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This essay takes up, from a psychoanalytic and cultural theory perspective, the underpinnings and psychic structures of racism, as it is lived out and practiced in the North American context. Considering the investment of white people in many projects of denial and historical amnesia, this is the most daunting task facing communities, large and small. This essay, which I have worked on with considerable anxiety, is focused on the tenacity of the conscious and unconscious commitments “white” people make to white privilege. I believe this reluctance to take on the questions of white privilege is currently a major impediment to progress in overcoming racism in many communities and social circumstances. In this essay, however, I have tried to center my attention on my own experience, particularly my own resistances, as a white person, citizen, and psychoanalyst.
The overarching concept with which I will be thinking about these matters is one developed by Ruth Stein (2005): the perverse pact. This pact can be observed in individuals, in couples, in social formations, and in intersubjective space. What is powerful in this concept is Stein's attention to social links that are both very close and intimate and simultaneously very violent and drenched in hostility. Both terms—“perverse” and “pact”—are necessary ingredients.
What I am concerned to do is to examine in myself and in other white persons, singly or in groups, the combined force of dissociation and violence that keeps racism in place. Dissociation