Stemming the Flow: Racism in White America

The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

Deep within the Earth it is so hot that some rocks slowly melt and become a thick flowing substance called magma. Since it is lighter than the solid rock around it, magma rises and collects in magma chambers. Eventually, some of the magma pushes through vents and fissures to the Earth's surface. Magma that has erupted is called lava. … If magma is thick and sticky, gasses cannot escape easily. Pressure builds up until the gasses escape violently and explode.”

AN OMINOUS, DESTRUCTIVE FORCE, a social “MAGmA” is oozing and lapping its way across the American landscape. It is spreading out indiscriminately, its ash creating a fog world where what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is a lie become merged and indistinguishable from one another. In Yeats's words, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

MAGmA's tidal force in the United States may be impossible to stop and may take a very long time to recover from. As a psychoanalyst I would suggest it is evidence that the United States is a group that is failing to contain the split-off and has evacuated parts of its members.

In this essay I argue that one of the many causes of this phenomenon is the ways in which white Americans—in particular, white liberal Americans—perversely disavow the ubiquity of internalized and structural racism. By white liberal American, I am referring to the group of white Americans for whom being racist is most ego-dystonic, who are most likely to be ashamed of their racism and most likely to seek to disidentify with racist intentions and wishes. A psychoanalytic perspective promotes awareness of oneself that includes the parts of ourselves that we hate and that are frightening or disturbing; the parts of ourselves that don't match up with our ideal image o