On Revealing Whiteness: A Reply to Critics

On Revealing Whiteness: A Reply to CriticsAuthor(s): SHANNON SULLIVANSource: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2007), pp. 231-242Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670665 .

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On Revealing Whiteness: A Reply to Critics

SHANNON SULLIVAN Pennsylvania State University

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 relation

ships 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 understand

ing 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 deliber

ate 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

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2007.

Copyright ? 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

231



232 SHANNON SULLIVAN

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 rac ism 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 work

ings of their entrails.... I see them ever stripped,?ugly human" (1999, 17). Unfortunately DuBois does not explicitly elaborate on the notion of uncon

scious 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 prag matism 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

psychoanalysis if it is going to be of any real help in understanding white privilege. The notion of the unconscious often presented by psychoanalysis is an atomistic

unconscious, a psyche that is sealed off, at its core, from the social, political world around it even if later it comes into interaction with it. Jean Laplanche's work is excellent on this front. Trained in both philosophy and psychoanalysis,

Laplanche explicitly rejects the "Robinson Crusoeism" of much of psychoana

lytic theory, which starts from a lone, isolated individual and then tries to build

out to a surrounding environment.1 There is "no solitary baby-Robinson," on

Laplanche's account of unconscious development, and Laplanche insists that

"the [philosophical and psychoanalytic] problem of becoming aware of or open to [the outside world] is a false problem" (see Fletcher and Stanton 1992, 190;

Laplanche 1989, 93). This transactional understanding of self and world is at

the heart of Laplanche's seduction theory, and it dovetails wonderfully with a

pragmatist ontology of habit. Let me turn now to my critics' specific comments and criticisms. One of

Willett's concerns is that I too heavily rely on white people transforming their

various environments to transform their unconscious habits of white privilege, and

she also is troubled by my call for responsible action. This criticism caught me off



ON REVEALING WHITENESS: A REPLY TO CRITICS 233

guard a bit because most of the response to the book has been that it does not admit of enough possibility for positive change. I first became aware of this worry thanks to the woman who copyedited the book: she strongly objected to the more upbeat blurb on the back cover that the press had generated because, she said, while she

enjoyed reading the book, she found it very depressing. In a similar vein, Taylor describes the book as creating a troubling "white liberal double bind": the situation that I set up in which well-intentioned "good liberal" white people are "condemned to screw up" and reinstate racism whenever they try to do something about it, so

there is no hope for them (202-3). And I believe that Mills also belongs in this

pessimistic camp, concerned that habits "underwritten by a material payoff. . .

rooted in a political economy of systemic racial advantage" (228) make the task of changing unconscious habits of white privilege truly overwhelming.

I tend to share Taylor's and Mills's pessimistic worries, which is not to

say that I think that the transformation of white privileged habits is impossible. Mainly this is because of the white habit of ontological expansiveness, which is the habit of white people to act and think as if all spaces?whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise?are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish. Ontological expansiveness, in other words, is a habit that assumes that a person can and should have total

mastery over his or her environment. And so, as the book elaborates, appeal to a transformed environment is not an easy or optimistic solution. Here, as seem

ingly always, the devious maneuvers of unconscious habits of white privilege tend to obstruct their transformation. Here, in other words, is the double bind that concerns Taylor: the very act of giving up (direct) total control over one's habits can be an attempt to take (indirect) total control over them by dominating the environment. The very act of changing one's environment so as to disrupt

white privilege paradoxically can be a disruption that only reinforces that which it disrupts. On my account, then, white people's responsible action is not going to be a straightforward attempt to change one's environment or switch to a different environment. More than anything, the responsibility I call for is a responsibility for one's unconscious life: for the effects generated by one's unconscious habits of

transacting with the world. Characterizing white privilege as increasingly operat ing through unconscious habits, in other words, is not a way to let white people off the hook for their nonreflective racism or their implicit acceptance of benefits of white privilege. It instead is a claim that notions of responsibility have to be

rethought to encompass unconscious habits. Here, again, I find psychoanalytic theory and pragmatist philosophy, for all their disagreements and differences in

style, to be helpful and fascinating partners. Let me return more directly to the issue of a white double bind: the fact

that well-intentioned "good liberal" white people are "condemned to screw up" when trying to do something about racism. I use terms such as tragic meliorism and Foucault's pessimistic activism to talk about this issue, and Taylor's emphasis on pragmatist fallibilism also is well placed. My reaction to the double bind is




different than his, however, because I find the double bind something of a relief, even potentially conducive to action. I think that a lot of well-meaning white

people?and I think here especially of my white undergraduate students when we talk about race?feel paralyzed by their whiteness and the accompanying realization of the history and present of white racism and privilege. Often it takes the form of white guilt, but it also can take the form of white perfectionism and

white control of situations (much of the latter not on a conscious level, I would

say). And if white people cannot be sure that they will do and say the right things, which means making sure that they will not accidentally act or sound like racists, then it is better for them to keep their mouths shut and not do anything at all. And that often is precisely the wrong thing to do. The inevitability of white screwups with regard to raced and racist situations means to me that white people can stop focusing more or less solely on themselves?what is the impact on me and my moral standing if I do or do not do X in this situation??and spend more energy

figuring out the situation and what might be done to improve it. Now this is terribly vague because I have not provided a concrete situation

to consider, and I do not think that there are fixed answers that can be provided in the abstract, as Taylor points out. And he asks the fair question of whether there is

any more guidance in thinking through concrete instances of the double bind that I can provide. As a first stab, I would not call the double bind a "what do black

people want?" problem, although it is true that black people's needs, desires, and

preferences are often ignored or made secondary to those of white people. And I like Taylor's reminder that there are different settings in which white people can and do exercise their discretion about whether to engage with others, and thus there is a difference between self-segregation as a form of remediation and

imperial self-segregation. (This is discussed more extensively toward the end of

Revealing Whiteness, especially in the context of the white privileged habit of

ontological expansiveness.) Briefly, the guidance I would offer well-intentioned white people at this historical moment is that they should err on the side of doing and saying something even if that something ends up sounding racist (which it

sometimes does), rather than screw up by maintaining a self-protective silence.

White people today need to dive into talking about race, including whiteness,

explicitly identifying and thinking of ourselves as raced even when and perhaps

especially when in all-white groups or situations. This does not inject race into

situations that previously were unraced?something that my work has been accused

of (by a white person); it, rather, helps bring to light the way that race and white

privilege in particular were functioning all along. Focusing on the Laplanchean aspects of Revealing Whiteness, Taylor also

asks about the "whitely seduction" problem: does seduction, which is a Laplan chean term for the development of unconscious habits, really occur at such a

young age? More directly, what is the specific mechanism for this development, and is it cleanliness? This is a good question, and I admit that I am speculating in the book when I suggest that concern for cleanliness might be productive of




racist seduction. And maybe in the end Taylor is right that not much rides on the claim that white privileged seduction begins in infancy. I do not know with

certainty, nor in many ways is it important to know, what exact month or year in

early childhood a racist unconscious begins to develop in an infant living in a rac ist world. I am intrigued by Laplanche's argument that bodily nuances, gestures, tics, and so on convey meanings to prelinguistic babies that they developmentally cannot interpret but that impress on them that something significant has occurred in a situation (in which, e.g., a white parent holding an infant bodily tenses up). But more important, the problem of whitely seduction in infancy is an issue for me because I want to reject Baby Robinson Crusoe: again, the idea that we are little atomistic islands when born and then only later, after infancy (when weaned from mother/the feminine into the paternal realm of language?this is the standard

psychoanalytic story), do we become socially transactional beings. So that is the real motivation for the examination of racist messages conveyed to and impartially "digested" by infants, not to ultimately pinpoint the exact mechanism or age by which this occurs.

In the context of discussing color blindness, Taylor also is concerned that I move too fast in the book with the Grutter legal case. Given constraints of space, I will not take up the case itself but shift to what I think is Taylor's overarching concern here: that diversity programs often are much better antiracist tools than I allow and that sometimes they are all we have, imperfect though they are. I agree with Taylor on this point. Yet I still worry about the "talismanic power" that the rhetoric of diversity often has for good liberal white people, especially in most

universities, "as if," explains a pseudonymous contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "it drives away suspicion of unmerited privilege the way that crosses are supposed to scare away vampires. By now every Babbitt in America has learned to celebrate diversity. People do so to signify that they are a good person, and, what's more, that they are hip, trendy, and 'down with the program,' even if the program is 10 years out of date. . . . The rhetoric of diversity has become so

pervasive that it is little more than another form of white noise" (Benton 2006, CI). I do not mean that diversity programs should be eliminated, and certainly a more racially diverse student and faculty population is needed at most uni versities in the United States. But I think a lot more ground would be covered if a university also explicitly confronted enduring forms of white privilege and domination rather than hold to the currently popular view that those problems can be eliminated by the sheer presence of a few nonwhite students and faculty sprinkled in the midst of white people and that white people have to wait for nonwhite people to show up before race is on the table and action against white

privilege can be undertaken. Willett asks if the Laplanchean-pragmatist account of white privilege in

Revealing Whiteness could fit with Foucault's account of power, and the answer is yes. I have long thought that Foucault's account of discipline and Dewey's account of habit are describing similar bodily ways of being from different points




of view: bird's-eye, from a distance (Foucault) and lived, on the ground (Dewey). And so explicitly queering the account of whiteness I present does not sound

very queer (odd) to me at all: like Foucauldian accounts of power, transactional theories try to capture the crisscrossing, multidimensional ways that bodies have effects on and are a/effected by other bodies. This does not result in the

disappearance, through theoretical pretension, of things like oppression. What it does is understand oppression as part of a network of complicated relationships in which all parties are ontologically constituted through the attempt of some

people to unidirectionally (and often violently) affect the lives of other people, to influence their behavior, to conduct and direct their activities. So Willett rightly outs me in a nontransactional moment when I speak of an oppressor-oppressed pole. This shorthand for my whiteness, sharply contrasted with nonwhiteness,

oversimplifies my and other white people's racial (and racist) habits. The context of this sentence, however, is explaining my first forays into thinking about race:

my initial motivation when thinking about white privilege came from trying to

sympathetically understand what my male students felt like when first confronted with feminist philosophy. An oppressor-oppressed pole is far too simple to

capture the relationships of men and women, masculinity and femininity, but it can be a helpful first step for the novice in thinking about those relationships. So too for the white person?and here I really mean white woman?who begins to realize that she is raced, especially middle-class white women, as I go on to

explain in the book's introduction, who have a history of habits of self-sacrifice that allegedly provide moral purity.

Willett caught me in another problematic moment that occurs in the story of Charlie, more specifically when I describe a "sea of black people" on the bus

(2006, 114). I was startled by the phrase when I first read Willett's comments, and so I went back to the book to see if I really said that. Yes, I did: not Charlie, but me. Did I say it ironically? I want that to be the case. The context of the

passage is self-critical of my inability to embody, as Willett explains, an ethics "subtle enough to weigh through the ironies of friendship" attempted on that bus. As Willett so wonderfully puts it, "What can a modern subject do? Maybe you could boycott Jim Crow, but you cannot really boycott a phantom" (212). But as

I try to place myself back in the moment of writing that chapter, I am not sure

it was part of a deliberate moment of self-criticism. It does not feel that way in

memory. I admit that it is more likely a moment where, quoting myself from the

book's introduction, "I inevitably have failed to see all the ways that my particular

perspective has influenced what I have written. I can only hope that the instances of my retreat to invisibility?invisible middle class whiteness?will be telling in

ways that illuminate white privilege, if also disturb and disappoint my readers"

(2006, 112-13). (And even this quotation is problematic, functioning as a sort of disclaimer?"I called it first, so you can't get me for it.") Willett does not explic itly press me on the unreflective white privilege manifested in the book, but she

rightfully could have done so.




Willett has suggested Foucault, but what also, turning to Mills's main

question, about a non-class-reductionist Marxism as another possible partner for

my project? And how important do I think unconscious motivations are in deter

mining white behavior that reproduces white domination? Could there be a Marxist

explanation that does not much need psychoanalytic theory? First, to respond to Mills's request for clarification: I agree with him that white privilege (in the standard sense of the term: the edge that the system of white supremacy provides white people) has been a constant from the start. It is primarily an issue of termi

nology here, as Mills points out. But I wonder if our terminological disagreement also hints of a more substantial disagreement that gets to Mills's questions about class and a Marxist approach to critical philosophy of race. When Mills quotes my sentence about white privilege being in the body?the nose, back, neck, and so on?and then claims, "So this is not white privilege in the sense of white racial

advantage" (222), I was somewhat puzzled because I would tend to say that this is an example of white racial advantage in its psychosomatic manifestation: the

edge or advantage that the system of white domination provides in terms of hav

ing the "right" kind of body with the "right" kind of senses, kinesthetic responses to the world, and so on. Some of those responses might not be pleasant feeling for white people?the involuntary tensing up or bodily awkwardness when in a

group of black people, for example?but they are a part of their racial privilege. They are material, but they are not particularly tied to the economic?and the economic (money, jobs, wealth) is what I think Mills is after when he says "in the sense of white racial advantage." If I am right, then this would be the biggest difference between my approach and his. While not dismissing the importance of racial disparities in wealth, for example, I am more interested in the material dimensions of class that are psychological, cultural, and symbolic rather than

straightforwardly or simply economic. This interest does not show up much in Revealing Whiteness, but it is

becoming increasingly important in the work I am currently doing on transform

ing the lived category of whiteness into something other than a category of racial domination. I do not have space for the full argument here, but I think that intra

racial, including class, distinctions within the group of white people are key to that transformation, especially given the problem of ontological expansiveness. (The title of one recent book summarizes the concern nicely: Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture [Tate 2003].) As Mills asked in an earlier version of his comments, expressing his concern about the difficulty of self-transformation through transformation of one's environ

ment, "What would changing one's environment mean? Hanging out with black

people? Immersing oneself in texts from the experience of people of color? Well, undoubtedly, these can make some difference, but how deep?" As the second half of Revealing Whiteness details, even as a psychoanalytic-pragmatist concept of habit reveals the important role that environment plays in human ontology, includ

ing its transformation, I too am concerned about white relocation into nonwhite




spaces. My argument is not that white people should seal themselves off from the worlds and lives of people of color, but I do think that white movement into nonwhite environments often is part of the problem, not the solution to white

privilege. So rather than traveling away from (= avoiding) one's whiteness, what if white people stayed home, so to speak, and examined the way that relationships between different classes of white people are crucial to the maintenance of white domination of people of color?

I am particularly concerned lately with the contemporary "good liberal," middle-class white person who considers him- or herself an antiracist and

yet?often precisely for that reason?avoids associating with lower-class white

people, whose views on race and racism seem crude and offensive. White people who have acknowledged white privilege and want to work against it sometimes

prefer to struggle exclusively alongside people of color rather than interact with

allegedly racist white people (Stubblefield 2005, 173). This avoidance creates a

chasm between different groups of white people as if they were absolutely and

irremediably different from one another. The crude, lower classes are racist, and the enlightened middle and upper classes are not?with this conviction, so-called

intelligent white liberals often pit themselves against other white people, who are

posited as the main source of racist evil. This chasm involves wealth and other economic factors, but those factors

are not the main issue at work here. As feminist ethnographer Steph Lawlor has

argued, "The inequalities of a class society do not end with economic inequality: indeed, economics may not necessarily be the most meaningful way to talk about class" (1999, 4). And sociologists Sennett and Cobb in The Hidden Injuries of Class write, "The activities which keep people moving in a class society, which make them seek more money, more possessions, higher-status jobs, do not origi nate in a materialistic desire, or even sensuous appreciation of things, but out of an

attempt to restore a psychological deprivation that the class structure has effected

in their lives" (1973, 171). Like gender, race, and a host of other components of

contemporary human ontology, class is found in the psychosomatic habits of one's

bodily self. It is not, quoting cultural theorist Annette Kuhn, "just about the way

you talk or dress, or furnish your home, it is not just about the job you do or how

much money you make doing it; nor is it merely about whether or not you went

to university, nor which university you went to. Class is something beneath your

clothes, under your skin, in your psyche, at the very core of your being" (quoted in Lawlor 1999, 5). And so I disagree with Mills when he says, "Class is not

inscribed on the body the way race is" (225). I am not claiming that class and race

are identical, but I do think that an orthodox Marxist revolution that eliminated

bourgeois ownership of property would leave many class structures (habits) in

place, even as such a huge economic transformation would affect those habits. As cultural anthropologist John Hartigan demonstrates, "intraracial distinc

tions are a primary medium through which whites think about race" and manage the boundaries between white and nonwhite (1999, 17). And although not often




acknowledged as such, intraracial distinctions between white people have their

origins in and often continue to be located along regional fault lines in the United States. "Hillbillies" and "rednecks," for example, originated as names for southern whites whose speech, diet, and lifestyle were perceived as (too) similar to those of southern blacks and thus who tended to be "objects of contempt for transgressing a racial order that was rapidly losing its semblance of naturalness" (Hartigan 1999, 28). The racial category of "white trash," which characterizes those who transgress white social etiquette based on decorum and hygiene, generates an even deeper wellspring of loathing because of the threat of pollution that it represents (Hartigan 2005, 99, 123). All three categories support what historian Joel Williamson has called the "grits thesis": a view of politics and race in the South promoted by white elites that blamed racial violence on poor whites rather than examining racism as an institutional problem (Hartigan 2005,118). Hillbillies, rednecks, and especially white trash?these are the class of white people that good white liberals depend on

(without acknowledgment or even much conscious awareness of it) to ensure their moral status and secure the distance between white and nonwhite. These are the

despicable, "bad" white people who are responsible for the continuing existence of racism and white supremacy, not "us."

It will come as no surprise that I think psychosomatic habits based on intraracial class distinctions between white people can operate unconsciously?but perhaps not as often as habits of racial domination given that class prejudice is not frowned on the same way that racial prejudice is. As Jim Goad charges in his Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's

Scapegoats, "Day after cotton-pickin' day, we are invited to hate white trash.... Cartoon people. These days, we hardly ever see the redneck as anything but a caricature. . . . The trailer park has become the media's cultural toilet, the only acceptable place to dump one's racist inclinations" (1998, 15-16). Goad's mani festo is dangerously wrongheaded as it pits classism against racism and claims that the former is America's real social problem. It fails to acknowledge how classism can buttress racism and racism can both support and require classism. But it does show how prejudice against "white trash" is more overtly acceptable than racial

prejudice. And so class prejudice has not gone underground in contemporary Western democracies to the extent that racial prejudice has done.

As this comment suggests, I think that a Laplanchean analysis?using that term broadly to indicate an analysis of the transactional self that includes its unconscious habits?can be more or less relevant to a particular social issue, such as white domination or class prejudice. To be more precise, I think a Laplanchean analysis is always relevant to understanding human ontology, to understanding how unconscious habits help make up the selves that we are. But the selves that human beings are change across time, history, and geography, so whether a

person's unconscious habits are constituted in part by race/racism, gender/sex ism, class/classism, and so on will depend on the historical and geographical

moment in which he or she lives. Are unconscious habits the only motivation for,




in this case, white domination? No, and I agree with Mills that prudential white calculation also sometimes motivates white behavior. But I think that it is less of a

motivating factor than often is believed (and that white people in particular often

desperately want to believe: "I just want my kids to go to a good school") and that even the economically rational choices made by white people about where

they live, what schools their children attend, what careers they pursue, and so

forth usually need a richer explanation that accounts for unconscious fears and desires that circulate around and through those choices.

This discussion hints at an answer to one of Taylor's questions, which concerns what I would suggest we do with the unreconstructed white privilegists. How can they be made to confront and overcome themselves? My reply likely will

disappoint Taylor: Revealing Whiteness is not intended to answer these particular questions. The openly and deliberately racist white person is not who I am writ

ing for or about in that book; I am writing for and about well-intentioned white

people. But Taylor might be happier to hear that this particular focus returns me to his question, at least indirectly, because writing to and about the good liberal white people means writing to and about the people who tend to think that they are not the problem when it comes to ongoing racism and white privilege. The class issues within whiteness discussed above are extremely relevant to the question of

how, in Lucius Outlaw's words, white people might "rehabilitate racial whiteness'9

(2004). And an important part of the answer is that rather than deflecting racism onto white trash and other white Others as a way of ensuring one's own moral

goodness, contemporary "good liberal" white people need to recognize that this deflection is an offshoot of the very racism that they wish to challenge. Struggle against white privilege and domination must include struggle against invidious class divisions between white people themselves.

None of this is a political program along the lines of what Taylor asks

for?my work is short on that, I realize. It is a personal, interpersonal, social, even educational issue that hopefully has political effects. I tend to be fascinated

by the ways that oppressive structures such as white domination take root in

people's personal lives. Racism is not located solely in the psyche; it has a long

history of perpetuating itself through political, economic, national, educational, and other institutions that are much larger than any individual. Yet part of the way that these institutions are able to so effectively privilege white people and exploit nonwhite people is through the development of individual attachments and com

mitments to them. Here is where pragmatist-psychoanalytic partnership can be of

particular help to critical philosophy of race: it can help us understand both how

people become personally invested in racist institutions and structures and how

they might try to combat this "interior" investment by changing their relationship to the "external" world. Much more than individual, psychical change is needed to eliminate racism and white privilege, of course, but changes to larger, imper sonal institutions ultimately will be effective only if the roots they have planted in people's psychosomatic habits have been dug up.2




I will close with a (too) brief response to Mills's question of what might motivate a white person to choose to embark on a path of antiwhiteliness that will involve significant financial sacrifice. This will touch also on Willett's question about training for a different ethics for white people and thus perhaps also on

Taylor's request for more ethical guidance from my work. Mills asks if a plau sible case can be made to show the material benefits of the transformation of the white majority, and understanding "material" here as strictly economic, I think the answer is that it cannot. "Will the case have to be made in terms of benefits of other kinds?" Mills then wonders, and the answer is yes, even if antiwhiteliness also is linked to anticapitalism. Borrowing from Spinoza, my sense is that sad

passions such as self-sacrifice, self-hatred, suicide, and betrayal ("race traitor") are not likely to motivate much of anything from white people except more sad

passions, which will not be of much benefit to an antiracist transformation of whiteness. (Here I divert from the end of Revealing Whiteness where I implicitly endorse a race betrayal for white people.) Rather than betray, kill, or otherwise

try to distance themselves from their white selves (a milder version of which can

be found in strategies of color blindness), I think that white people need to get closer, more intimate with them. Part of this proximity includes middle-class white people no longer othering other classes of white people. It might include

embracing whiteness as a family that one loves?which is importantly different from liking?enough to try to make it better, healthier, than it is, fueled by joyful rather than sad passions (see Sullivan forthcoming).

White antiracist activist Tim Wise once alarmed his predominantly white audience and black interlocutor by remarking that he ultimately was not fighting racism for the sake of nonwhite people. As he explained to the black woman, "I

mean no disrespect by saying that_It's just that I don't view it as my job to fight racism so as to save you from it. That would be paternalistic.... I fight [racism] because it's a sickness in my community, and I'm trying to save myself from it"

(2005,98). Along with Spinoza, I think here of Nietzsche and his use of "health" to explain his work as a cultural physician. Nietzsche's philosophy and concepts of health are dangerous ideas to invoke in the context of race, I realize, and questions of how "we" decide who counts as a member of the white community or family have to be addressed. Setting those important concerns aside for the moment, I think that a white person getting closer, rather than farther away from, his or her whiteness could help him or her strive to make white people healthy enough that they do not poison other races when interacting with them but, instead, can

reciprocally nourish each other. White people need to become more, not less, "selfish" in Nietzsche's sense of the term, in that they need to adorn their souls with genuine treasures, rather than the counterfeit gems of white supremacy. Only then will they be in a psycho-ontological position that allows them to "flow back [to others] from [their] fountain," to fairly, generously, and even lovingly engage with others rather than respond to them out of a soul-starved stinginess (Nietzsche 1969, 100). It is this sort of material benefit, this kind of motivation




for the self-transformation of whiteness, that I am trying to explore in my current work. A Marxism that remained weak on psychological issues might not be of much help in that enterprise, but perhaps there is another interesting marriage to arrange here between Marx and Laplanche. That might be a queer marriage, especially if Foucault, Dewey, and DuBois join in, but its queerness might be

precisely why it could be helpful to a critical philosophy of race.

Notes 1. Before training with Lacan, Laplanche studied at the ?cole Normale Superieure with Merleau

Ponty and Hippolyte and received highest commendations on his aggregation dephilosophie (Fletcher and Stanton 1992, 225).

2. This paragraph is adapted from an earlier article (Sullivan 2003, 21).

Works Cited Benton, Thomas H. (pseudonym). 2006. "Love Me; I Celebrate Diversity." Chronicle of Higher

Education, December 8: CI.

DuBois, W. E. B. 1984. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books.

-. 1999. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil New York: Harcourt Brace.

Fletcher, John, and Martin Stanton, eds. 1992. Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the

Drives. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Goad, Jim. 1998. Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's

Scapegoats. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hartigan, John, Jr. 1999. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit. Princeton:

Princeton University Press. -. 2005. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

James, William. 1955. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Dover Press.

Laplanche, Jean. 1989. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Lawlor, Steph. 1999. "Getting Out and Getting Away: Women's Narratives of Class Mobility." Feminist

Review 63, no. 5: 3-24.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books.

Outlaw, Lucius. 2004. "Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness." In What White Looks Like: African-American

Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy, 159-71. New York: Routledge.

Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. 1973. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage Books.

Stubblefield, Anna. 2005. Ethics Along the Color Line. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Sullivan, Shannon. 2003. "Enigma Variation: Laplanchean Psychoanalysis and the Formation of the

Raced Unconscious." Radical Philosophy 122:20-34.

-. 2006. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

-. Forthcoming. "Whiteness as Family: Race, Class and Responsibility." In Difficulties of Ethical

Life, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Dennis Schmidt. Bronx: Fordham University Press.

Tate, Greg. 2003. Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture.

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On Revealing Whiteness: A Reply to Critics

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