Racial Reverb: "Paranoia within Reason" and the Sounding of the Social

On the evening of June 28^th, 2020, Mark and Patricia McCloskey trained guns on Black Lives Matter protestors passing by their mansion on Portland Place, a street in St. Louis' wealthy Central West End. Images of the armed couple quickly went viral, and within hours the McCloskeys had become the latest poster children for white paranoia. Like "BBQ Becky," "Permit Patty," and countless other white civilians who have called the police on Black people for going about quotidian tasks—not to mention the innumerable police officers who have murdered Black people and gotten off scot-free after professing fears for their personal safety—Mark and Patricia McCloskey were participating in what we might reasonably call a form of group psychosis. "Psychosis," in that all of these white people are conjuring and acting upon unfounded fantasies of Black people as dangerous aggressors. "Group," in that none of them is acting alone; their fantasies fit together in a vast, transgenerational patchwork of anti-Black discourses, which both structure and are structured by the material infrastructures of racial capitalism. Of course, the fears and fabrications of white Americans like Carolyn Bryant, Daniel Pantaleo, and Derek Chauvin,¹ along with the juridico-political systems that both abet and ratify them, are not unique to anti-Blackness in the United States; scholars like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno ([1944] 1994), and Claude Lefort (1986) suggested long ago that rightwing ethno-nationalism has an intimate relationship with paranoid fantasies of bodily invasion. Consider French author Jean Raspail's dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), in which "western civilization" buckles under a mass influx of third-world immigration, or more recently, Renaud Camus' theory of the "Great Replacement" (2011), which argues that white global elites are conspiring with Africans and Middle Easterners to gradually replace the West's civilized, white body politic with a savage, Black and brown one. Whether we look at right-wing nationalist movements in France or Holland, Britain or the U.S., the fantasmatic contours remain largely the same (Wekker 2017, D'Arcens 2018, Shoshan 2019). In the nightmares of many Western, right-wing populists, there is a civilized body politic that must remain intact, pristine, white—but its integrity is threatened by seething masses of filthy, parasitic, Black and brown rapists just beyond the gates. As Homi Bhabha puts it, the conjurer of this fantasy is "caught in the ambivalence of paranoic identification, alternating between fantasies of megalomania and persecution" (Fanon 2008, xxxiii).

Psychoanalytic theorists like Bhabha and Fanon, however, only give us one side of the story. For white paranoia is not merely a psychic state; it is also a social, political, and cultural phenomenon. And as Eve Sedgwick has suggested, when understood in its social, political and cultural contexts—rather than solely through the diagnostic frame of the psyche—paranoia reveals itself as a fundamentally mimetic affect: it "seems to grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand" (Sedgwick 2002, 131). Suspicion begets suspicion. Indeed, John Jackson (2008) argues that both white and Black people are locked in an asymmetrically reciprocal bind of mistrust: what he calls racial paranoia. Jackson grounds this phenomenon—at once psychic, social, and cultural—in the long durée of white supremacy.

In the antebellum period, slave owners did not take for granted the ability to read enslaved people's true emotional states off of their outward expressions. A complaisant smile might conceal feelings of hatred, resentment, or perhaps even plans for insurrection (Jackson 2008, 34). Meanwhile, Black people living under the sheer terror of plantation logics learned to allocate trust carefully, even among other enslaved people. Jackson notes that many slave revolts were preemptively quashed after enslaved whistle-blowers snitched on their counterparts, and that even in the free North, undercover Black spies would lure fugitive slaves into a false sense of security in order to capture them and bring them South again (35). Thus, on both sides of the color line, the "peculiar institution" brought with it...