we have to see to exist, and we see skin color, and religion, and ethnicity.
“The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man….Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentication communication be possible….At the beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child.”
In fact, there is no way to escape the reality of the deformative effects of racism on all people. The first step is to acknowledge it; the next is to fight it.
Fanon tells the story that frequently in Algeria, he would be stopped by the French police who would initially mistake him for an Arab. After realizing their error, they would apologize to him profusely. Though he would vainly protest, they would assure him that Arabs, unlike Negroes, were not be trusted and that is why they had to be harsh with them. Fanon noticed that he was “astonished to learn that North Africans despise men of color” and that he was unable to establish good relations with them initially. “The Frenchman does not like the Jew, who does not like the Arab, who does not like the Negro.” And the cycle of racism goes on.
The Black man wants to be like the White man, he writes, and the White man wants only to be human. Let them both be human, he argues, but real flesh-and-bones humans.
Fanon’s goal is an “authentic disalienation” of humanity.
Simply exalting a black (or an Islamic, for that matter) past will not do:
“Have I no other purpose on earth than to avenge the Negro of the 17th century? In this world, which is already trying to disappear, do I have to pose the problem of black truth?..Let us be clearly understood. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight year old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique….”
Simply attacking the enemy will also not do:
“I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of my ancestors. There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden….No I do not have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the white man. I do not have the duty to murmur my gratitude to the white man. My life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me back on myself. No, I do not have the right to be a Negro….”
The demands on the Black and the White are about how to make a better world than this messed-up world into which they were thrown at birth, how they can take what is bad and make it better. Beyond praising the Black and blaming the White, or pretending at a humanity that ignores both, Fanon is asking us if we can create a new world, a world in which Black and White are different, not the same, not unimportant, but also neither better nor worse:
“I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices….Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?”
Now this Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks seems like a different person than the Fanon of lore, the one who extols violence as a means for psychological redemption, the Fanon ofWretched of the Earth. Indeed, perhaps Fanon’s tenure in Algeria radicalized him, for the tone of these two works is not only different, but even in that book, Fanon’s style as political theorist is radically different from his chapter written as a clinical psychiatrist. The bookbegins famously, after Sartre’s lengthy preface, with the blazing chapter “Concerning Violence”. Fanon pulls no punches from the start. The first sentence says: “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” and he does not look back. This is followed by other theoretical chapters on spontaneity, national consciousness, and culture, the chapters which so entranced many radicals decades ago. Yet curiously little attention has been given to the final full chapter of the book, “ Colonial war and mental disorders”, a compiliation and discussion of many real psychiatric cases treated by Fanon in Algeria. Here not only does he feel initially a need to apologize for including this chapter in the book, but his tone is quite different, more subdued, more anguished, as in Black Skin, White Masks.
“Perhaps these notes on psychiatry will be found ill-timed and singularly out of place in such a book; but we can do nothing about that.” He argued that the essence of colonialism was to be a “furtile purveyor” of psychiatric diseases. “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constant: “In reality, who am I?” (pp 249–250).
He then described four basic categories of cases: first, so called reactive psychoses, like mania and psychotic depression in the setting of much killing and mayhem. Second, psychiatric cases that are the effects of “total war” such as the taxi driver who becomes impotent after his wife is raped, or the European torturer who ties up and beats his wife on the slightest provocation. Third, the effects of torture, such as paranoia, phobias, depersonalization. Fourth, psychosomatic disorders, such as gastric and other ailments that occur after torture and brainwashing in particular.
Fanon reveals himself as a psychiatrist: He uses drugs, like high doses of neuroleptics in one cases and sedatives in another, a quite progressive approach in an era when neuroleptics had just been discovered. He values biological psychiatry: in his discussion of psychosomatic illness, he rejects the view that physical illness can be solely psychologically caused and upholds the view, citing Pavlov, that the brain must play an important role. Yet he also pays great attention to slight hints that reflect unconscious conflict, and cites Freud at times: someone being too breezily cheery is held to be suspect; dreams are used to reveal a patient’s guilt feelings about killing an innocent old women; sexual fantasies are explored. But he is , at root, an existential psychiatrist: he sees his patients as people, first and foremost, caught up in a crazy world.
He sees a patient having a panic attack outside his house, and he gives him a ride in his car.
He interviews 2 Algerian boys who killed their European friend:
“Why did you kill him? (Fanon asks)
Because he trusted us to go up on the hill (the child replies).
Did he do anything to you?
No.
So why did you kill him?
Because they kill us.
But did he ever hurt you in particular?
No. In your opinion (one child said to Fanon) what should we have done?
I don’t know (Fanon replied), but you are a child and what is happening concerns grown up people.
But they kill children too.
That is no reason for killing your friend.
Well kill him I did, now you can do what you like.” (pp 270–272)
This Fanon, the psychiatrist, treats Algerians and Europeans alike. Though he takes sides in the war, he does not judge individuals while he treats them, and he never condoned individual violence.
Yet as soon as the psychiatric chapter is over, we meet again Fanon the political theorist, supporter of mass violence, in fiery conclusion, famously writing: “Come well comrades; it would be as well at once to decide to change our ways….Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man but murder men wherever they see them….”
Martin Luther King Jr
There is a fascinating autobiographical essay by King entitled “My pilgrimage to nonviolence” (King 1963 (1981), in Strength to Love, hereafter “SL”) in which the great civil rights leader begins by noting how in college he was first exposed to liberal theology. He found that this pacifism seemed ill-founded because it ignored so much evidence of sin and evil in the world.
King’s rejection of liberal orthodoxy sits uncomfortably with the image of the US civil rights movement as a liberal agenda. In this respect, his reaction might be compared to what Jean-Paul Sartre called the “condescending liberalism” of those Frenchmen who, despite their best intentions, still forced the Jew or the black to choose between the false choices of being accepting or rejecting his racial identity. Fanon in fact referred to the “masochism” of those white persons who engaged in extensive efforts of exculpation for their guilt about racism. The psychological deformation of racism lives on in both the inferiority of the blacks and the masochism of the whites. Indeed, a flavor of this liberal condescension can be found in the foreign policy of “benign neglect,” so long favored in American international relations: in the cold war with the Soviets, those leaders who happened to oppress their nations were neglected so long as they toed the anticommunist line. Democratic leaders, like Mossadegh in Iran or Allende in Chile, who did not oppress their internal enemies were overthrown by the US government, however, due to insufficient anticommunist fervor. The neglect, far from benign, exercised by American diplomats, is rather similar in ideological origin to that wing of American pacifism that wishes to leave the people of the world alone. There is a whiff of John Stuart Mill’s view that tolerance and democracy works in Europe but not in China or Iran, specific counterexamples to the theory of liberal democracy he provides in his classic essay “On Liberty.” Saddam Hussein, all agree, was a tyrant, but liberal pacifists believed we were better off leaving him alone to tyrannize his people, while conservatives seemed to think that his tyranny was horrible but that of the US army is acceptable.
I have a feeling King would have disagreed with them both. A nonviolent resistant foreign policy would have involved continued economic and diplomatic pressures against him, rather than all-out war, but neglect of tyranny anywhere, would have not fit with the philosophies of either Fanon or King.
Yet “neo-orthodoxy” or what today might be called neo-conservatism seemed equally limited, too hide-bound in its adherence to biblical reading and too closed to change or progress, in sum, too pessimistic about humanity where liberalism seemed to optimistic. The key step for King, he writes, was the discovery of existentialism (he cites especially Paul Tillich): there he finds that both theist and atheist existentialist philosophers adequately captured the fragmented nature of reality, the constant conflicts of human history, the fact that the realities of human existence seemed to conflict with man’s essential nature and wishes. Where man wants to be free, he finds himself in chains; where he seeks to communicate, he finds insurmountable barriers.
The existentialists captured the essential nature of human existence, better than the liberals or the conservatives. Then King notes how his discovery of Gandhi’s nonviolent political methods provided the last piece of the puzzle. The existential dilemmas of mankind could only be solved with the message of Jesus Christ, using the methods of Mahatma Gandhi.
One of the things that drew me to examining the ideas of King was that once I started listening to his sermons I found that he referred to psychiatry or Freud or psychology in the majority of his sermons at some point. He also frequently used psychological arguments to explain his political perspectives. For instance, he repeatedly stated that all of us “suffer from a Civil War inside of us”, between the idealistic moral part and the selfish sinful part. For King, life was a struggle within each person, and religion was the guidepost to solving that struggle. In a famous sermon, citing Luke 11: 5–6 (“Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him.’”), he refers to this inner struggle as the midnight of the soul:
“It is midnight in the psychological order. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Deep clouds of anxiety and depression are suspended in our mental skies….Bestsellers in psychology are books such as Man Against Himself, The Neurotic Personality of Our Times, and Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Bestsellers in religion are such books as Peace of Mind and Peace of Soul. The popular clergyman preaches soothing sermons on “How to be Happy” or “How to Relax.” Some have been tempted to revise Jesus’ command to read, “Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality. All this is indicative that it is midnight in the inner lives of men and women.” (SL, p. 59)
King hated the concept, so popular among sociologists and psychologists, of being well “adjusted” to normal life. (Even today, psychiatrists diagnose “adjustment disorders” in persons with mild anxiety and depression). Elsewhere King said that “human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted”, as he encouraged people to be nonconformists (as Emerson did) in service of justice and freedom.
When faced with the evil of the world, King identified three responses: passive acquiescence, violent resistance, and nonviolent resistance.
He was not simply a promoter of pacifism: “I am not doctrinaire pacifist, but I have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism which finds the pacifist position as the lesser evil in the circumstances.” In international relations, the circumstances were nuclear weapons. Whereas before, King said he could understand that “war, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system,” now he felt with nuclear weapons that the choices were either “nonviolence or nonexistence”. But outside of international relations, one can see that King would not oppose violent resistance if it were the only alternative to passive acquiescence to evil.
I recently heard a story told by someone who knew the Dalai Lama. He was asked what he would do if someone entered the room and started killing people, would he still abjure violence, assuming that he had a loaded pistol readily at hand? The Dalai Lama said that he would of course defend his friends against a killer and that he would use the pistol to do so, except he would begin by shooting at the other man’s legs first and then working his way up to the head only if he failed to stop.
So the key for King was resistance versus non-resistance, not violence versus nonviolence. One must resist injustice, that comes first; nonviolence is simply the best method of resistance. Why?
King offers three reasons in a classic sermon, “Loving your enemies.” First, violence added to violence only increases evil in the world. Second, violence harms the person who inflicts it, as much as the receiver of it, the same point Fanon had made. Third, love had a redemptive quality, it is the only way to transform an enemy into a friend. One might add a comment by Gandhi that captures the intellectual humility of nonviolence: in case we are wrong, he said, about his political activities against the British, the only ones who will be hurt by our actions are ourselves.
How does one love one’s enemy? One does so by understanding that love is a kind of empathy, not an actual liking of another person. King brings this out by using distinctions from Greek philosophy:
“Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than the command to ‘love your enemies.’ Some men have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible….Jesus, they say, was an impractical idealist….Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist….The Greek language can clear our confusion….In the Greek New Testament there are three words for love. The word eros is a sort of romantic or aesthetic love….The second word is philia, a reciprocal love and the intimate affection and friendship between friends. We love those whom we like, and we love because we are loved. The third word is agape, understanding and creative redemptive goodwill for all men. An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart. At this level, we love men not because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type of divine spark; we love every man because God loves him. At this level we love the person who does the evil deed, although we hate the deed that he does….When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros nor philia; he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative redemptive goodwill for all men. Only by following this way and responding with this type of love are we able to be children of our Father who is in heaven.” (SL, pp 49–52)
King operationalizes this approach by identify three ways to love one’s enemies. First, one must be able to forgive. “Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done…it means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains a barrier to the relationship….Certainly one can never forget, if that means erasing it totally from the mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed no longer remains a mental block impeding a new relationship.
Second, “an element of goodness can be found in even our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against itself.” Nothing is completely evil or good in the world. This may seem unusual in a man of religion, but it is a religion based on a realistic human psychology. Religion in the US has unnecessarily become identified with fundamentalism, or as DuBois put it, “the South has religion, earnest, bigoted, one which ignores the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, and replaces them with a dozen other supplementary ones.” Fundamentalism and moral absolutism is not the only kind of religion. “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us,” said King. Once we learn to focus on the good in people, we begin to take a different attitude.
Third, we must seek not to defeat or humiliate the adversary, but to bring out the best in him. Just at that time when we can fully defeat, that is when we must not do it, and then we often see that we can tap into vast reservoirs of goodwill that we had no idea existed.
I see King’s views here then as a politics of radical empathy — a more psychological way of putting it than love — which is the same as that of Fanon, and they both have their roots in existentialist thinking.
To close, existentialism is, above all, about concrete experience. It is about viewing the reality of things, not their abstractions. As Walt Whitman put it, it is about exalting the present and the real. Fanon said he could not be an objective scientist about racism, because, for him, the effects of racism affected his father and his brothers and sisters and himself.
I realize now why Fanon and the Harvard professor didn’t mix. For Fanon, the struggle to understand racism was very personal and a matter of life and death. For the professor, it was an intellectual commitment, perhaps, and if the world would improve based on his work at all, so much the better. But first and foremost, his work aimed at a successful academic career, a larger house in Cambridge, perhaps, but hardly anything more personal than that.
Yet, as Aimee Cesaire, who Fanon so admired, wrote: “And more than anything, my body, my soul, do not allow yourself to cross your arms like a sterile spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of sorrows is not a stage, for a man who cries out is not a dancing bear….”
