The Negro is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety.2
–Frantz Fanon
I came into the world imbued with the will to fi nd a meaning in things, my spirit fi lled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.3
–Franz Fanon
Alternatively, why does blackness suggest sexual allure in spite of the feeling that it conveys something negative?4
–Robert E. Hood
Something Old is New Again: “Make America Great Again” as a Call for White Consolidation and Mythic Return
Donald Trump became president of the United States in 2016, which ush-ered in a new era in American social relations. It was not so much that the acrimonious racial climate became palpable in a way that had never been seen; it had been. African Americans knew very well what was going on.
History was replete with painful illustrations of our tenuous and conten-tious existence in the country—from several hundred years of enslavement to a century or more of lynching, to legally codifi ed white racial terror and police brutality—black people remain ever-present in their awareness of how fragile civility is. But for many people it was new. Some had never seen a president so freely express racial animus and congeal such a large
portion of the white populous into a fervor that could be witnessed so regu-larly in the news media and, more vociferously, on social media. Things appeared out of control. Yet, something was uncanny, eerily familiar, a pat-tern that repeated itself throughout American history: with any minute step toward racial progress or even the perception of progress comes the violent response from all sectors—actively or passively—of white communities.5
Donald Trump called for this white response during his campaign, concealed in the slogan “Make America Great Again.”6 America appar-ently heard. White America. Militias increased. White nationalist and white supremacist movements appeared from out of the shadows. The policing by white people—often by white women—of African American bodies engag-ing in routine and mundane aspects of their lives, who were then reported to law enforcement, or worse yet, shot at, seemed to increase. Black America heard it, too, but African Americans were suspicious. What could such a call mean except violence for us? When had America been great—during slav-ery? Jim Crow? The period of lynching that lasted about a century from the beginnings of Reconstruction? That ostensible American “greatness” had grave consequences for African Americans. It signaled white consolidation, a backlash. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in detail about this phenomenon.
It appears and reappears predictably when white people rage against appar-ent black progress. In some of his least lauded but arguably most radical writings in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community?, King writes:
Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love him and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unifi ed and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. This step backward has a new name today. It is called the “white backlash [emphasis added].” But the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities, and ambivalences that have always been there.7
Here, King supports my contention that there is a pattern to the “back-lash.” In the next section, I use psychoanalysis to unpack and expose the structure and motivation for this backlash, particularly as it relates to what
King calls the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of white people toward black people that is consistent with Robert Hood’s observation in the third epigraph that frames this chapter. The question that King does not answer is: Why are white people so opposed to black progress? What is the reason for their violent response, their consolidation, in which various factions—
often opposed to one another politically and economically—come together in service of continued white domination? I want to emphasize that this consolidation is always a reaction to perceived black progress, even when such presumed occurrences are unquantifi able or are quantitatively false.
The Elaine Massacre is one example of white consolidation. It took place a century ago when black sharecroppers in Arkansas attempted to organize themselves to gain a greater share of the profi ts from their labor. The share-croppers simply wanted just and equitable wages for their products, know-ing that the white land owners were stealknow-ing most of the profi ts, without ever accounting honestly for what was produced and, in addition, by charg-ing absurd amounts of money for the use of their land. The black farmers merely wanted fairness. On September 30, 1919, they met at a local church to plan their organizing efforts, which included joining a union called the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. White men, many of whom were law enforcement, shot up the church late that night. Some of the men in the church defended themselves, fi ring shots back.8
The Arkansas governor at the time, Charles Brough, commissioned fed-eral soldiers to intervene, not to protect the black farmers and families, but to “kill them if they failed to surrender immediately,”9 giving license for white people to massacre black people indiscriminately. Their attempted self-defense was framed as an insurrection. As a result, more than 200 Afri-can AmeriAfri-cans were slaughtered, many in a mass lynching. These murders included women and children. Yet, twelve black men were charged with murder, and the black community of Elaine was terrorized and destroyed.
The murder of African Americans and the destruction of their towns and communities were not uncommon. Throughout the history of the United States, there are many examples—from Tulsa (Greenwood), Oklahoma, to Rosewood, Florida.
It is important to note, in this illustration, the way that white consoli-dation functions: 1) Various white institutions come to bear on maintain-ing white domination and sanctionmaintain-ing white violence (almost without exception. In this case, the Supreme Court, in one of the few instances in American history, ruled that African American rights to due process were violated). This may include churches, police, the courts, journalists, etc. 2) Substantial white differences dissolve in the crucible of white violence in service of white desire and need. Rich and poor, Republican and Democrat,
liberal and conservative, across genders and sexual orientations, etc., white people participate actively or passively, by non-action, therefore consent. 3) White narratives (sometimes outright lies) justify this violence by blaming black victims (resembling a collective psychoanalytic defense mechanism), by appealing to mythologies about black violence, cultural defects, and las-civiousness, and by citing or alluding to white, and ultimately religious, narratives about whiteness as the preeminent orientation. Passive narratives may also appeal to the slow nature of progress and the need to work within the “system” for change even though the system is structured in and by whiteness. 4) African Americans are disciplined in some form, through offi -cial means or by extrajudi-cial ones by cultural consent. 5) The cycle repeats when white people see their worldview and way of life as in jeopardy from black progress.
The religious site of white consolidation is the mythical white worker.
Through the process of white consolidation, white people are represented in and by the white worker, the quintessential white subject. This chapter, as well as the volume in which it is located, maintains that these processes and the complex—whiteness—in which they exist and from which they fl ow are fi rst and foremost religious. Quite obviously, of course, I am not the fi rst to point out the religious nature of whiteness. Scholars have done so for some time now. Subsequently, in what could be read as a religious defi nition of whiteness, James W. Perkinson’s article “The Ghost in the Global Machine:
White Violence, Indigenous Resistance, and Race as Religiousness” seeks to give expression to a coherent notion of whiteness as religion and as reli-gious. Perkinson proclaims:
In sum, ‘whiteness’ thus discerned—in my own on-going attempt to name and alter the affl iction damning the majority of people of pallor to a zombie-like existence of sleep-walking cooperation with their singularly rapacious neoliberal and imperial masters—is many things. It operates as a violent and violating continuum of select biological features, taken up in manipulative discursive schemas, implemented in and implementing discriminatory insti-tutional practices, habituated in coercive cultural and sexual orientations, materialized in aggressive social architectures and urban demographics, that nonetheless remains a spiritual and political choice.10
Perkinson articulates what he calls a “profi le” of whiteness, which includes individual decisions, economic and political factors, affective moods, and cul-tural, gendered, and erotic modalities that culminate and interface with the world, garnering and accumulating benefi ts, while enacting violence on the world.11 In the words of W. E. B. Du Bois: “‘But what on earth is whiteness that
one should desire it?’ Then, always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”12 In my own words now, what is religious about the white-ness that Perkinson is describing is that it is an aggregated complex of individ-ual and collective relations of power, corporate networks, institutions, affects, cosmologies, myths, representations, epistemes, politics, and economics that congeal in the meaning and status of the bodies of those who live, identify, and are perceived as white, which structure the world, experiences, and rela-tions with—and to an extent of—others (who are not white or perceived as white), and which function as the organizing interface with the world. In short, whiteness organizes, makes sense of, and overdetermines reality.
As a consequence, Perkinson tracks this whiteness through the disci-plinary method of history of religious phenomenology, since he is most concerned with “the religiousness of such a whiteness.”13 While Perkinson tracks the religion of whiteness through the history of religions, in part, because he wants to disrupt it, I utilize a Fanon-inspired psychoanalytic approach for the same purpose, that is, to mark, make visible, and reduce whiteness to its constituent elements and to expose its religious purpose.
While religious, this whiteness is not a self-contained totality, though it often appears as such. On the contrary, whiteness is also a need and desire and therefore a lack and absence. Thus, I am interested in the motivation, meaning, and function of whiteness as a religious orientation.
On Whiteness, Race, and Religion: Toward and Beyond a Fanonian Psychoanalytic Interpretation
There is a structure to this phenomenon. White religious fervor is always a response to perceived African American progress or desire for progress in the United States. Hence, whiteness needs the black object, African Americans in this case, for its own existence. It is constituted and maintained through a perpetual exchange of often-binary taxonomies that valorize whiteness and deprecate blackness. As such, whiteness will always have a relation to—and be dependent upon—blackness. This is the working thesis of this chapter. For this reason, black activity that seeks its own freedom and independence is always met with a backlash, again, which I call “white consolidation,” since it is much more than a violent racial backlash. To be sure, violence is always an aspect of this white consolidation, but there is something more, something religious, that I want to explore later in this chapter. Robert Hood attempts to track these matters in his book Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness. Hood argues that the meaning of blackness in the West is attributable to the cosmologies and mythologies of Christian traditions. The
thesis is only partially correct. Hood asks, “Can blackness only be defi ned by contrasting it to whiteness and therefore making its core meaning dependent on whiteness?”14 In my defi nition and Perkinson’s expression of whiteness above, it is clear that whiteness exceeds Christian traditions. My argument reverses Hood’s basic question of ontology. Or rather, I shift from Hood’s ontology of blackness to a metaphysics of whiteness, since I want to answer and respond to the inverse of his question. Whiteness needs blackness, not the reverse. More specifi cally, it requires blackness as an object.
In the psychoanalytic vocabulary of Frantz Fanon—which drew upon Freud, Lacan, Jung, Adler, and others—black bodies are “phobogenic,” that is, objects constituted by white culture whose “place” must be maintained to protect whiteness from its irrational fear of contamination and loss. They are perceived and experienced as bodies that elicit fear and rage (the two often go together), in particular for white people, a dynamic that Fanon addresses in his seminal work, Black Skin, White Masks. I do want to be clear, however, and note the racist and colonial legacy of psychoanalysis, which, through evolutionary notions of race and culture, incorporated such ideas of the primitive as cultural and psychical defect into psychoanaly-sis. Freud, for instance, used the language of the “primitive” to describe psychopathology.15 Furthermore, Fanon argued against the universality of Freud’s notion of the oedipal complex, suggesting cultural variations that rendered it moot in Africana cultures.16 And, yet, Fanon saw psychoanaly-sis as the preeminent means of unconcealing the psychical motivation of white racism. Indeed, Celia Brickman’s Aboriginal Populations in the Mind:
Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis contends that “as a critical discourse it [psychoanalysis] is eminently suited to analyze and deconstruct colonial-ist thought, as has been shown by its use in the exemplary works of Frantz Fanon.”17 Likewise, I want to utilize Fanon as a basis for uncovering this whiteness that needs the black phobogenic object by making two primary claims about the irrational fear that, according to Fanon, white people invest in black bodies.
First, this irrational fear is the fear, disavowal, and concealment of what is experienced as a homoerotic incursion of the black world into the white world, in which it understands itself in the passive position. Fanon referred to this “pho-bia” as “destructuration.”18 What he intends, here, is the white desire and need to maintain the distinction between “worlds,” though it (the complex of whiteness) needs the black for its own existential articulation of its world and for its maintenance. By “destructuration,” Fanon also had in mind the way that the presence of blackness, of the black object, threatens a particu-larly white cosmology and psychic structure that has as its center, ironically and contradictorily, a black object. It is this apparent contradiction—of
desire and animus, of consumption and expurgation, and of danger and attraction—that is the sine qua non of the religion of white rage, and indeed, of classical religious theory, which I explore in the conclusion.19
Fanon locates the matter of black bodies as phobogenic both in the bio-logical and the phenomenobio-logical realms. Which is to say, for me at least, the issue of white fear of blackness is about whites’ own perceptions of physical black bodies and the affective responses and mythologies that are developed, which then both precede and inform appearances of the black in the imaginary and consciousness of white people. In Fanon’s words:
Let us try to determine what are the constituents of Negrophobia. This pho-bia is to be found on an instinctual, biological level. At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man—at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man. This is not the place in which to state the conclusions I drew from studying the infl uence exerted on the body by the appearance of another body. (Let us assume, for example, that four fi fteen-year-old boys, all more or less athletic, are doing the high jump. One of them wins by jumping four feet ten inches. Then a fi fth boy arrives and tops the mark by a half-inch. The four boys experience a destructuration.)20
Fanon shares further insight from Lacanian psychoanalysis in a footnote to the statement above, where he says:
It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan’s theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man.21
This refl ection is based upon Lacan’s psychoanalytic developmental theory of the point at which a child recognizes itself as a self (i.e., as an I) in a mirror.22
Fanon muses on the possibility—again, based upon Lacan’s theory— that a projection occurs for the white as they experience the appearance of someone who is black due to a disturbance of white people’s idealized view of them-selves, their imago. Moreover, Fanon notes that the “real Other” for white peo-ple was and will be black peopeo-ple. This is an important insight that the editors of The Religion of White Rage indicate in the introduction to this volume. That is to say, racial animus in the United States has always been generated, not
largely by immigration, but by anti-blackness in which immigrants are coded as “not-white-therefore-black.” In return, immigrant groups are socialized into American racial hierarchy, which is then coded as “not-white-but-at-least-not-black.” Blackness, then, is maintained at the bottom-center of American racial relations while exploitation of black bodies becomes the vehicle for social mobility.
Another feature of destructuration for Fanon is that it is experienced as homoerotic. Perhaps conceptualized in the androcentric confi gurations of the oedipal complex—or a critique of them—Fanon, in my estimation, intimates that white men envy black men. Regarding this psychoanalytic notion of destructuration, I am interested in the homoerotic implications. To be sure, these appear in sublimated confi guration in often-coded racialized patriotic art forms, most clearly seen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century patriotic
Another feature of destructuration for Fanon is that it is experienced as homoerotic. Perhaps conceptualized in the androcentric confi gurations of the oedipal complex—or a critique of them—Fanon, in my estimation, intimates that white men envy black men. Regarding this psychoanalytic notion of destructuration, I am interested in the homoerotic implications. To be sure, these appear in sublimated confi guration in often-coded racialized patriotic art forms, most clearly seen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century patriotic