Pathologizing Whiteness Is a Brick on the Road to Genocide

Racism is now masquerading as science as "Whiteness" has been deemed to be an inheritable psychological condition, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

The paper, which was published on May 27th, describes "Whiteness" as a "malignant, parasitic-like condition to which 'white' people have a particular susceptibility." The words, published in a journal of this calibre, would not be out of place in a Nazi psychoanalytic journal from the 1930s with some hackneyed analysis on "Jewishness" or any other class, creed, or race of people deemed subhuman by the anti-Semitic racists who masked their bigotry in science.

The paper’s publication is far from an outlier in the field - a New York-based psychiatrist invited to the Yale University’s School of Medicine recently gave a speech in which she, one Dr. Aruna Khilanani, described a “psychological dynamic that is on PTSD repeat” in which people of color experience frustration in trying to get white people to empathize with their struggles with white supremacy. The experience of having those accusations denied by their supposed “oppressors” causes anger, which in turncaused her to fantasize about shooting white people.

The “Whiteness” research paper, written by one Dr. Donald Moss, a San Francisco-based psychologist, claims that the condition of "Whiteness" is "foundational" (meaning you inherit it from your parents), and "generates characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind, and in one's world."

"Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts' appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse," it continues, reading like the racist screed that it very much is rather than a scientific whitepaper that observes the empirical properties of a given subject.

Worse still, the document provides a remedy for “Whiteness” - as if race itself is a disease to be cured of - in the form of "psychic and social-historical interventions." One might ask how these proposed solutions are any different than a frontal lobe lobotomy, which would undoubtedly produce similar results.

"Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness's infiltrated appetites," it continues, adding that these would-be fixes would "reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation." And there it is: reparations for the sins of the fathers, even those not your ancestors. Your only crime, it would seem, is sharing similar facial features and skin tones with anyone guilty of the charge.

Not once does the paper itself suggest that racism might be a complex problem worth approaching holistically. Not once does it suggest that one might simply "live and let live." Instead, much like those who champion and promote the cause of "anti-racism," the paper is rooted in anger and hatred towards whites. The solutions, simply put, are just there for the sake of saying, "hey, we tried" when violence is the inevitable result of such heated rhetoric. It's a means to pin the blame on those deemed "oppressors" and to absolve the "oppressed" of any actions they might choose to take to deal with "Whiteness."

The piece, which was apparently not written in any kind of ironic sense whatsoever, suggests that remembrance of the 9/11 attacks on American soil or the Holocaust are rooted in Whiteness, presumably because the former invokes a sense of shared national identity while the latter calls for solidarity with a historically persecuted culture whose members have been killed, and continue to be killed over their birthright. The paper juxtaposes the concept of "never again" and that of "great again" (referring to Donald Trump's Make America Great Again), seemingly in protest of any pride a white person might happen to have.

"Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression," it warns. "There is not yet a permanent cure." 

It goes without saying that the pathologization of race by the article and its author is no different than the debunked study of phrenology or any other attempts to pathologize and disenfranchise whole groups of people. The fact that such an article could be published in a peer-reviewed journal just shows how deteriorated the field of psychology has gotten, and thanks to the advent of wokeness, it only promises to get even worse.

You can follow Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter @stillgray.