Loving Whiteness to Death: A Critical Examination of White Sadomasochistic Emotionality

• In Event: “Something Doesn’t Feel White”: Racial Affect, White Dissonance, and the Possibility for Challenging Whiteness in Education

Abstract

Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) birthed out of the need to expose how white superiority, hegemony, and racialization impact systems of American raciality. Drawing from its historical roots of unveiling white privilege and power (Johnson, 2005, McIntosh, 2001), research responded by strategically applying its theoretical definitions (Allen, 2004, Best, 2003, Gillborn, 2006, Lee, 2005, Leonardo, 2009, Lipstiz, 1998, Schick, 2010, Sleeter, 1995, Thompson, 2003). However, these sociohistorical analyses overshadow the need for a psychosocial understanding of whiteness. Thus, this interpretive theoretical paper describes the problems associated with white emotionality, explores the structure of white emotionality, and proposes a socio-therapeutic approach to white transformation and the abolition of whiteness.

In the Symposium, Plato asserts eros (love) is ultimately the need to feel whole. Then how should we interrogate whites’ need to feel whole/loved when they invest in a social system that ultimately provides them with only a distorted sense of wholeness? How is white emotionality connected to the façade of “white” identity? Further, how might a break-up with whiteness lead whites to a more authentic feeling of humane love?

Erich Fromm (1956) posits that most so-called “loving” relationships are sadomasochistic. Attempting to overcome the fear of loneliness, the sadist dominates another to create attachment with a follower and the masochist attaches via the worship of an idol. Extrapolated to white psychology, the authors examine how the need of love and the fear of its ontological opposite, that of isolation, cultivate a sadomasochistic relationship to whiteness. Meaning, whites willingly and knowingly engage in a surveillance of a racialized social structure that sadistically inflicts harm onto people of color while masochistically denying themselves the opportunity to experience true humane love. Rather than dealing with this condition positively by undoing the racist social structure, whites instead repress their racial knowledge, thus creating a psychological defense mechanism that allows them, psychically, to continue reaping benefits. As white group members ensure this repression continues via social operations of surveillance (Foucault, 1995), whites are instilled with the sense that if they become a traitor to whiteness, they will be alone, isolated, and, thus, without love. Fearing loneliness, whites masochistically cling to the white polity, expecting to find some wholeness/love there.

By subscribing to a sadomasochistic sense of racial love, whites are then paralyzed to end the absurdity of race and experience truly humane love. Borrowing from Fromm, only an “escape from whiteness” will fill white peoples’ need for a more humane love. However, to exit such a sadomasochistic relationship, whites must be prepared to embark on a painful process of rearticulating what constitutes love. Just as a mother who acknowledges the painful process of childbirth when deciding on becoming pregnant, whites must acknowledge that the process of breaking with whiteness is painful, yet in the end, they will experience the birth of humane love. Expanding articulations of whiteness in this way, allows for a nuanced understanding of the psycho-emotional subscription to whiteness and how, by explicating its parameters, we can instructively propose ways of emerging out of it.

Authors

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver

• Ricky Lee Allen, University of New Mexico