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Books by Claudia Tate
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire /
Black Women Writers at Work /
Dark Princess /
The Selected Works of Georgia Douglass Johnson
The Works of Katherine Tillman
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Freud and
His "Negro": Psychoanalysis
as Ally and Enemy of African Americans
By Claudia Tate
Who Practices Psychoanalysis?
[T] he practitioners of psychoanalysis are almost
categorically all white, and its analytical models disregard the
effects of racial differences on the lived experiences of the
analysts and analysands. . . . African American scholars have
been so hesitant in embracing psychoanalysis. For once African
Americans recognize that psychoanalysis always seems to boil
down to sexual matters to the exclusion of race matters,
psychoanalysis appears to ally itself as much or more with the
forces of white privilege than with those of racial equality.
Freud's Racism and Tate's Intent
My aim . . . is not to brand Freud a racist and then dismiss
psychoanalysis as irredeemably racist because its inventor was.
. . . I want . . . to reveal that the position of both the
theory and the practice of psychoanalysis today is still tainted
by the racism in which psychoanalysis originated and that we
must acknowledge and try to alter this positioning . . . . I
want my exploration of Freud's joke . . . to demonstrate some of
the potential that psychoanalysis holds for undermining racism.
Freud's Negro Joke
In the
Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1957), Ernest Jones,
Freud's eminent biographer, reports that in 1924 Freud
rejuvenated an "old joke" by referring to an American
patient as "his negro" (Vol. 3, 105). Jones explains
that Freud's use of this "strange appellation" dated
back to 1886. . . .For when the joke leaked into the public
domain and materialized also in 1886 as "a cartoon in the Fliegende Blatter depicting a yawning lion muttering 'Twelve
o'clock and no negro'," Freud identified with the lion and
produced a new rendition of the joke by conflating it with the
cartoon (Vol. 1, 151). . . .The old joke must have delighted
Freud because, as Jones reports, Freud told variations of it to
those in his inner circle for several decades.
Replicating the Master/Slave Relationship
Freud [by identifying himself with the lion] has established
(however unconsciously) an equation between the analyst/patient
relationship and the most brutal form of the master / slave
relationship, in which the slave is only a piece of meat to
satisfy the master's ravenous appetite (for power, money, sex,
aggression, or whatever). Freud's joke thus reveals an imbalance
of power intrinsic to the analytic relationship that in many
ways puts the patient at the mercy of the analyst, just as the
slave is at the mercy of the master.
Racial Compensation
Freud's joke also reveals Freud's own racial anxiety, an
anxiety that . . . played a significant role in the way Freud
and other Jewish analysts tried to position themselves and their
practice in relation to gentile society. Freud's own racism . .
.can be seen as partly a defense against his own Jewish
identity. . . .[It] functions to allay his anxiety about the
reception of psychoanalysis and the social alienation associated
with his Jewish identity in anti-Semitic Austria of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Freud's Discursive Blackface & Derisive Blackness
[The] joke's ironic performance of blackness allows Freud to
stage his own white masculinity in the guise of the colonial
master. . . . [It] reveals the racial trauma that psychoanalysis
originally sought to master Freud's compulsive repetition of the
joke suggests that for him psychoanalysis failed to acheive a
permanent mastery of his feelings of social alienation.
Psychoanalysis and Privilege: Bedfellows
By allying itself with social privilege, psychoanalysis
confined itself to the private realm of the white bourgeois
family. under these conditions, whiteness effaced the racial
difference of Jewishness, but only if the social borders were
marked by ostracized blacks. This confinement repressed the
"primal scene" of the larger culture and its racial
castration."
[Descendants of European Jews in America] forget that
they were once "black" in Europe. Like the assimilated
Jewish Americans, the practice of psychoanalysis reinforces its
position in dominant US culture by forgetting that it was born
of racial conflict and, moreover that many of the psychological
conflicts of its patients also have roots in racial conflict.
Blackness & Feminine Deficiency
When the figurative blackness of Freud's "negro'
patients proved insufficient to subdue his anxiety over
anti-Semitism, he turned to another displacement by constructing
the lack for "woman" based on her missing penis and
described her essence as impenetrable as the "dark
continent"--Africa (Freud, "The Question of Lay
Analysis" 212).
How Black Is Black?
Freud's joke reconstitutes the polarized economy of power
between Jewish therapy and ailment by transforming this
relationship into a tripartite one of relative social privilege
among whites, Jews, and Negroes before collapsing the triangular
formulation into the simple polarity of white and black. this
reconstitution has the effect of whitening the metaphorical
blackness of Jewishness in direct proportion to the prominence
of actual black bodies. Suc prominence erases the Semitic
blackness presumed by Aryans because Jews under these
circumstances become absorbed into the category of whiteness.
Symbolic Blackness, American Art & White Supremacy
Blackface was also linked to the major twentieth-century
cinematic events of
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903),
Birth of
a Nation (1915), and
The Jazz Singer
(1927).
Indeed, Freud's "old joke" deals with racial
anxiety in much the same way as The Jazz Singer does: both
exploit the ontological blackness of African Americans to erase
the figurative blackness of the Jewish body. . . . Jack's choice
to sing jazz under the name of Jack Robin literally kills his
Jewish father--a personification of Old World customs and, thus,
Semitic blackness--and opens a space for himself as a white
American son. . . .
In his performance of blackface, Jolson actually performs
whiteness, masked as blackness. . . . blackface bolstered the
sense of racial privilege of both the white performers and the
white working-class audience by making their social difference
the object of common-sense whiteness instead of other more
discriminating signs. Early black minstrelsy, then, was a
discourse of whiteness.
Psychoanalysis: the White Man's Game of Superiority
Psychoanalysis has functioned to affirm white, masculine
heterosexuality as the pinnacle of civilized culture at a time
when peoples of European origin first recognize themselves as a
minority in the global population, when Western women are more
effectively demanding political agency, and when other forms of
socialization and family formation appear to subvert the
naturalness of the nuclear family. When these historical factors
become prominent, psychoanalysis appears as a discourse about
"a crisis in the male imperial identity", in which
race disappears and sex looms everywhere.
The Utility of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis can also help us to analyze the racist roots
of many cultural phenomenon like Freud's joke. Perhaps we can
appropriate the tools of psychoanalysis and use them in ways
that its creators and early practitioners never imagined.
Source: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture
& Society, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp.
53-62.
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 19 December 2011
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