Six Inconclusive Notes on the Whiteness of the “Good White”

1 Whiteness is the central, hegemonic, universal, disembodied position from which the Other is judged, measured, constructed, imagined. In “Decentering Whiteness” (2015), Charley Flint and Jeff Hitchcock characterize the position of Whiteness as: the standard, the background, the normal, the undifferentiated, that which is defined by the Other or the Outsider, the obvious, the familiar, the impervious to contradiction, the morally correct, the dominant, the place of resources and wealth, the ordained by God; a self-centeredness that makes it better than its obverse: the “marginal.” This position is unconscious, invisible. The eye that can't see itself. Whiteness, as a position, is elaborated in opposition to Blackness. Frantz Fanon clearly saw this in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008): “[T]here is no longer any doubt that the true Other for the white man is and remains the black man.” (p. 139) Racial difference is construed as a social place-holder for a split between the central and the marginal, the powerful and the powerless, which seeks to perpetuate itself through a violent system: racism. Mass shootings, police brutality, and lynchings (past and present) are violent phenomena that are inherent to this system, to this split created by Whiteness. They are more normally addressed and criticized by “well-intentioned” white liberals, including white psychoanalysts, in order to unambiguously position themselves as allies, and, many times, unconsciously, as morally superior to the racist “bad whites.” They are the “good whites.” I would like to draw attention to some problems in this unconscious strategy that, I believe, show the same anxiety in “good whites” as the one we see more clearly in the “bad whites” (openly racist people, white supremacists, white separatists, the alt-right, etc.) of losing their centrality.

2 From a psychoanalytic perspective, the split inherent to Whiteness can be traversed by several dynamics. Firstly, I