The Essence of Whiteness

Daniel Boscaljon

IV. American Fascism

The combination of factors addressed by Melville—the fear of a dumb blankness, becoming self-consuming commodities, the blindness to reality, beginning to consume others—were all present within an America set in the 20th and 21st century, during a time when Democracy and political involvement were to have solved our problems.

The political process in America, however, is just as alienated from actual relations to citizens and situations as other parts of the economy. The American education intended to extract maximum whiteness from its citizens. It is thus meant to instill a sense of obedience to authority (Ahab), an unthinking acceptance of expectation (Delano), a desire for dissociating from the unpleasant aspects of reality (Bachelors), and finding that the protection of purity becomes identical with the product consumed (Maids) or labor exhausted at the point of exhaustion (Bartleby). As such, the question of critical thinking about reality or the freedom to create a future that does not seem predestined seems something no longer innate to white humans—who continue to use law and violence to prohibit others from seeking lives open to flourishing.

Writing in 1941, Fromm’s characterization of American politics seems apt. He looks to how voters are made to feel irrelevant by distant, pre-selected candidates who are marketed through repeated slogans divorced from daily reality. Nonetheless, politics continues to flatter voters by pretending that participation matters, although “these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and so to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision” (129). Becoming merged with entertainment—before actors and reality television characters ascended to the presidency—politics was a spectacle that provided a glimpse of freedom while keeping all truly important economic structures intact. Within this world, freedom is allowed by those who are immersed from fear and those who have the good fortune to outrun assailants. Those who have been traumatized by this world are provided with a variety of products designed to overpower the mind and the body, providing a state of numbness that allows extraction to occur more easily.

The two widespread forms of true escape that Fromm suggests are submission to a strong leader (Fascism) and compulsive conforming (democracy). I would argue that these have merged in the 21st century in the figure of whiteness. Trump’s assumption of the presidency offers all of the horrors of whiteness described by Melville—the raging monomaniac, the dumb blankness, the indifference to consuming women, the blithe disregard for reality. But even if Trump can be explained as the ultimate essence of whiteness, it does not explain why such a large percentage of the American populous voted for him.

Fascism allows for those whose lives have been extracted as whiteness to return to a state in which life feels less overwhelming. This, following Fromm, is “the tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking” (140), which he understands as played out in the striving for “submission and domination.” These traits play on the discussion of Christianity (submission and self-annihilation) and Capitalism (domination through intellect and will) cited from Fromm earlier.

Submission allows for a sensation of wholeness as the despised self is totally extracted and removed in favor of a self that is dominated or shares in the strength of a powerful external entity: “a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion,” by virtue of having lost “one’s integrity as an individual,” one is provided “a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges” (154). Because one is only following orders, rules, or directions, there’s a freedom from responsibility and thus also the sense of guilt and shame that follow the threat of failure. It also carries into it the promise of extraction that was offered to whiteness through the promulgation of sadism, which Fromm argues includes the “complete domination over another person” by “inflicting pain on him, to force him to undergo suffering without his being able to defend himself” (154), a pain that re-introduces the sadist to the potential of bodily sensation at all—as these often have been sacrificed as part of the extraction of whiteness. The blend of these is symbiosis:

In one case I dissolve myself in an outside power; I lose myself. In the other case I enlarge myself by making another being part of myself and thereby I gain the strength I lack as an independent self. It is always the inability to stand the aloneness of one’s individual self that leads to the drive to enter into a symbiotic relationship with someone else (157).

The sadistic drives—controlling others—are conscious, but symbiosis allows for the masochistic needs to be met as well at an unconscious level. The question of submission also comes in terms of internalizing authority so that the work of self-obedience disguises the lack of freedom (165). Authoritarian power works easiest once it moves to the level of what Fromm calls “anonymous authority,” where there is no one actual person whose will controls things, where “one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow” (166). By virtue of his cruel and paradoxically effective incompetence, Trump manages to successfully conflate the sense of symbiosis, authoritarianism, and anonymous authority. This would seem to suggest that Trump, like most of those who vote for him, also engage in what Fromm calls pseudo-thinking: “the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority’s opinion without being aware of this process” (190). One’s original feelings and volition are, in this way, also extracted and substituted to allow for the kind of thoughts, feelings, and will conducive to authority.

This process parallels Mbembe's discussion of our contemporary situation in Necropolitics. He argues that “Humanity is in the process of leaving behind the grand divisions between the human, the animal, and the machine so typical of the discourse on modernity and on humanism” (179). This type of hybridity, encouraged by our use of smart phones, has allowed what he calls “the great paradox of the twenty-first century,” which finds a “growing class of slaves without masters and of masters without slaves,” in which “both human persons and natural resources continue to be squeezed to boost profits” (179). The advantage of eliminating slaves is finally eliminating the anxiety of insurrection.

Hitler amassed power for a number of circumstantial reasons that echo the conditions that have led to the growth of fascism in the twenty-first century. In part, Hitler was able to look at how the “lower middle class” was “threatened by monopolistic capitalism,” and to use its anxiety and hatred to move the middle class into a “state of panic,” “filled with a craving for submission to as well as for domination over those who were entirely powerless” (218). Hitler promised this his constituents would receive financial security, and provided emotional satisfaction and distraction so that the failure to follow through on his promises could be ignored. The effects of the decline of the middle class—in 1940’s Germany, like the U.S. of today—created a situation where “psychic forces thus aroused thus became effective in a direction that was opposite to the original economic interests of that class” (219). Racist politics and policies are always counterproductive because they require the extraction of an essence out from where it flourishes; however, because this creates conditions of misery that then become amplified by weakened senses of self, questions of actual effectiveness are set aside in the interests of simply getting through the day.

When life feels overwhelming, and one’s innate vitality has become extracted in favor of artificial and secondary economies of desire and merchandising, giving up makes sense. This is especially true when the world seems governed by impersonal forces that cannot be identified, much less fought against. These circumstances make an authoritarian character (and the “rebellious” (not revolutionary) type that feeds the system by affirming its power) feel more desirable, because it provides an excuse for failure (the fact that impersonal forces influence reality), a way to become empowered (finding someone superior in the social system who effectively instrumentalizes others), and those who are weaker whom one is assigned to target and victimize. . In The Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe describes this as the process of history, which is “essentially governed by forces that escape us,” leading to a “conspiratorial reading of history” that Mbembe defines this as “the neurosis of victimization” that embodies a “negative and circular way of thinking that relies on superstition to function. It creates its own fables, which subsequently pass for reality” (88). Fromm argues “The common feature to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self, his interest, his wishes. The only possible happiness lies in the submission to these forces” (169). Ironically, this denial of individual potency, will, and intellectual ability is the crowning achievement of essential whiteness and thus comprises the total failure of its initial desire.