I’ve been away from here and from most writing since the summer. The less said about July and August the better, but there was a lot of death and devastation all around. A dear friend’s father passed, but not before saying cruel things. A beloved pet went on to the Rainbow Bridge, but not before getting very, very sick. There was an ill-fated attempt to serve on a jury that I had no business being on, but didn’t realize it until I’d already been seated. And, then there was moving apartments. It’s not a summer I want to repeat. EVER.
Then, there was some plant medicine, some bike riding in Central Park when the weather allowed, and working my way back to making meaning with words. It’s been slow, this return. I notice when I’m feeling better because my creativity starts to percolate back up — whether that’s transforming a plain white-box of a NYC apartment into something beautiful or imagining the next book or simply writing here.
Reading always helps me return to myself.
In the last week, I’ve read a couple of titles that seem important for my next-next book on Combating the Far Right (CTFR). One is Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. Klein reads the audio narration and that’s how I first enjoyed the book. It’s worth your time and will be one of my comps for the CTFR book. I’ll have more to say more about Klein’s book in a post to follow. Hers debuted at #8 on the NYTimes bestseller list, so I figure she doesn’t need a boost from me.
The other book I’ve read recently and am still thinking about is The Psychosis of Whiteness by Kehinde Andrews. In it, Andrews takes on a range of topics, from the “Anti-Racism Industrial Complex” (many of the most popular in the genre, dragged) to “West Indian Slavery” (and the mind-bending fact of plantation weddings) and to the “Post-Racial Princess” (Meghan Markle). His main point is that whiteness is less an individual identity that carries with it a certain amount of “unconscious bias” (a field he finds deeply problematic) that can be reformed or improved, and more of a collective delusion.
Andrews, who is Black and British, is one of the very few Black people in higher education in the UK, where just 1% of professors are Black (in raw numbers: 160 out of 22,885). The subtitle of the book is “Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World,” suggests he, like many Black faculty in predominantly white institutions, has witnessed a lot of “insanity.”
So, about the “psychosis” in the title. Andrews is careful to mention that there are people in his life who have been diagnosed with the psychiatric disorder “psychosis,” and he doesn’t want to stigmatize anyone with a mental health diagnosis further. He’s eager to say that he’s using the term as a metaphor rather one than rooted in the clinical specifics of the DSM-5. He writes, “The metaphor of ‘psychosis’ shifts the discussion away from individual intentions and instead allows us to focus on how these ideas function on a societal level,” (p.25).
So, why use the term? He contends it’s an effective device that helps us pull back the analytical lens to a broader level. Following the sentence above, he continues:
“Society is based on White supremacy, and a key mechanism for maintaining our political and economic system is to convince the population that this is not in fact the case. Think of the fact that we never discuss global inequality in terms of White supremacy, even though it is clearly the most obvious feature of economic injustice. It cannot be coincidence that Black people live in the poorest parts of the world (so-called sub-Saharan Africa) and White people reside in the richest (the West). That is the purpose of the psychosis of Whiteness, to delude us into thinking there is nothing wrong, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary” (pp.25-6).
Yet, he is playing with the clinical definition in order to get us to notice things about whiteness and what it does in the world. He highlights the “delusional” aspects of Whiteness, how violently irrational it is.
“Most White people do not live near nor socialize with racialized minorities, and this segregation is both a cause and effect of the psychosis of Whiteness. This distance from the so-called ‘other’ allows hallucinations about the ‘ghetto’ to feed delusional thinking about issues of race. One of the most powerful of these hallucinations is that a bloodthirsty dark horde will overrun majority White nations to seek control and revenge. This is pure paranoia, a delirium that posits White people as latter-day victims, and a delusion that racism is an unfortunate element of the past” (p.27-8).
The key here, and throughout Andrews’ book, is his analysis of whiteness as collective delusion. Is there a cure for this delusion?
In an epilogue, “Out of the Rabbit Hole,” Andrews points to the way out. In this section he writes. “The only way to end the psychosis of Whiteness is to destroy the conditions that create it” (p.209).
The book works and I’m persuaded by his argument, grateful for what it then allows me to say. But there are places where an astute reader might want more. Andrews recaps the racist history of psychiatry, from Samuel Cartwright, who coined “drapetomania” in the 1800s to describe the “disease” of wanting to flee slavery, to the contemporary version, Protest Psychosis, in which schizophrenia became the go-to diagnosis of psychiatry almost two centuries later, as recounted by Jonathan Metzl. But for those of us interested in the psychoanalytic, it gestures toward these concepts rather than grapples with them.
In a companion podcast called Make It Plain, Kehinde Andrews sat down with the actor David Harewood for a conversation. Harewood, now 57, was in his early twenties and studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), when he had a psychotic break, which had everything to do with race. In the podcast episode, Andrews and Harewood talk past each other a bit, as if each is looking for a slightly different conversation than the one they’re having. Andrews wants to talk in the abstract about the harm of whiteness, while Harewood wants to talk about the very real and specific harm it has caused him and his psyche.
Harewood describes the intense pressure he was under as a Black actor in a theater world steeped in whiteness, which he explores in his documentary, “Psychosis and Me.” The psychic pressure he experienced as one of the only Black actors in a sea of white faces caused him tremendous pain. In the film, he talks about being cast in the lead of “Romeo and Juliet” next to a white actress. Then, the reviews devolved into notices about his “Black Romeo,” one even comparing him to (American boxer) Mike Tyson for his “thick neck” and “threatening demeanor.” Those kinds of comments, what today we might be tempted to call “microagressions,” are anything but “micro” and can do a number on your head.
In the book, Andrews tells an even more harrowing story about Harewood’s early acting experience. Cast again in the lead, Harewood played Sloane in Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Harewood was once again the only Black actor in the play, and the character of Mr. Sloane was described as a “scheming, murderous, sexual deviant,” in other words, the embodiment of a racist stereotype. Harewood watched as Black people in the audience of the play walked out in disgust each night. It was this experience, Andrews writes, that “tipped him into a psychotic break.”
Yet, there’s little space for this kind of psychic pain in Andrews’ book, which fair dues, he didn’t set out to address that. What it does address: our collective hallucination that whiteness is a real thing and our fealty to it is delusional, is a valuable contribution. In a couple of recent talks I’ve given, I have even used the expression, “whiteness is a collective psychosis.” Now, I can say that and cite Dr. Andrews (2023).