a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Every day the New York Times offers more depressing reports on the fall electoral campaign in America. They match the reports in the Globe & Mail on the possibility of an up-coming Canadian election, which would also feature far right candidates –including the present Prime Minister—who are shockingly prejudiced.

In Delaware, the former state Governor, a moderate, has been defeated in the Republican senatorial primary by Christine O’Donnell, a climate change denying Tea Partyer who is described as a “perennial candidate” with quite a curriculum vitae of personal finance problems and quite a scrapbook of off-the-wall statements to her credit. Not even the usual libertarian financiers would bankroll Ms. O’Donnell’s primary bid, because she was thought to have not a prayer in November, but now they are stuck with her. Sarah Palin backs her, maybe that will do… To my mind, this is a season in which sexism has taken a variant form: muddled, uneducated, sarcastic, inexperienced, self-applauding small-town “soccer moms” or “grizzly mamas” are the kind of women who generate electoral enthusiasm on the angry right. It is not a good year to be an intelligent, conscientious, calm Olympia Snow. People who want to be represented by a woman like Christine O’Donnell are, as I see it, sexist; they are saying “this is how our kind of people should be” and being otherwise is bad. An aspiration to denigrate or erase the identities of intelligent “otherwise” people is operating here, and intersecting with sexism.

Erasing identities is one basic way that prejudice manifests itself, and I was suggesting in my last post that there are two others: eliminating and exploitatively dictating a role. This idea that there are three basic purposes that prejudices serve is central to the theory of prejudices that I work with, having developed it out of the psychoanalytic Studies in Prejudice series published soon after the Second World War. Those post-War studies assumed that all prejudices are alike: they all involve projections, they all involve regression; people who are prejudiced against one “minority group” are prejudiced against all, and all alike; and prejudiced people share a personality type called (by Theodor Adorno and colleagues) “the authoritarian personality.” The Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport summarized this theory of “ethnocentrism” in 1954, and his book, The Nature of Prejudice, is still a standard work.

That decade of psychoanalytic work was extremely important because it opened up for exploration the whole domain of unconscious motivation. But, to my mind, it was also very flawed and replete with misleading generalizations. For example, in Adorno’s and Allport’s books, there is no prejudice against women because all prejudice is against minority groups and women are not a minority group. (By the same crazy logic, there would be no prejudice against blacks in South Africa because the blacks are not a minority group there…) During the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s, the ethnocentrism synthesis began to unravel under pressure from people whose victim experience it misconstrued or overlooked. People of color pointed out that racism is not just like anti-Semitism. Look, they said, did the white people who invented tests to show the inferior intelligence of people of color also try to show the inferior intelligence of the Jews who supposedly masterminded the international Jewish banking conspiracy? The brave Jewish supporters of the Civil Rights marches and voter registration drives were shocked to be told that their political help was welcome but that they should not think that they, too, were victims of racism. Similarly, in the 1960s, when feminists made the tremendously important argument that there is such a thing as “sexism” (the word was coined in 1965 on the model of “racism”), women of color cautioned: yes, but don’t go thinking sexism is the same as racism, or that white women understand racism because they have been victims of “sex slavery” (that is, slavery analogous to slavery on the basis of race).

As it became apparent within the field of Prejudice Studies that different groups are targeted for prejudice in different ways and for different conscious and unconscious reasons or purposes, the field fell into disarray. Various efforts to unify it arose, and various victim groups tried to keep the now obvious complexity of prejudices from undermining solidarity among protesting victim groups. So, for example, it became obligatory in 1970s feminist circles to speak of Gender-Race-Class as though this were one big Identity thing that the hyphens would, somehow, keep together. But no unity came into the field of prejudice studies or into the fragmenting politics of identity that emerged in the late 1970s. Instead, shelves filled with empirical studies of particular prejudices, and more and more people began to identify themselves very particularly (letters to the editor of a newspaper, you’ve noticed, now routinely begins with “as an X, I want to say…”).

Meanwhile, prejudices continued to flourish in ever-changing appearances. Nonetheless, many hoped to be able to interpret America as a nation marching in the direction of being “post-racial,” and many hoped a “post-feminist” era was dawning because women have made considerable social progress. These hopes, it seems to me, reflect the still-prevalent confusion about prejudices and how they operate. Even if the acts and appearances that are typical of a prejudice do abate or ameliorate, the needs or unconscious purposes served by the prejudices remain –and can rise up again or reassert or take new directions as circumstances change. There’s not much lynching going on now, but huge numbers of black men are hung up in jail, and that is not very “post-racial.”

I think of prejudices as operating like what psychoanalysts call mechanisms of defense; that is, they serve to keep unacceptable desires or emotions or thoughts out of consciousness by projecting them onto others. But not all projections are alike –there seem to be three basic clusters. A person who is an eliminator fears that there are people who are infiltrating his body or his home or his society and he is compelled to purge them: they can be spies infiltrating the State Department, financiers infiltrating the markets, competitors infiltrating the home team, terrorists infiltrating the neighborhood or the airport, immigrants infiltrating the labor force, people with a secret agenda infiltrating the political process, and so forth. Lots of groups can be the conspiracies that fill the fear bill. And it is very easy for fear-mongers to stoke a fear that can take so many forms. People who themselves enjoy operating like conspiracy members understand especially well that a political culture of fear can be fostered easily when folks feel invaded in their homelands or their wallets by devious “others.” So Karl Rove makes a good living.

By contrast, a person who exploits others, dictating a role they must play, setting up a scenario for them, fears his or her own incestuous desires and needs to make a barrier –“they” live over there, separate. But, at the same time, he needs to be able to go undercover or in disguise to play out desires with those lower, lesser people and make sure they are sexually subservient or dominated. Such internally split people–respectable and upstanding by day, as it were, and illicit by night–don’t try to eliminate their victims as the conspiracy theorist types do. They keep them nearby for exploitation –on the edge of the plantation, in the slum down the street, on the factory assembly line, in the brothel across the tracks, on the internet porn site.

The most common way in which a person who needs to assault another’s identity operates is to erase the identities of (usually) women and/or children who are right to hand, right there in house to be flatteringly, self-enhancingly mirroring or to be flattened, run over. Either operation gives a boost to a narcissistically prejudiced person’s self-esteem. A sexist man defines a woman as he wants and needs her to be, for himself, for his sense of power and control, for his ownership “rights” and paternity assertion. He may also enhance himself by controlling the identities of men he thinks of as womanly (as he fears himself to be)–for example, by calling them pathological, queer.

Certain groups of people –children, adolescents, homosexuals—are targets for all three of the basic prejudice forms, to their confusion and complex pain. Sometimes, a single “multicultural” person will qualify for all three prejudices. Black lesbians have quite a triple-threat time of it. Poor Barack Obama has among his many, many challenges that he is such a multi-target person in a totally high-profile and exposed spot. There are people galore convinced he is part of –or even the leader of—a conspiracy to undermine the country. For some, it’s a Muslim conspiracy –and he’s a Muslim, right? For some it’s a Socialist conspiracy –and he’s a socialist, right? He’s a lying foreigner, too, not one of us true born in the USA Americans. And isn’t he a tool of Wall Street? Or maybe a tool of the Socialists who hate Wall Street? Then there are lots of people who think he is not a man like they think a man should be — Ronald Reaganish, talking tough and toting a rifle and paying his NRA dues, an affable world policeman. His wife Michelle-O is too smart, too assertive, too Jackie-O, and he is a “metrosexual.” (At my grocery store’s check-out a few weeks ago, I spied a story in one of the American gossip rags that purported to “out” Obama, offering a photo of him at the beach with his abs photoshop-enhanced.). And, then, he is an African-American –one of those uppity ones, not a stepping and fetching one who knows his place. Perhaps, suggests the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, himself an aspirant to the Presidency, Obama is acting out his genetic (i.e., racial) Kenyan inheritance from his wild, anti-colonialist father… Thus do jealous white men try to hang a black man out to become impotent.

[Note, please enter your email under SUBSCRIBE on the homepage if you wold like to be notified when a new post goes up.]