Discussion of Harris, A. (2019). The Perverse Pact: Racism and White Privilege. American Imago,76(3),309-333.
Karen Weisbard, Psy.D.
Presentation of the Scientific Sessions
Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
Seattle, Washington
December 15, 2020
The Perverse Pact
In this paper, Harris (2019) uses the concept perverse pact to “examine some of the self-imposed limits in regard to reflection and action, along with the unconscious conditions in which white guilt and white fragility inhibit our progress towards genuine civil rights” (p. 310). She borrows the term from Ruth Stein (2005) who centers perversion in a relational structure that defines “us” and “them”; the us who are normal and civilized from the “them” who are pathological and primitive. The ones naming the perverse hold the power to define, describe, and possess the other. In so doing, we name ourselves as the ones who possess the power to locate others. In this process there is a disowning of our own perversity, and in this way we enact hatred and destructiveness. Not just of the other but of our own selves – that which we hate in us is placed in the other thereby diminishing and destroying parts of ourselves, making static that which is alive and must be animated and owned. The perverse pact is a relational act – within the psyche and then writ large in the culture in which truths and lies, means and ends, love and hate become reversed. In telling you “I love you and I am sorry I have harmed you”, I may be enacting an unconscious wish to preserve my truth as the good one, the reflective one, and the reparative one, but I do nothing to acknowledge that I needed you to be the bad one, the non-reflective one, the one in need of my repair. Stein writes, “Perversion as a mode of relatedness points to relations of seduction, domination, psychic bribery and guileful uses of ‘innocence’, all in the service of exploiting the other” (p. 781).
This is an illustration of one of the unconscious commitments Harris asks us to explore in the maintenance of white privilege. We keep seeing ourselves as innocent in spite of the violence around us – past and present. It is easy to say,” I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there, those were not my slave-owning relatives”. Harris quotes James Baldwin (1963), “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”, and she says, “Here we must understand that innocence is meant as the site of evacuation and disavowal. There is a perverse refusal to know.” (p. 312). It is a refusal to know that just because I didn’t do it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and doesn’t mean that I am not part of the racist structure of America that for centuries has used black bodies to build the society that I now live and prosper in, a society that those black bodies cannot live and prosper in, a society that kills those bodies and denies them opportunities for positions of prosperity. Here are a couple of facts:
- According to Pew, “In 2019, the median wealth of white households was $171,000. That’s 10 times the wealth of black households ($17,150) (Rankin, p. 184)
- According to a 2017 article on racial wealth gap, the author’s write, “…the intergenerational wealth gap was structurally created and has virtually nothing to do with individual or racialized choices. The source of inequality is structural, not behavioral – intrafamily transfers provide some young adults with the capital to purchase a wealth-generating asset such as a home, a new business, or a debt-free college education that will appreciate over a life-time. Access…is not based on some action or inaction on the part of the individual…” (Rankin, 184).
I am that white household and those are the advantages I give my children.
“You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know”. (Weir, 1988)
What do we not want to know?
Guiltiness
We do not want to know how we hate to feel guilty. Harris references Stephen Mitchell’s distinction between guilt and guiltiness. Mitchell (2000) writes, “…genuine guilt entails an acceptance of accountability for suffering we have caused others (and ourselves)”, whereas “guiltiness [involves] perpetual payments in an internal protection racket that can never end” (p. 731). He continues, “…guilt and guiltiness, are not just private feelings or states of mind. They also become modes of communicating our experiences to others.” (p. 732). Mitchell asserts that sometimes our guiltiness exerts a coercive effect on others, demanding something of the other to help bear what I do not want to feel, and what I do not want to know. Many, if not most, authors writing about racism and antiracism have no tolerance for white guilt. Our guilt is seen as attempts to exonerate ourselves, as continued objectification of others, as a refusal to see how nothing changes with guilt, and in fact preserves the structure of white identity. Particularly guilty are those of us who pride ourselves in liberal theory and so-called liberal practice, unfortunately including this very talk by the Diversity Committee. While motivated by a desire to educate ourselves and others, and to bring us into conversation, we may still enact guiltiness for often nothing changes. I will have more to say about this soon. First it feels fitting that we hear from selected black voices on guilt.
Audre Lorde (1981) from, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding To Racism
I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger….Guilt is not a response to anger…if it leads to change it can be useful…Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness (Gay, 2020, p. 60)
I do not like feeling guilty about the anger that I have at certain injustices that I witness, have participated in, or have been the recipient of. Many of us do feel guilty about how angry we feel, how angry we get, how dysregulated and inarticulate we become. We then focus on ourselves again – to try to calm down, to apologize, to soothe the stormy feelings, and then we lose the target – the things that occur to make us feel so incredibly angry. Sometimes we need to calm down and try again to speak. But we must look at how we create guilt in those who do want to speak and not calm down. Alternatively, I can induce guiltiness by thinking of others as racist for not speaking out or getting angry at the injustices that I may see or feel. This takes me back into the perverse pact of denying my white privilege to define another, exonerating myself again. Harris brings in Ta-nehisi Coates’ (2008, 2015) argument that, “…in the determination to hold racial difference, white consciousness and white persons maintain racism…it is our ‘destiny’…he insists that white supremacy is inscribed in all our values and projects as Americans. Our democratic and our aspirational projects sit irreducibly on a racist base” (p. 319).
It’s hard to learn what we don’t want to know.
James Baldwin (1965) from, The White Man’s Guilt
I have often wondered, and it is not a pleasant wonder, just what white Americans talk about with one another. I wonder this because they do not, after all, seem to find very much to say to me, and I concluded long ago that they found the color of my skin inhibitory. This color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand, it seems all too likely. In any case, whatever they bring to one another, it is certainly not freedom from guilt. The guilt remains, more deeply rooted, more securely lodged, than the oldest of old trees. (p. 47)
The Master’s Tools – Empathy
Harris quotes Audre Lordes’ 1984 prose, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Harris writes, “The work of these writers…do not easily point a pathway or hold out hope in the wider cultural conversation about white privilege” (p. 320). I do hold hope. I believe Harris lost an opportunity to speak for and to psychoanalysts about the tools we do have to bring to society at large and to each other. I have long agreed that psychoanalysis, used well, is revolutionary, and has and can continue to dismantle many systemic wrongs. Nowhere does Harris speak about empathy, empathic identification, and the uses of projective identification.
For example, who better than us can try to understand what is going on when our friend, colleague, neighbor or patient speaks to us about the homeless problem in Seattle. I have heard many rants about the encampments in the parks and on the meridians that are ruining people’s real estate – the value of their home and the views from their kitchens. I have heard them speak of the danger to their children, who must walk by these encampments every day on their way to school or the park (when they did walk there). The dirt, the drugs, the danger. Now, in a clinical situation, it is hard to say to a patient, “Well imagine how they feel, imagine who you are talking about, imagine how they got to be living on the street?” But that is not my concern at the moment. Mine is to use these words to try to know what it is like to be a black person in America. To know that a black person is thought of as ruining my white life. To know that a black person is thought of as reducing my financial well-being by their existence – whether on the streets, at my college, graduate school, training institute, or corporation. To know that every day a black person lives with the feeling that they are dirty and dangerous. To know that every day a black person lives with the feeling that I am avoiding them, that I am crossing the street when I see them, that I do not want to see them, and I do not want them living in what I consider my neighborhood.
What is it like to walk around every day feeling these projections? I want to cry. I feel heartbroken, just as I do when my white patients tell me this is how they feel, not because they are white but because people in their lives projected all this ugly onto and into them, how helpless they were as infants and tiny children to protect their skins from mother’s self-loathing touches or father’s sexualized stares and hands. They want me to feel that I should hate them too and see them as they see themselves. I know, and we therapists know, the pull to enact this is strong yet our job is to think about it, to contain it, to transform it with them and for them.
These are the tools we have, and we must use them. To think deeply about the problem of race and white privilege is our privilege and responsibility. We know how to contain, mentalize, and translate projections and fantasies into knowledge. In conversations with ourselves, with our colleagues, with our patients, and with others in the world we must start with empathy. But we cannot end there.
The Intersubjective Paradigm
In 1970, Joel Kovel, a psychoanalyst, trained in the Freudian and Ego Psychology tradition, wrote White Racism: A Psychohistory. In this book he tried to free himself from the paradigm of his time. He said, “Psychoanalysis can only grasp the full reality of racism if it is itself freed from psychologism, which for present purposes we may define as the location of significance within the construction of an isolated mind” (p. xcv). He came to see that by insisting on the integrity of the “I” as formed from within, we miss that there is no “I” without the other. Unfortunately, he left psychoanalysis before he knew another paradigm existed within the field. Rooted in Hegelian theory, Jessica Benjamin asserted,
each subject needs the other to create a dialogue of recognition-a third thing. This dialogue is not used only to construct the self but to have the connection, the pleasure, that arises when the two generate a third thing together…It is only from the point of view of a third – the space of dialogue oriented to something more than self – that we are separate-yet-connected beings capable of a desire that does not endlessly mirror the others desire, trying to be what the other wants or to make the other be what we want. (1998, p.591-593).
The premise is that we are all equivalent centers of being, and that I cannot exist without the you that needs to recognize me standing here in front of you for me to exist. This interdependency of self-other forms the crux of intersubjective theory and allows us to challenge the feeling state of “only one can live”. Benjamin, along with many other relational analysts, describes our analytic task as one of mutual recognition and the restoration of intersubjectivity. We are constantly working to repair the breakdown of my needs versus your needs and rise out of this conflict to a shared humanity whereby I see that we both want the same thing – recognition of our differences. This third joins us together even if what we want is different. We are all desiring subjects – desiring to be seen, desiring to be out of a space of doer-done to, mine/yours – where our self-interests have equal merit, complexity, and meaning.
Within this relational sensibility, Judith Butler’s voice rises like a beacon. She states (2003), “If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the ‘we’ is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or, rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation” (p. 12). When it comes to race, we must recognize that we are as much constituted by what we avow as by what we disavow. White racism disavows the master-slave, white and black bodies that have come before us. White racism denies the violence in this disavowal. In stating “the fundamental sociality of embodied life”, Butler reminds us that, “the ways in which we are, from the start and by virtue of being bodily beings, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (p. 17).
Harris, a disrupter of the binaries of gender and sexuality is self-admittedly lost in race, as is psychoanalysis until recently. I believe Harris emphases the wrong thing when she writes about her objects, the ones she does not want to give back. She writes, “It is my awareness that I don’t want to give back the objects that actually constitutes the problem” (p. 325). I would argue that the bigger problem is that she saw the objects as belonging to her even as she knew they did not. It is living in an isolated “mine” that denies there is such a thing as mine without you. It is easier to give back when we realize this does not belong to me, rather it belongs to all of us, in a shared humanity. In an interview in the Boston Review (2020), Butler says,
“For me, the bottom line is that if I destroy another life, I also destroy myself to some degree because relations compose who I am, and I am nothing without them. My life is not sustainable without others, and theirs is not sustainable without me. We’re attacking the social bond that holds us altogether when we attack each other. And I believe we need to cultivate that kind of ethos in order to support a broader global philosophy and politics that is committed to radical equality and affirms the equal grievability of lives-the equal value of lives”(p.7).
Systemic Cultural Change
For there to be a radical equality of lives we must grasp that we are constituted by the other and have constituted the other, that we all have equal rights to a non-violent existence, and that we cannot change this inequality by changing our minds, our identities, or by giving back our possessions. Most black writers require us to see that white privilege constructs the social order, and it is the social order that needs to be changed. In How to be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi (2019) writes, “The construct of covert institutional racism opens American eyes to racism and, ironically, closes them, too. Separating the overt individual from the covert institutional veils the specific policy choices that cause racial inequalities, policies made by specific people. Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policy and policymakers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of ‘the system” (p. 220).
I want us to engage in a thought experiment as I describe two systemic changes that could provide access and equity to all citizens of our country. In these proposals the notion of citizenship advocated by Habermas (2001) implies “a sense of common identity that transcends difference and motivates citizens to share…with people they do not know, but to whom they feel related by common bonds. This sentiment implies reciprocity…” (p. 15). The first proposal is mandatory universal service in which service to the nation would be a universal obligation, with each American having a choice for how to serve. In 2018, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service toured the country to learn how service was seen in America, and concluded that “while service is encouraged…there is no widely held expectation of service in the United States” (p.1). We all know what military service means, and while the make-up of the military generally reflects the racial demographics of our country, there is a huge racial disparity between officers and enlisted men and women. National service includes programs such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Teach for America. Public service provides support to the infrastructures of our country. What do you feel as I ask you to imagine consigning your children and grandchildren to such a universal obligation?
The second proposal is Universal Basic Income whereby every citizen receives a flat monthly payment, regardless of whether they are working and earning an income or not. An aim would be to alter the structural inequality of wealth and poverty in our country. What do you feel when I ask you to imagine every adult being given enough money to live on so that not one citizen ever lives below the poverty line again?
Claudia Rankin, American poet, playwright, essayist, writes in her book, Just Us (2020), “Unless something structural shifts in ways that remain unimaginable, the life of my [white] friend is not a life I can achieve. Her kind of security, because it is not merely monetary, is atmospheric and therefore not transferrable. It’s what reigns invisible behind the term “white”. It doesn’t inoculate her from illness, loss, or forfeiture of wealth, but it ensures level of citizenry, safety, mobility, and belonging I can never have” (p. 189). At the conclusion of her book she calls me into her pain and her hope when she says, “Reimagining agency is the conversation I want to have. How do “all of us” believe again in our inalienable rights?…Anchored in unknowing, I yearn to rise out of the restlessness of my own forms of helplessness inside a structure that constricts possibilities” (p. 331).
Are we up to the task and challenge that these proposals ask of us? What identities, positions, and possessions do we imagine we will lose? Can we instead ask ourselves what we could gain as we think of the collective good?
Systemic Change Within the Institute
While the above systemic changes are meant to re-imagine a society that puts social justice and redistributive policies at the center of our democracy, the next proposal is not an act of imagination but of activism. Kendi (2019) writes, “Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change” (p. 208). Many analytic institutes have altered the structure of money for supervision of control cases. Within independent and ApsA institutes, supervisors agree to take a set lower fee for one control case. Rather than asking candidates to apply for scholarship money to subsidize their training, all supervising faculty make an investment in getting a little less so that training is more affordable for all. I ask us not just to imagine this change but to institute it. This is an anti-racist act that goes a small way to changing the power structures that are currently in place.
Conclusion
At the end of her article, Harris returns to the question, “Is there the will to undertake the dismantling of white privilege? Is there the stamina and strength to do this?”. She poses this question to Anton Hart, who she reports looked at her askance, and replied, “How about not just too fragile, how about downright unwilling?”(p. 331). Kendi (2019) says, “We do not have to be fearless…to be antiracist. We have to be courageous to be antiracist. Courage is the strength to do what is right in the face of fear” (p.211). I felt emboldened and accompanied as I wrote this paper. Many of you who know me, know that more than anything I love to be in the outdoors. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), provided a soothing and hopeful presence during my writing. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a botanist and a Professor of Ecology. She speaks of our interdependence with the earth, and tells us that the earth is a gift, and a living, reciprocal partner with whom we dance, grow, and thrive. Butler and Kovel, too, include nature in their conceptualizations of how we can re-structure the social order. When the goal of citizenship is social integration based in recognition of interconnectedness and the fulfillment of justice for all, we move beyond what is good for me to what is good for all. Power, and all the assets that pertain to it, are thus redistributed, and coalesce around this virtue. Actions are in service of others from whom power has been taken, and in service of the earth which feeds us all. Like the earth, we are gifts to one another, living in reciprocity. We must act accordingly. For me this is the heart and action of reparation.
I will conclude with the words of the great radical visionary, Senator John Lewis. His words give me hope, courage, patience, and determination.
Thank you.
“Take a long, hard look down the road you will have to travel once you have made a commitment to work for change. Know that this transformation will not happen right away. Change often takes time. It rarely happens all at once. In the movement, we didn’t know how history would play itself out. When we were getting arrested and waiting in jail or standing in unmovable lines on the courthouse steps, we didn’t know what would happen, but we knew it had to happen.
Use the words of the movement to pace yourself. We used to say that ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part. And if we believe in the change we seek, then it is easy to commit to doing all we can, because the responsibility is ours alone to build a better society and a more peaceful world.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America (2012)
References
Baldwin, J. (1965). The White Man’s Guilt. Ebony Magazine.
Benjamin, J. (1998). Finding the Way Out. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8(4):589-598.
Butler, J. (2020) The Radical Equality of Lives. Interview with Brandon M. Terry, Boston Review, January 7, 2020.
Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4(1):9-37.
Gay, R. (Ed.) (2020). The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. W.W. Norton & Co., NY, NY.
Harris, A. (2019). The Perverse Pact: Racism and White Privilege. American Imago,76(3),309-333.
Habermas, J. (2001). The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Citizenship, July 17, 2017.
Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an Antiracist. One World, NY, NY.
Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions: Minneapolis, MN.
Kovel, J. (1988). White Racism: A Psychohistory. Free Association Books, London, England.
Lewis, J. (2012). Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America
Mitchell, S. (2000). You’ve Got to Suffer If You Want to Sing the Blues: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Self Pity. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10(5):713-733.
National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, Interim Report, January, 2019.
Rankine, C. (2020). Just Us. Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Stein, R. (2005). Why perversion? ‘False love’ and the perverse pact. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86(3):775-799.
Weir, B. (1988). Black-Throated Wind (lyrics).