Abstract
This paper furthers the use of psychoanalysis as a lens for reading the contemporary political and social world and explores the ongoing reproduction of the racial unconscious in the United States. In applying a psychoanalytic lens to interpersonal violence and legal and political discourse during Obama’s presidency, we attempt to explore how internal fear of blackness prevents America and psychoanalysis from accessing non-destructive relational psychological spaces. We argue that the violent responses to racial blackness and power are not second-hand effects of racial and economic disparity, but rather intimate parts of our psychodynamics that involve an intersubjective process we term “object fear.” We discuss relational theories that help us negotiate object fear as a location for often ignored racialized group and dyadic psychodynamics, looking at specific examples of object fear, interpersonal violence and the limits of relational psychoanalysis to address these types of object relations. We end by turning to a series of recent Supreme Court decisions to look at the ways in which object fear has been triggered at this historical moment in relation to the presence of a black president and the threat to the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States.
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Notes
On Michelle Obama’s ancestry see Swarns and Kantor (2009). On verbal attacks see “Why They Keep Attacking Michelle Obama” (NewsOne, 2012).
The “Birthers” are an organization that makes the claim that President Obama does not meet the requirements for the presidency because, according to the Birthers, he is not a “natural born” citizen due to his father’s immigration status and the claim that Obama himself might have been born in Africa.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested on the porch of his home on July 16, 2009. Gates had returned from a trip and was having trouble getting into his house. A white woman in the neighborhood saw Gates and his driver struggling with the front door and reported a possible attempted break-in. When the police arrived, Gates became angry at the implication that a black man struggling with his own door was a criminal and that the officer would not recognize the racial biases circulating in the situation. Gates yelled at the officer as he left the house and was then arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. After President Obama responded by saying the police “acted stupidly,” he set up a meeting of himself, Vice President Biden, the arresting officer, and Gates over beers on the White House lawn. A telling Daily News piece reported that 41% of Americans disagreed with the president’s handling of the situation and described Obama’s attempt openly to discuss the racial dynamics at play in the incident as “ripping a scab off one of America’s most emotionally charged issues [and] damag[ing] his strategy to push health care reform (Bazinet et al, 2009).”
On March 23, 2012 during a press conference, President Obama unexpectedly responded to questions about the then ongoing case of the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. The president said, “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon.” But liberals and conservatives read this as an explicit comment about the racist nature of the crime – liberals largely cheering on Obama for openly addressing race (though he did not say “race” nor “black”) and conservatives condemning him for “playing the race card” and being divisive rather than representing all Americans. While the conservative reaction correlates more directly to what we term object fear (anxiety over the recognition of the internal blackened object), the widespread coverage of this comment from all sides indicates that any comment in which the president draws attention to his own racial blackness becomes a site of controversy and an opportunity for sensationalist news stories. On the use of the “race card” see Borelli (2014).
This accusation of “blurting” seems to be a projection of Scalia’s own actions here – that is, to blurt out his feeling that the president’s agency was threatening – and echoes Wilson’s “blurting” of “You lie!”
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Jones, A., Obourn, M. Object fear: The national dissociation of race and racism in the era of Obama. Psychoanal Cult Soc 19, 392–412 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2014.38