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Published online: 20 December 2023
© The Author(s) 2023
Todd McGowan’s The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred puts forward a psychoanalytically informed perspective on the psychic and cultural dynamics that fuel racism in modernity. In conjunction with a recent series of published works that examine racism through a psychoanalytic lens, such as Lacan and Race (George & Hook, 2021), this book centers on the concept of fantasy and its organizing intrapsychic and collective power in the context of racism. McGowan’s book stands out for its accessible and engaging style, effectively offering a beginner’s guide to the world of psychoanalysis. Therefore, it is not a book solely for psychoanalysts or academic experts, but rather welcomes readers who are embarking on their initial exploration of how psychoanalysis can shed light on societal phenomena such as racism. In this review, I will delve into McGowan’s arguments, also addressing the underlying psychoanalytic theory that, while not explicitly stated in the book, is implicitly present throughout.
The book begins by arguing that racism cannot originate from a distortion of knowledge. Situating racism in this way reduces it to an epistemological problem that can be solved by filling up the gaps in our knowledge of racial difference. Today, most people have access to knowledge about the systemic and historical wrongs of racism and, while we see a drastic increase in anti-racist education and integration, we see no drastic decline in racism. On the contrary, racism seems to have developed further and is being implemented in new and sophisticated ways.
According to McGowan, the fact that consciously knowing that racism is bad does not alter racism is evidence to the working of the unconscious. Here McGowan is not talking about the unconscious in the sense of not-knowing—implemented in the study of “unconscious bias” (see, for example, Moule, 2009)—but the Freudian das Unbewusste that resists knowledge. It is the unconsc