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This is a book for our times, as the introductory references to Barak Obama's Dreams from My Father and Steve McQueen's film Twelve Years a Slave suggest. Volney Gay's analysis of the psychic pleasures and costs of slavery is informed by growing up lower-class in Portland, Oregon, where he learned what it feels like to be lesser than. Only later did he realize the many psychic pleasures he enjoyed by being white. As he and others have explored, white privilege is largely invisible to those who possess it. Because whites have always had it, because they do not know what its absence feels like, they accept their pleasurable superiority as natural. They are unaware how oppressive their assumptions can feel to people of color.
By exploring the origin of these pleasures in the institution of slavery, Gay has several aims, the largest of which is to encourage us to have empathy—even with slave owners. He wants us to acknowledge that in their place we might have acted as they did (and the “they” here is inclusive: he cites instances of free black masters who “like white owners … sold slaves when they needed funds or when they were dissatisfied with their slaves’ behavior” (p. 93). By acknowledging our capacity to oppress others, by refusing to demonize the slaveholder, we remain open to understanding.
A psychoanalyst, Gay puts not an individual, but a nation, on the couch, analyzing patterns of thought that are familiar tropes in the