On Revealing Whiteness: A Reply to Critics

I am truly honored to have Charles Mills, Paul Taylor, and Cynthia Willett comment on my recent book Revealing Whiteness. Their careful readings and thoughtful analyses have pushed me to think further about my work on whiteness in particular and critical philosophy of race more broadly. I will not be able to do full justice to their contributions here, but I hope to use their rich comments to clarify parts of Revealing Whiteness and to broach questions about transforming whiteness that follow in the wake of the book.

One of the main goals of Revealing Whiteness is to bring American philosophy into conversation with psychoanalytic theory around issues of racism and white privilege. I find the pragmatist concept of habit enormously helpful for understanding how the bodily self is constituted in and through its relationships with the (white-privileged) world and in turn how the (white-privileged) world is affected by and can be changed through human transactions with it. And I find the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious helpful for understanding how habit—especially socially and politically unacceptable habits, which habits of white privilege and white supremacy generally are today—can be deviously obstructionist, working to evade conscious examination and deliberate transformation. It is not merely that habit is non- or subconscious, that habit operates without conscious awareness, as John Dewey and others like Maurice Merleau-Ponty demonstrate well. It is that some habits actively scheme to block critical consciousness's recognition of them, ensuring that they continue to exist by existing relatively undetected.

W. E. B. DuBois is the guiding influence of Revealing Whiteness because he explicitly speaks of the fruitfulness of bringing pragmatism and psychoanalysis together to think about unconscious habit. In his 1940 autobiography, DuBois writes that around 1930, “the meaning and implications of the new psychology [Freud] had begun slowly to penetrate my thought. My own study of psychology under William James [who explicitly analyzes habit as ‘the enormous fly-wheel of human society’ (James 1955, 121)] had pre-dated the Freudian era, but it had prepared me for it. I now began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folks to oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge” (1984, 296). I love this move in DuBois's middle to later work, which steps away from the liberal-scientific strategies for fighting racism that he championed in his early career: the idea that white prejudice against black people occurs because white people are naively ignorant about the lives of black people; and thus what is needed is merely the generation and distribution of accurate sociological data about them. After World War I, DuBois became more pessimistic about white people and the chances for their rehabilitation, and he abandoned his belief that most white people (e.g., those not in the Klan) were fundamentally good-hearted and just needed to be shown the truth about black people. As DuBois writes about white people in 1920, “I see in and through them. . . . I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the workings of their entrails. . . . I see them ever stripped,—ugly human” (1999, 17).

Unfortunately DuBois does not explicitly elaborate on the notion of unconscious habit, so I turn to Dewey for his rich analyses of habit as an organism's predisposition to transact with its physical, social, political, and natural worlds in particular patterned ways. But Dewey's notion of habit (and pragmatism's more generally) needs to be augmented with something like the psychoanalytic unconscious. Otherwise it drastically underestimates the obstacles—defense mechanisms, projections, and other psychosomatic symptoms—to personal and political transformation that one's unconscious habits can put up. Dewey's pragmatism is by no means Pollyannaish, but it tends to leave out the ugly hostility of some human habits, and it sometimes strikes a tone that I find too genial for grappling with the “stripped,” “undressed” backsides of white privilege.

So pragmatism needs psychoanalysis, but this will have to be a pragmatized...