Moss's “On Having Whiteness”

July 6, 2021. I am perturbed by the use of the phrase “Parasitic Whiteness,” used throughout Donald Moss's “On Having Whiteness” (JAPA 69/2). Moss asserts that “the condition is foundational, generating 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” (p. 356).

Dorothy Holmes (2021a) begins her discussion of Moss's paper by noting that she was “intrigued and made anxious” by it (p. 373) and ends by calling Moss “brave, bold, and clearheaded about Whiteness, knowing that it can so easily befuddle and upset us” (p. 380).

Was the anxiety Holmes experienced similar to mine when reading the word “parasitic”? She uses the word only once, instead interrogating the concept of Whiteness without the adjective. In her other contribution to JAPA 69/2, Holmes (2021b) discusses the embeddedness of “white supremacy” in many institutions. Moss does not use the term “white supremacy” in his discussion. How different are these two terms: “white supremacy” and “Parasitic Whiteness?” My objection to the term “Parasitic Whiteness” is that the term is reminiscent of the slur “Jewish parasite” (Wikipedia 1). In contrast, “white supremacy” is not a slur. It is a term derived from seventeenth-century scientific racism (Wikipedia 2). The latter term denigrates nonwhites and is a self-designated term of approbation which from the “19th to the mid-20th century was largely taken for granted by political leaders and social scientists in Europe and the United States” (Jenkins 2005).

In the introduction to JAPA 69/2, Mitchell Wilson (pp. 233-234) notes that psychoanalysis has a history of using pejorative terms to describe patients, such as “borderline” or “primitive.” He notes that “as analysts we know that words of significance carry history on their backs” (p. 234). Has Donald Moss introduced a new pejorative term, a slur with a long history, into a respected psychoanalytic journal?

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