Between the Lines

We can all—or most of us—agree on the existence of a thing called structural racism. But can structures have a life of their own, independent of the people inside them?

One premise of a democracy is that there is an active line of connection between the whole and the part, that society and psyche shape each other in a meaningful way.

In the wake of George Floyd's killing, it seems many white people are in a rush to prove their wokeness. To show they're on the right side of history. Maybe some good can come of that.

But what to make of the disparity between our knowing language of concepts and analysis and the unknowing, ceaseless, subterranean language of fantasies and feelings?

A paradoxical question: In my way of using language, what gets lost to conscious examination?

More and more, I find myself aware of how speech can function as a smoke screen, motivated by a need to disavow my own embeddedness. More and more, it's that problem of embeddedness that I keep coming back to—how my own mind is intimately bound up in the fabric of this American sickness.

What is the line that connects me to the lynching of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street? How is the flow of my most private thought and emotion, fear and desire related to a systemic pathology that is so easy to decry, and yet so seemingly impervious to our knowing discourse?

The forces of power, the forces that perpetuate inequality, that deny access, circumscribe difference, contain it as one might seek to contain a threat, are not outside us.

White supremacy, among other things, is a costly defense structure. It is designed to protect power and ward off fear. But the defense is full of cracks and always has been. The various forms of economic, cultural, and social segregation that are intended to guard against the eruption of white anxiety only deepen anxiety, as they deepen black despair and black rage.