White psychodrama: the extended hypothesis

I was vastly entertained by Liam Kofi Bright’s take on U.S. racial politics, in his paper “White Psychodrama” (recently published in the Journal of Political Philosophy). First off, I was excited to see it get published at all, since it’s written in a style that seldom makes it past peer review. Academic philosophy is plagued with articles that, by the time all referees have been placated, sound like they were written by committee. More importantly though, I think the objectivating stance that Bright takes toward the ideological positions in the U.S culture wars is extremely helpful.

Just to be clear, I disagree with almost everything he says. There is, however, one point on which he is absolutely right. When we use the phrase “racial conflict” with reference to the U.S. we tend to think of it as a conflict between the white majority and the African-American minority. But a major dimension of the conflict is one that occurs amongst white people, that doesn’t really have much to do with the interests of blacks. In this sense, a lot of the arguments we are exposed to are best characterized as a “white psychodrama.”

(I’m not going to summarize the article; anyone with an interest can read it here. It’s open access, but if that changes there is a manuscript version that’s easy to find on the web.)

Bright’s reasons for worrying about this are quite similar to my own, which is that the struggle for racial justice in the U.S. has acquired extraordinary cultural prestige, and so tends to attract imitators throughout the world. (“The U.S. being a culturally dominant global hegemon, the terms and structure of its culture war tend to be exported, so they are worth understanding even for those of us who are not US citizens.”) Among those who seek to imitate its “terms and structure,” few ever stop to ask themselves whether it actually is a struggle for social justice. Bright’s suggestion is that it is better regarded as a psychodrama, and a distraction from the real issues.

My own concern is not so much that it is a psychodrama (although a lot of it is), but rather that what Americans have discovered is a recipe for perpetuating racial conflict, and are now busy exporting it to the world. The biggest obstacle to acceptance of this analysis is the tendency people have to take it all at face value (e.g. to imagine that, if people are doing something in the name of “justice,” that what they actually want is to achieve some state of justice). Hence my sympathy for Bright’s approach.

There is, however, an important aspect of the psychodrama that I think he misses out on entirely. He comes closest to acknowledging it when he notes, of the anti-racism efforts of the “repenter” class, that “Sometimes all this can be rather ostentatious, and one rather suspects the moral kudos for being seen to do as much is playing rather too large a role in their motivations. But we need not be so cynical…” To which I am inclined to say “no, you need to be that cynical, perhaps even a bit more so.” Specifically, Bright is inattentive to the role that accusations of racism play in structuring the status hierarchy among whites in America.

To see this, consider the following, strange fact about racists in America: They hate being called racist. Why? Is it because they share the view that racism is wrong, but imagine that what they are doing is somehow different? Not really. It is because the term “racist” is used as an epithet in America, among whites, to convey not only a moral judgment, but also status deprecation. This probably dates back to the civil war, but the term “racist” in America is indelibly associated with a poor, ignorant, lower class, white Southerner. As a result, racism is considered not just morally wrong, but also trashy, backward, and unsophisticated.

Liberal Americans often fool themselves into thinking that calling someone a racist is purely an exercise in moral judgment, like calling someone a “liar” or a “coward.” Obviously every act of moral condemnation involves the assertion of some form of superiority, but in the case of “racist” the assertion of status dominance is particularly striking. When a white American calls another white American racist this always entails two claims: 1. you are immoral, and 2. you are beneath me. A major dynamic driving the culture war in America is that liberals like to think of themselves as only making the first claim, whereas what conservatives hear is only the second.

This is why Donald Trump is always so keen to insist that he is the least racist person in the history of the world. He is very attuned to status, and fanatical about maintaining social dominance. When people call him racist, the moral accusation rolls off him like water off a duck’s back, but the status injury is intolerable and must be emphatically resisted. So he feels obliged to insist, not just that he is non-racist, but that he is better at it than everyone else.

Trump’s reaction illustrates another point, which is that wherever one finds conflict over social status, one is likely to find status competition. Status competition produces a great deal of extreme behavior, because it forces people to outdo one another, as a result of which they can get locked into cycles of increased effort. In the case of status signalling this can generate more and more exaggerated displays. One can see this dynamic at work in the efforts of liberals to establish their commitment to anti-racism, where they often engage in forms of self-deprecation that seem calculated to alienate and offend other whites (and thus seem self-evidently counterproductive, as far as the goal of achieving racial justice is concerned.)

It took me a while to figure this out. For example, I was for a long time mystified by the enthusiasm that self-evidently liberal American have for calling other self-evidently liberal Americans racist. The realization that it was not really about racial justice, but rather about social status – in particular, about fortifying their own position in the status hierarchy – helped to make it more intelligible. It also helped to explain the eagerness with which white Americans, especially of the penitent variety, rush to embrace even the wildest accusations made against them. It made me want to post a sign somewhere saying: “Beware of white people offering to accept responsibility for all the world’s problems.” Of course, some problems in the world are actually caused by white people, but others aren’t, and if there is to be any hope of fixing them it’s very important to be able to tell one case from the other. But you’re not going to be able to find out which is which by asking white people, because the answers you get are going to be dictated not only by each person’s position in the psychodrama, but also the status concerns underlying it.

Unfortunately, Bright follows up his bracing reframing of racial politics with a rather tiresome insistence that “non-aligned” thinkers, like himself, should just set the whole thing aside, adopt a purely materialist stance and focus on improving the distribution of wealth (because “as long as the material inequalities exist they will keep making racial hierarchy salient”). In a rather serious case of old wine in old bottles, he asserts that conflicts over race are just part of the ideological superstructure aimed at distracting the working classes from the real issue, which is economic inequality.

It occurred to me, reading this, that the sort of intellectual jujitsu he applies to the U.S. culture wars could just as easily be turned against his own position. He may not realize it, but “British academic who thinks everything is about class” is also a familiar figure (in a drama that’s been playing out for well over a century, and that, in my naïveté, I had hoped was finally played out). The number of Brits who say “you silly Americans, thinking it’s all about race, when actually it’s about class,” is easily matched by the number of Americans who say “you silly Brits, thinking it’s all about class, when in fact it’s about race.” (On the latter point, it’s worth observing that there is a truly gigantic literature arguing that the reason you can’t do economic redistribution in America is because of racial animosity, so telling Americans to forget about race and focus on material inequality is not very helpful.)

A genuinely non-aligned political thinker recognizes that Brits are obsessed with class, and so vastly overestimate its importance, just as Americans are obsessed with race, and so vastly overestimate its importance. Neither one has a formula for the creation of a just society, in large part because there are no shortcuts, and no magic bullets. (For example, both groups ignore or misunderstand status hierarchy.) Nevertheless, Bright is certainly correct in claiming that we need to be less naïve in how we interpret the prevailing discourse.