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I thank dr. altman for his willingness to discuss the difficult topic of race and ethnicity and to offer his work—and himself—as a subject of study. His article provides an opportunity to explore certain issues that I would like to discuss hermeneutically—that is, historically and politically—and by doing so advance values to which I know both of us subscribe.
Psychologists tend to over-psychologize the origins and effects of racial oppression. Mainstream psychologists usually understand prejudice or racism as a universal occurrence caused by natural processes or inherent structures of the mind activated by a putative universal human tendency to create in-groups and out-groups by generalizing about others and creating stereotypes. In their minds, the social realm enters the picture as only one “causative factor” among many. Although this academic tradition has had a long lineage and has served important functions in the ongoing attempt to secure a place for psychology in 20th-century U. S. society, lately it has been encountering opposition from some multiculturalists and from what is called the linguistic or interpretive turn (see Rabinow and Sullivan, 1987). How this debate plays out in psychoanalysis will constitute an important aspect of the movement's historical legacy. Altman's work is an important contribution to that debate.
The universal-feature argument, the position Allport (1954) popularized, is one much beloved by psychologists of most theoretical stripes, but its accuracy has recently been called into question. As Gaines and Reed (1996) pointed out, W. E. B. DuBois's (1903) position is much preferable to Allport's. Racial oppression, DuBois argued, is a