Response

December 19, 2021. I was honored to have been included with Dorothy Holmes, Beverly Stoute, Jyoti Rao, Alan Bass, and Peter Loewenberg in JAPANS extraordinary issue “Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism.”

“On Having Whiteness” has generated a wide range of readings, from the warmly appreciative to the murderously inflamed. I was unprepared for the wide-reaching tumult. I had thought of the paper as a straightforward effort at reworking some familiar ideas. But, just as in the clinical situation, in the publishing situation the moment you let your words go you lose control of their meanings. Your words come back to you, their meanings transformed by the listener or reader, and you then have the opportunity to listen, to learn, and to go at it again, influenced this time by your experiences of surprise.

I very much appreciate the opportunity to “go at it again” here, to respond to letters from three readers and hopefully to deepen our psychoanalytic and personal capacities to address the malign and enduring presence of the impulses, ideas, and actions structuring the ideology of white supremacy.

Leon Hoffman expresses deep concern about my use of the words “parasite” and “parasitic.” He reminds us that, for centuries, these words have been used in murderous anti-Semitic slurs characterizing an entire people, positioning them as appropriate for elimination. I was stunned by his reading. Had I inadvertently manufactured a Trojan horse carrying an anti-Semitic slur?

Hoffman concludes his letter by referring to “Moss's use of the term ‘White Parasitism.’” Had I written that, I would absolutely agree with him that I was using the word to slur a category of person. But, in fact, I had not used that phrase. What seems to have happened is a kind of slippage of meaning. I used the words “parasite” and “parasitic” as a way of thinking metaphorically about a process, a mode of transmission by which white people can become infiltrated with white racist impulses and ideas. I was thinking