'Growing Up' as a White Person: Accounting for Where We Are, What to Unlearn, and What to Learn

 I have acquired but have not read Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Healing our Hearts and Bodies. I have spent much time reflecting on these issues in the last several years, and have been preoccupied with a number of major black writers, Frederick Douglass above all. Race has been an active issue in my clinical work over the last year, and I have done my best to invite conversation about race when it feels appropriate. 

I have tried to own my privilege as a white person, and to call out the power imbalances that exist as a white clinician working with black folks or other POC. I have been fortunate to have some wonderful relationships and conversations around these issues.

I recently was thumbing through Menakem's book and came to a chapter called "Whiteness without Supremacy." At this point in the book Menakem has devoted chapters specifically to healing white hearts bodies, and healing brown and black hearts and bodies. (Menakem is a somatically oriented therapist/social worker, as am I, and so he speaks of the 'body' in a broad sense in which it is not a mere physiological machine, but an intelligent organism that posseses its own intelligence and direction towards growth and healing). 

The chapter "Whiteness without Supremacy" raises a familiar problem. I quote him at length: 

"For genuine transformation to take place, white Americans must acknowledge their racialized trauma, move through clean pain, and grow up. African Americans and American police need to do the same. And, for now, we each need to do it in our own culture, and in our own way. When I explain this to groups, some earnest white folks in the audience often ask me some variant of this question: 'Resmaa, I'm totally up for this. But I have no idea what to do or where to start, or what the next steps are. Can you lead us or offer us a set of next steps?' My answer, of course, is no. The question is itself just one more expression of imaginary white fragility. It is white Americans turning yet again to a Black body and saying, 'Help us. Serve us. Save us. Bail us out. Do our work for us. Above all, don't make us stand on our own two feet and grow up.' But growing up is exactly what all of us--individually and collectively--need to do. I can't grow you up. You can't grow me up. Adulthood can't be outsourced." (262).

When I read this I cried and cried and cried for a few minutes. Something in it struck me deeply. I hear the voice of a friend who I have forgotten: "It is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressor." Nothing could be more obvious.

What would it mean to grow up? Why did it move me so much to read this passage? And what would a next step be, for a white person, from within whiteness, without outsourcing to the oppressed bodies that enable my privilege?

I want so badly to grow up. 

What I mean by this is that I want to become responsible (i.e. able to respond). I want to be able to look at the world, make an honest accounting of it, and of myself, and to act in a way in which I don't turn away from what I see. I want to be able to turn towards the pain of others and my own pain without shying away. Before the pandemic I regularly saw an acupuncturist who I felt very understood by. She once told me that I had a type of energy where I was able to look directly and move into deep territory with people. "You seem like you could almost spend all of your time in this process of looking." This is one of my strengths, but it also means that I am often estranged from my body and from the things that live there. I gawk and awe at the world, and in my gawking and awe I sometimes forget to live in it.

I so cherish the process of observation. I so badly want to be able to look carefully at what is happening. The essence of therapy is careful and loving attention. There is something in careful attention, in which it is identical with love, that is profoundly healing.

Sometimes all we need to heal is to be understood: "Really being listened to and being loved are so close to one another that most people can't tell the difference." I once shared this quote with a friend and she retorted: "I would argue they are the same." This is most likely correct. But we have different words, and so I think them two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same reality.

To grow up means to understand and to act in light of that understanding, regardless of the pain it causes. This requires love. All those who say that love is the key to a higher reality, or that love is this higher reality are fundamentally correct. 

If white people need to grow up, and growing up has something to do with being able to love and pay attention carefully, then the question arises: Why do white people have a hard time seeing people as they are, pain as it is? Why do white people have a hard time loving? 

Love is fundamentally a matter of relationship. Love cannot take place outside of relationship, even if that relationship is with our own bodies, our own thoughts, our own souls. If we struggle to love, if we struggle to see reality, it means we struggle in some capacity with relationship.

There are many ways of relating, but two of the most fundamental are 1. relating to a thing in terms of its usefulness, and 2. related to a thing in terms of its fullness. For now I will call this the generality of a thing versus the particularity of a thing. When we concern ourselves with the generality of a thing we observe only what is relevant in that thing to our purposes: it isn't important to me which person picks me up when I call a Lyft because any Lyft driver will be able to get me where I need to go. During that Lyft ride, however, I will undoubtedly encounter a particular being that is filling a general role. I may, if we are lucky, even speak to this particular being in particular ways, and share a particular connection with them

This combination of generality and particularity is of the essence of what it means to be human: we always fill generic social roles, and we are always a particular being that is unique in ways that this role cannot account for. At the same time, we cannot exist in our raw particularity: no such human being has ever existed. Any novelty that a human being accomplishes is accomplished both through and in spite of  generic roles. We are fated to this peculiar fusion.

I was, for example, a barista of a highly particular sort. I excelled at the generic features of the role: I can crank out a line of drinks, know how to track a bus tub and stir station, and was a successful latte art competitor. But my particularity and idiosyncrasies also thrived as I filled that role. I had many important relationships with 'customers', I knew them as humans. I exchanged writing with customers. I became friends with customer. I would say weird things to people to play with them.

Relating to things or people in either general or particular ways is thus of the essence of being human.

I will hypothesize that something has gone wrong in the balance between these two ways of relating in European and American (ie white) societies. We are excessively locked into our general ways of being. Many people speak effortlessly of feeling like a cog in a machine, like they are dominated by the roles they are forced to play as a matter of course in being a social animal. Capitalism, mass industrial society in general, has made our being, our experience, overly generic.

MLK spoke of the way that capitalism 'thingifys' people: it makes us into objects that are valued only for our usefulness. Frederick Douglass writes beautifully in his Narrative Life of the struggle between his life as a slave, in which he is mere object, and his life as a full-blooded human being, in all of his complexity and intricacy. 

To thingify is to dominate or master.

Growing up, becoming responsible, means learning to recognize that our relationship to ourselves and others is one excessively oriented towards domination and mastery. This process relies on an attitude in which we regard people primarily as generic objects rather than particular beings.

At least two things, then, seem needed to grow up as a white person. First, we need to understand how we became so good at dominating ourselves and others. Only if we understand where this comes from can we unlearn it. Second, we need to learn how to positively regard other beings as full blooded human beings and not objects. We need to learn how to look and listen in the proper, deep sense of these words. We need, in short, to unlearn our spirit of domination or mastery, and to learn a spirit of love and care.

The unlearning of our spirit of domination requires that we have an adequate story to tell about ourselves that can help us make sense of our implicit cultural viciousness and violence. This is particularly difficult for us because white intellectuals generally have their head up their asses with overly-sophisticated theories of knowledge. 'There are no more metanarratives... knowledge is impossible... all beings make their own meaning,' one screams into the void. 'Only physicalist science and medicine are adequate sources of knowledge,' another screams into their cold instruments. Postmodernism and Scientism, in other words, appear to be the only two forms of knowledge available to us. And, spoiler alert, neither of them produce the human knowledge, the unlearning and learning, that I am describing.

We need, against postmodernism, to assert that history is intelligible; that we can adequately account for our past in a way that allows us to see the present clearly enough to grow up. And we need, against Scientism, to assert that nature is more than the predictable movements of dead physical things. 

I raised these issues in my last post, which is the most programmatic piece of writing I have produced to date. Now I am putting these issues together with specific concerns about racial justice that have and continue to occupy me morally, politically, and clinically.

 

How is history intelligible? American and European history becomes more intelligible in terms of the rediscovery of the tradition of esoteric writing: or through the rediscovery of the fact that science and politics are in permanent tension, and that individual and communal growth are often antithetical. Part of the reason that we are so good at dominating ourselves and others is that we are so desperate to believe that these most cherished values can fit together. 

 

Surely, politics can be made rational? Surely, the well being of individuals and the well being of the community can be made the same?

It is not clear to me that either of these questions can be answered in the affirmative, and my reading and thinking incline me to say that they are indeed permanently at odds. 

Modernity and the Enlightenment were precisely processes of trying to bring about a harmony between science and society, and between individual and collective goals. Capitalism is a clever outgrowth of this project: 'What's good for the goose is good for the gander.' Nonsense. 'Selfishness is good because it generates competition.' What myths we tell ourselves to justify our childish spirit of domination.

Growing up as a white person means taking account of these eminently European and American projects, recognizing their failure, and reformulating a politics that can account for these tensions. Because the recognition of the tensions I have described does n ot leave us hopeless. It leaves us squarely in the face of the question of equity and sacrifice. If it is true that science and politics are at odds, then we need to take public education as seriously as possible. If it is true that individual and communal growth are at odds, then we need to equitably compensate those who must do the bad jobs in society. I would be delighted if garbage collectors made 60k with a 4 day work week. Hell yeah.

This is the answer to the postmodern assertion that history is unintelligible, or that we can only hope to 'make meaning' and never 'find it': We need to perceive our situation as the product of an uneasy marriage of science and politics, in which the most disparate and conflicting parts of human nature have been slammed into one another, making us into monsters. 

We no longer know how to move gracefully as the vertebrates that we are, combining generic roles and particular lives. The roles dominate. The machine crushes us, despite our raging against it.

But this account of history requires an account of human nature. It requires us to be understood in terms of our higher aspirations and the conflicts that arise from those higher aspirations: the glory of political life, with its requirements for deference and loyalty, are opposed to the nobility of science and philosophy, with its emphasis on individual reason and relentless questioning that undermines loyalty. And our account of human nature, is unfortunately been bastardized by the physicalist orientations of modern science.

Behaviorism is the most glaring contemporary form of this absurd view of human nature. We are not machines that need to be fixed, and the 'masses' of people do not need to be regulated by statistical masters. 

We need to assert, against behaviorism and physicalism, that healing, growth, and Life are real. Goodness or value is not a human invention. It is a reality that we all participate in. Human beings deserve to grow and flourish. Our societies of domination do not permit this growth, and I don't know how they can.

Growing up as a white person, becoming responsible for my involvement in a system of mastery and domination, means this dual unlearning. 1.We are not in an unintelligible situation, we can track the history that has brought us to this moment, and we can assert that we are the children and products of an uneasy fusion of science and politics forcibly brought about by propaganda wielding philosophers of the early modern period, and their alliance with financial and governmental institutions. 2. We are not mere physical machines, but growing organisms. We do not exist solely to fit into the social categories that dominate us. We need to assert a teleological view of nature. I am not explaining this well right now. There is too much else that I'm holding here and I'm tired.

 

Growing up as a white person also means learning to listen. It is so painful to understand the suffering that white people have brought onto the world with the invention of whiteness. It is so painful to openly account for the spirit of domination that predominates in white communities. We like being in control, we like the power. Baldwin was right that for some reason white people need black people as a fiction that can uphold our own cleanliness.

 

Perhaps we are ashamed of the extremes of human nature: the violence we are capable of, the brutality. So we tell a story in which that is not us, that is them. But it is us. It is me. I understand the appeal of violence. I understand the appeal of domination. Part of me revels in the possibility. But I know this is not the part of my nature that is worth feeding.

 

Baldwin is right to ask the question: When will the white person not need the fiction of the black person? When will the white person allow themselves to be human? We, of course, will likely never rid ourselves of these labels, now that we have them. But we can move through them, somehow, to reach something more human.

 

Learning to leave behind the fiction of whiteness means understanding that whiteness is a necessary invention of the Enlightenment project. It is a fiction that is required for the ever growing role of technology and domination in society. For unless there were whiteness, unless there were blackness, this spirit of domination could not thrive.

 

I fear I've become wildly speculative here.

 

But how to listen? How to not run from our own pain?

We must turn towards our own bodies. We must return to the fullness of the beings around us. Can we do this when we must interact in our generic roles all day, with the baristas, bus drivers, and cashiers?

This isn't some 'inner change' is the answer claim. Structural change is required. The transformation or abolition of prison systems. But structural change will never be enough if individuals are not healing.

I don't know. But I feel I've taken some steps in this writing.

I have explicitly raised some questions that I have been afraid to raise.

I want to grow up.

The Project as I Understand it Now: Politics and Psychotherapy, Metaphysics and a Metanarrative

I see more and more the importance of the late Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

 

It is a complex book that a I read a few years ago and need to reread. Nine chapters and 81 pages, the slim volume argues that one of the most promising points of resistance against capitalism is the proliferation of mental illness. So many of us are unhappy, seeking out therapeutic help in the form of psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals. I work in the world of mental health and think and believe that good work is taking place. 

 

I also think that much disturbing work is going on in mental health. There is an important 2014 article by H Hansen titled 'Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms of Diagnosis, Disability, and structural Stigma under Welfare reform." The article demonstrates how the Clinton era welfare reforms introduced unique psychiatric and pharmaceutical dimensions to the distribution of social services. If individuals want to receive government support they often must submit to psychiatric diagnoses, medication regimens, and ongoing observation by government licensed institutions. I have seen the insides of institutions that serve precisely this function. The reality of poverty, trauma, and their combination, is chocked up to mental illness. As if the actions of the 'mentally ill' were not understandable responses to distress and injustice. The medicalization of human growth permits these social-political problems to be explained in individualistic medical terms. In this way the language of 'mental illness' reinforces the oppression and suffering of the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society. Robert Whitaker's book Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill ( which I am slowly reading) has convinced me that medicine and mental health have often contributed to the mistreatment of the poor and vulnerable.

The middle classes are also rife with issues surrounding mental illness. Depression and anxiety are widespread phenomenon, and there is increasing awareness and acceptance (even championing) of psychotherapy in most liberal circles. I have benefited tremendously from therapy, and am delighted to be at the beginning of a career as a therapist. A former therapist once referred to it as 'beautiful work'. I was then only doing the work as a client. I now am beginning to understand that statement from the other side. 

I also applaud and am excited about the proliferation of trauma research, and the growing public awareness of the implications trauma research. All of my work is informed at the deepest levels by my reading on trauma and polyvagal theory. It is essential to a full of account of what it means to be human, and how healing is possible.

Fisher's book is so important because it can serve as a load bearing point in the basic features of my project: A politicized form of psychology and psychotherapy that is both effective at producing practical and clinical insights, and theoretically coherent from the level of practice to metaphysics (or ontology, pick your word). I am emphasizing that this politicized vision of psychotherapy must be coherent practically and theoretically. Theory is far more practical than we sometimes think.

This emphasis on the relationship between theory and practice is significant in light of Fisher's argument that capitalism, fused as it is with medicine and the medicalization of human distress, relies on materialist or physicalist ontology:

“The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualism (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation.” (37).

The discussion of mental illness as an individual medical problem, in other words, prevents it from being understood as social and political issue. The medicalization of mental illness say their is something in your brain/mind/machine-body that is wrong and that needs to be 'fixed'. A politicized account of mental illness, on the other hand, would assert: your feelings of pain and distress can be explained by an unjust and exploitative society that has denied you the time and means for actualizing the potentials that are unique to you. A politicized image of mental illness says: there is a group of people that want you to be unhappy so you buy things.

The truth is somewhere in between the medical and political perspectives. There are genuinely organic or chemical causes of mental illness, and medication is an important and sometimes necessary tool in someone becoming well. The claim is only that the medical-physicalist ontology lends itself more to a politics of mastery or domination, and that we would do well to recenter politics in our understanding of human distress and well being.

 Clearly an alternative understanding of mental illness is needed. This means, in part, that a new ontology is required. We need an account of nature and human beings that can account for two things:

1. That mental illness needs to be understood primarily in terms of social-political injustice rather than individual medical causes.

2. That human beings do not need to be fixed, but need to heal and grow. The body, in other words, is more like a plant than a machine: it is a wild, organic, growing thing. A full account of mental illness thus requires an ontology of life.

Fisher thought that the left was particularly ill suited to articulating such alternatives because of the proliferation of 'postmodernism' and the suspicion of 'metanarratives'. He thought that it was time to reclaim the capacity for metanarrative: "Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent problems, these are all the effects of a single systemic cause: Capital. We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically as well as geographically, ubiquitous." (77) Fisher is thus, in part, calling for a theoretically or ontologically consistent form of resistence against Capitalism. I think that the contemporary use of trauma research by political, queer, POC, or indigenous therapists/healers is precisely an ontologically consistent form of resistance to capitalism.

 

Does the full ontology or metaphysics matter? I'm not sure. Part of me thinks that going so far with the ideas  is... self-indulgent? Crude? Insensitive? I have concerns about becoming a disengaged academic some day. I have been doing political adjacent mental health work. I felt good about it. I will continue to be engaged with it, despite that I'm leaving my current job.

Surely ideas mean something? And surely the consistency of the ideas down to the metaphysical level has some significance? This is precisely the question of science and politics. I am not sure.

 

Regardless, I ask: What would such a fleshed out ontology and metanarrative of mental illness as a political problem rather than an individual medical issue look like?

 

Metaphysically, it would require a teleological account of nature as opposed to a mechanistic or physicalist account of nature. It would require us to understand nature as something that we belong to, and that is naturally a world of growing beings that are driven by their desire to pursue what is good for them. It means that goodness or 'value' is real and out there in nature. Trauma, and all that we are learning about the intelligence of the body, moreover, imply a teleological ontology of life, and a politics not of mastery, but of sacrifice and equity.

This stands in contrast to many modern accounts of knowledge, the most popular being physicalism, followed by forms of postmodernism in which language is said to be projected or imposed onto a silent world.

Fisher points out the fundamental compatibility of postmodernism with capitalist-medical-physical ontology. I think this is not incidental, as Stanley Rosen argues in Hermeneutics as Politics that postmodernism and physicalism are the two branches of enlightenment philosophy.

The dilemma, then, is this: both physicalism and postmodernism either reinforce, or are powerless to combat, capital's logic. A new ontology of trauma, the body, and Life are necessary.

Metanarratively, it would require in part what Fisher describes: a historical narrative that can account for Capital as the cause of contemporary despair and unhappiness.

Capitalism, as I view it, however, needs to be understood as part of a larger shifting that takes place in the relation between science and politics. This shift in the relation between science and politics is referred to as 'modernity' and saw itself flourish in the 'enlightenment'. 

 I believe the most striking way of analyzing this shift in the relation between science and politics is through a peculiar tradition of writing known as 'esoteric writing'. Esotericism I've written about here so much and I feel like I write the same sentences over and over. Esotericism is a form of writing in which someone is potentially obscure or misleading for a variety of reasons: to avoid political persecution; to avoid disseminating dangerous ideas; to agitate for political change; or to help other philosophers learn by providing them with challenging texts. People wrote this way up until sometime in the mid nineteenth century.

How did such a thing disappear from our view?

The issue highlighted by esotericism is precisely the uneasy and often contentious relation between science and politics. Science and politics, in other words, have generally been radically divided from one another. Our situation in which science and politics are so intimately fused is highly novel, and clearly highly volatile. To perceive this one need only reflect on the fact that a wildly irresponsible president has access to the most sophisticated and powerful weapons ever created.

Esotericism, its forms, and its disappearance, can offer a metanarrative that fleshes out the explanation of capitalism. Capitalism is a unique form of this attempt to bring about a fusion of science and politics. The changing relationship between science and politics can be traced in the way that philosophical and scientific writers relate to politics and society as a whole. 'How esoteric did they have to be?' is a crucial question for self-knowledge.

Developing an understanding of esotericism means coming to terms with the fundamental conflict between science and politics that is at the heart of our current political moment, in which there is an absurd and horrific amount of resistance against the basic measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.