Otherness

00:00:01 Welcome to the Helix Center. I'm Ednner Sassin, the director of the center. Uh, in 1932, July of 1932, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Freud asking him about to quote him, "Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?" and Freud then wrote a pretty long paper answering that question.

00:00:33 I say that because our next round table on January 11th will be on why war. It will be multidisciplinary. So we will have neuroscientists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, anthropologists participating at that round table. Today's round table is on otherness and it was organized by Dr. Daniel Pausner and uh he will introduce the participants and then

00:01:04 proceed. Thank you. I have the honor of introducing Oh, you Yes. Yeah. Hi, I'm Jerrywitz. associate director at Helix and I do have the honor of um announcing the members of this prestigious board. They're going to discuss otherness. So, if you would raise your hand when I mention your name, please. First, Jessica Benjamin is

00:01:35 the best is best known as the author of the bonds of love from 1988 which brought a feminist intersubjective perspective into the psychoanalytic field and of beyond doer and done to an intersubjective view of thirdness which that's 2004 and that became the basis of her more recent book beyond doer and done to recognition theory intersubjectivity and a third from 2018. This book emphasizes the importance of acknowledgement in therapeutic interaction and in relation to trauma

00:02:07 including collective historical trauma. In addition, she is the author of like subjects, love objects and the shadow of the other. She has been one of the leaders in the relational movement in psycho psychoanalysis since its inception. She teaches and supervises at the New York University post-doal program of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as well as the Steven Mitchell Relational Studies Center of which she is a co-founder. Janice Edwards

00:02:41 is a clinical social worker. Thank you. She received her MSW from Howard University School of Social Work and her PhD from the National Catholic School of Social Work, Catholic University, Dr. School of Social Work. Since 2011, she was the principal investigator of a health resource services administr Administration, million-dollar grant training social work students in behavioral health and substance use disorders. Dr. Edwards maintains a private practice providing psychonamic

00:03:12 and psychoanalytic oriented treatment. Her experience spans inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy for children, adolescence, and adults. Prior to academia, she was direct clinical director of the emergency psychiatric response team at the FBI for 10 years addressing crisis and trauma treatment. She also served as a policy analyst in the office of the secretary of health and human services. Dr. has consulted with numerous agencies and has served on the boards of the Washington School of

00:03:42 Psychiatry and the Montgomery County Mental Health Association. As an accomplished author, she is president of the American Association for Psychoanalysis and Clinical Social Work and serves on the editorial board of clinical social work journal and psychoanalytic social work journal. Daniel Golden serves as editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is a training and supervising analyst on the faculty of the institution of contemporary psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and has written numerous articles for

00:04:12 psychoanalytic psychoanalytic dialogues psychoanalysis self and context and psychoanalytic inquiry. His book storytelling and psychoanalysis and in the everyday world will be published by rutledge this year. Daniel Golden with Daniel Pausner, one of our other panelists, create and host a popular psychoanalytic podcast, The Conversation. Historian, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist George McCari is the

00:04:43 director of the Dit Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, History, Policy, and the Arts, and a professor of psychiatry at Wild Cornell Medical College. For over two decades, he has worked to integrate humanistic scholarship into mind brain medicine and science. His latest book of fear and strangers, a history of xenophobia, excuse me, 2021, was named a New York Times editor's choice and a Bloomberg Book of the Year. His previous award-winning works include Soul

00:05:15 Machine, the invention of the modern mind from 2015 and Revolution in mind, the creation of psychoanalysis from 2008. Translated into 11 languages, his books have inspired eight symposia. His essays have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Baritin, and New York, the New York Times, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Daniel Pausner is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the icon school of medicine at Mount Si where he teaches and supervises psychiatry

00:05:46 residents in psychonamic therapy. His writing explores a range of topics through a multiple lens of psych the multiple lens of psychoanalysis inactive phenomenology which you may all recall we tal touched on a panel or two ago epistemic justice and infancy research. He has published work in the journal of autism and developmental disorders, psychoanalysis, self and context and psychoanalytic inquiry where he is an associate director. As noted, he co-leads the podcast the conversation

00:06:18 with Daniel Golden. Al Rosemarin is a psychoanalyst and writer. His research takes place at the intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory and explores the relations between the subjective and collective aspects of human life. He has written about how psychosocial constellations such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ideology, national nationality and history form our sense of self, our identifications and attachments. He has been interested in belonging as a

00:06:50 fundamental psychosocial drive. He is co-editor of the book series relational perspectives in psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of psychoanalytic dialogues. Aayal teaches at the white institute and the psychoanalytic institute of northern California. Originally from Israel Palestine, he now lives and works in New York. His upcoming book is titled belonging and its discontents. Jasper St. Bernard is a visiting assistant professor of history at roads

00:07:20 college. His academic work currently focuses on African-American philosophy, focusing primarily on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He recently completed his recently completed dissertation explored the anti-ynching work of Ida B. Wells Barnett. While Jasper's work focuses on the social political thought of black people during the lynching era, the topics he has written on have varied. For instance, in the Rutled Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition from 2022, he

00:07:51 co-wrote a chapter with Dr. Sean Gallagher, race and the implicit aspects of embodied interaction we touched on recently. Um along with inactive uh cognition um race and uh okay where where in that in that paper race and the implicit aspects of embodied social interaction they explored the role the body and early childhood have in the development of one's implicit biases. He also co-wrote an article with Dr. Verina Erllyn Bush Anderson, Just the Same as

00:08:22 Fascism for Us: The Black Panther Party's Anti-Fascist Thought and Practice from 2023, in which they examine the party's formulation of fascism and how that relates to discussions regarding the relation between America and fascism that grew around 2015 2016. Jasper most recently joined a group of international thinkers and practitioners in a book project Ubuntu interdisciplinary conversations across continents from 2023

00:08:52 and with that long list of accomplishments we'll take it away panel start um this is an interesting opportunity because we've already talked amongst each other but in a different format but being together and doing this in a roundt I think will will be both relevant to the topic uh and it'll be easy to get going because we already have a sense of where we were. Um there's obviously a political moment right now that's charged. I guess I want to make a just a meta note that we're

00:09:22 probably not going to want to get into uh discussions of takes on elections and and this kind of stuff. Now we're going to stick with with the topic of of otherness and uh and hear from people's, you know, particular um perspective and and expertise. I think uh as in the podcast, it might be worth remembering perhaps at the top that the notion of an other before we problematize it and turn it into something that can be used against uh is actually constituents

00:09:57 of of having subjectivity at all. you wouldn't really know uh that there was a reality at all if you didn't have a sense that it was something out there that could be experienced by people just like you. So I think that is a foundation uh that we can start from and we will look at developmental aspects of how the more problematic kinds of othering emerge and we're going to look at aspects of cultural uh permeation and how they uh contribute early in

00:10:29 development to uh patterns in in families and cultures of using uh othering as a strategy. And we're going to hear about uh something I think that also touches on this moment which is we're in a moment of frightening true xenophobia, a kind of crisis. And we have uh you know an expert uh to to help us sort of sort out what's unique about that in terms of otherness and othering. Uh, with that, uh, kind of want whoever

00:11:00 feels like it to just pick it up or I could tell them, you know, Yeah. You know, I I think I think there's Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I'm calling on Jessica. What? Oh. Oh, you said something. No, I just said you should call on people. Okay. You in other words, maybe you'd structure I like the Yeah. Yeah. Okay. spontaneous conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, no, just just for to start. Yeah.

00:11:30 Just Well, let me go ahead. I'll I'll just bring up something that's sort of autobiographical just to kind of uh be a little vulnerable here, I suppose. Um I think my first uh introduction to this sort of idea of otherness came from a very very early childhood. I'm an identical twin and that's a very very strange phenomenon, right? because I have a brother who I'm very close to, especially when I was little and there was a sense that we could have almost a spiritual connection with one another.

00:12:01 We knew each other's minds really well. There was a sense of recognition between the two of us, probably more between the two of us than from our parents in many ways. At the same time, when we went out into the world, suddenly we would collapse into this rather extreme category of twinness. And people would react to us in this, you know, way of, "Oh my god, you two are the same. What's it like? Do you have your same language? Oh, there's two of you, right?" And suddenly all that sort of sense of uh of selfness

00:12:32 that we developed with one another just would collapse. And so I was very early on sort of brought into this idea of the difference between one's identity in the world as a category and how one is. Yeah. Um, so that was I think my that was where that that was something I've been thinking about. I wrote a paper on it. Yeah. And then 2016 when Trump got elected, the otherness seemed to be I mean I see Trump's fascism I think is its nation

00:13:03 building around othering. Um so it it sort of Did you and your brother vote on different sides? No, we were the same side. Yes. Janice. Well, you know, let's go back to the Declaration of Independence because there we see the beginning of othering, you know, when they come out with we the people, we hold these truths to be self-evident. But yet the darker reality

00:13:34 is that our country is brutally and blatantly split between whiteness and darkness. Whiteness is the dominant society. So anybody that's outside of the dominant society is automatically the other. And so we African-Americans, we're others. And we became the containment from the time we were bought over here

00:14:09 for disavowed hate, envy, and prohibited sexual fantasies. And this was well before prime when Melanie was talking about projective identification etc and a language of splitting. So we have been otherred on this slave ship and it continues to be treated as the other

00:14:41 and because of who we are I think it undergurs not to get into politics the decisions that we have seen recently in our own. This is so interesting because in a way the problem of the overuse of the word other and it dilutes its meaning. But we just heard two very different discourses about the same term and and the question is like what is the link between the phenomenology of otherness the ontology

00:15:13 of otherness like it is constitutive as you say of subjectivity. It is embedded in the other mind problem. I do not know what's going on in your head. and yet it has this downstream effect of being incredibly important politically and and in terms of power. So, so that the the the the the struggle to bridge all that is I think you know incumbent on anyone who really wants to think hard about the problem.

00:15:44 So, so my response to that is then to take it take the next step which is to look at the contradiction between the two ways we use the other on the one side and when I was first writing about this I was using the term other all the time but I was using it to talk about the dilemma of having to recognize the other because you can't really have any subjectivity unless Yes, you're capable of recognizing the other. But then of

00:16:17 course, as you say, uh splitting comes along and you figure out, oh, I can be a subject by recognizing this other who is, let's say, like me. And denying recognition to the other who's not like me. And now that other that's not like me becomes the other in a different way, like the bad other and the good other, I guess you could say. And and so we're always like using the term to mean two radically different things. The other I

00:16:47 do recognize and the other I deny recognition too. And I think that where we do have to look at maybe where the two actually meet, which is that the other that I do recognize I recognize with great difficulty. I recognize with pain. I recognize with a certain kind of uh of sacrifice of omnipotence, you know, in Freudian terms or as I would put it, you know, the re the realization

00:17:18 that there is an other will that does not want the same thing as I want. You know, she doesn't want me to use this beautiful red crayon on the wall. And now we now this person that I, you know, go to for all my soothing and care. suddenly is mad at me or sees things very different than I do. Uh those you know that formative experience of of difference is then dependent on how that other reacts when you crayon on the wall

00:17:50 and so forth. So that problem of how we actually become able to recognize an other not in a forced way that undermines itself, right? that really has been such just in the power struggle and then real recognition. So from my point of view, it's that non-differentiating forced power struggle uh realization about the other that then turns into the hatred of whatever other

00:18:23 we we're going to pick on, but in particular obviously in America. Can can I make the philosophical move and like come I just have a question about how how a specific word is being tossed around just so I can track. Um so this idea of recognition um sorry this idea of recognition and what we mean what we take ourselves to mean when we say recognition because even in that example that was being given um I don't know that you you know sometimes

00:18:54 it is framed as if I am recognizing this other but I'm not recognizing this other but there there's something in that relationship that seems to um at least edge toward recognition. It's a different kind of recognition if if if um and the reason I asked that is because one of the things that I find interesting, you know, doing social political philosophy specifically here in America is that there seems to be um like a a preemptive moralizing that like

00:19:26 the individual knows that it is bad to misrecognize the which is why we build in excuses for the misrecognition. Does that make sense? So, but but then we obuscate that when we say, "Oh, I'm recognizing this one." And not I think you already have recognized this other. It's just there's a certain relationship that that is demanded of that kind of recognition. Does that make sense? Yeah. May maybe uh because I'm hearing something around the distinction between mutual recognition and alienated

00:19:56 recognition and the role of dissociation that that kicks in because I think we're where the hope is in certain familial or developmental styles there's mutual recognition and a tendency not to have to dissociate the things that you get ashamed about that you screw up in the course of everyday life that the family sort of says you know we're all flawed and we're all in this together and then you don't have to dissociate you don't have to build up a kind of sense that whatever's shameful about what I did is going to have to end up hopefully either working and making me belong to this

00:20:26 tough family that shamed me and I'll project that later and we can get to some of that stuff or uh you know I don't have to dissociate so much. I I can actually live in a lawful kind of world where uh I take responsibility for what I'm prone to want to dissociate myself from when I see something that is not like me. uh that's sort of how I you know see the dilemma. You could put it more simply just to say in the way that that granting your point Jasper

00:20:57 that the idea is that um initially of course in terms of social recognition children don't have social recognition when they're two years old and first struggling to recognize any other you know person as having uh this other mind and and possible power over them. So what what develops in a way in in one one kind of psychoanalytic way of thinking is this splitting where in effect the bad other that is you know

00:21:30 the receptacle the one that you project everything into for instance everything that you're not allowed to be. Uh but then how does that mesh with this idea that you're still recognizing them when you in other words you're saying I think rightly that when you deny recognition to somebody you've already recognized them and then you're you're you're you're categorizing them as what I look at it as sort of like the discarded and the dignified. you're categorizing them

00:22:02 as, you know, the one that is not dignified, but really you've already recognized them. Maybe we need to add a layer to all of this is that othering is also how collectives organize themselves, how groups of people organize themselves. This is us and this is you them. And so uh part of what goes on is that beyond how we develop to recognize each other as individuals, we are

00:22:32 interpolated into groups that tell us this is who we are and this is not. And that becomes I think as essential part of our psychology of our subjectivity as whatever encounters we have in the family and growing up. So if you think about that then we have a whole other I want to bring I was gonna ask Jasper actually to talk a little bit about that actually bring in George because I think that this question of

00:23:02 the two others the one that's fully recognized and the one that's semi-recognized or is really fits with your notion of the Zenos and the Barbaros that you wrote about in your book. Right. Right. So that that goes back to antiquity and and this misuse of the word xenos and xenophobia because actually that meant other city states in Greece and that's why as a 19th century term when it came along it really was about barbarians and antiquity but I was going to take it a slightly different direction because I think this is I I

00:23:34 think if you take the philosophy seriously we are always othering people it is constitutive of subjectivity and if you start with that you're not like so much on your high horse and you're also not so shamed about doing it. It's necessary and there's also kind of very clear ways that humans have figured out over time and it go this is pre-csychoanoalytic theory right conversation you know you figure out what's going on in the other person's head they become a subject now there's a kind of third space in between where

00:24:05 your subjectivity is shared that's I think you know thousands of years old and and one of the reasons it's important to say that is because when we immediately pathize this it also means that we can't really think about it clearly. It's shameful. Uh we can't think about the fact that communities do organize themselves like that. And that's not the problem. It's there's second order effects of how rigid are those communities. You know, what kind of community is that that you have to delve into, not that there's some kumbaya world where there's no us

00:24:38 and them. And so that's really what I tried to kind of develop and say like other anxiety is constitutive of of of of human interaction. There common ways of getting around it. Uh even if you've got a misperception like you know a lot of the sociologists who did research on racism and anti-immigrant sentiment would find someone who said like you know a Chinese man chased me through the woods. I thought he was going to kill me ever since then. I hated all the Chinese

00:25:08 and kind of like we know what to do about that too. If it's a misassociation, that's the problem of integration. That's when you bring that person together with that one association into a school where there are a lot of Chinese people and they play with them and they date with them and that's called habituation. That works also for a percentage of people. A bunch of us here are psychoanalysts. We actually have helped articulate the harder problem which is when there is projection the need to hate the need to hate the desire to hate not the mistake

00:25:39 of hating. And that's where you know psychoanalysts have really done great work in trying to help us think about this complicated othering that then takes on such monstrous historical kind of proportions. Can I just object to one thing you said right at the beginning? You can object to a number of them. Now you said you said that we're always othering. I think you're you're you're conflating differentiation and othering in your example where you then say I have to figure out what's in your mind and I'm going to converse with you. I'm not

00:26:11 othering you when I'm doing that. I understand that you're are an other and that's differentiation. Othering really is a negative term and I think we have to keep it as negative because otherwise we don't distinguish between the aggressive act of expelling someone from our us and I don't think Sartra would agree with you and no and and and differentiating other minds which is very difficult. Well, that's a very specific definition. Perhaps it's yours. But Sartra wouldn't

00:26:41 agree with you. And of course, all the French Sart didn't Sartra didn't connect to anybody. So, you know, the question of what he saw as differentiation is a whole other problem. He's the font of the theory of the other. It's a f it's a French development that happens with Sartra at the head of the the other that's the problem. That's the French other and then there's the Hegelian other. Yeah. Let me let me we'll come back to that. Do you think you think it sounds like We talk about there's differentiation in othering and I'm

00:27:11 speaking about othering from my cultural context and that is that we were assigned othering. Okay. And in our work I think we fail to understand the context of the other how do we explore it? Yeah. How do we unveil and really open up the othering between you and myself, the client, the diad and the therapeutic experience.

00:27:43 I sort of question though that really suggests because you have that very interesting paper uh on on cultural permeation and how it produces embodied uh learning in a sense to become racist essentially. Um and that um to some degree that offers I think one it's a it's a it's a dark view because in some ways it feels like oh boy if it's not just something we're learning we're picking up in every motion every

00:28:13 movement every tone of voice in every way the who is different and veilancing it for us that's a problem but there is a sense I thought you were talking a little bit I thought last night we were talking about toward the end of uh your paper about phenon and maybe you could tell us a little bit about it but there's also a sense that like maybe culture al permeation is a way out back into a picture of what belonging would look like if it's the only way in in some ways. Yeah. So that um and I'm going to piggyback on something you were just you were you were pointing to. So I I I kind of wandered the streets today and I was

00:28:46 listening to different people uh their readings on black skin white mask and something that just which is a book by Thomas Banan um that the the paper that was mentioned that I wrote um is largely about that fifth chapter but you just helped me understand something. So what um in that chapter and in the introduction, Fenan talks about how the the black man in that French colonial context has no onlogical resistance to the white man. Yeah. So it's the it's the dishonoring

00:29:16 as other as another subject that is at the root of or is is one of the roots of like that misalignment that happens in in interaction which is and and when you said like that's thrust upon like that lack of onlogical um resistance is really interesting to me like he is a subject. He knows that he's a subject but that subjecthood is not offered to him in the interaction. So like he's understood to be an object which is really which is really interesting. But

00:29:46 the the to speak to the one of the things we pointed to in the paper one of the things we tried to explore um cuz I'm not a psychoanalyst. I'm a philosopher but the one of the things we tried to figure out was um so in the fifth chapter um Fernand is narrativizing um this scene on the train and it's debated whether it's a narrative whether it's him and that we don't have to do that right now but there he's uh the the narrator is a black man who's on the train. He's cold. It's winter time. He's shivering. Um, a little a young white boy points to him and directs his mother, the young boy's

00:30:18 mother's attention to him and says, "Mom, look, a negro." And then all this unfolds in in the mind of the narrator about what that means. And so what we were trying to do is chase how a kid could know that early, right, that mom look right. And as and you know, one of the reasons I'm drawn to that chapter is I was I remember I was called uh uh I'm trying to figure out do I go I was called a by a little five little 5-year-old white boy in Wisconsin blonde hair. He point and and

00:30:49 I took something I knew his parents I took something from him that was going to harm him and he yelled that out in in frustration. How does a kid know that I'm that already? Right? That's the question. And so one of the toward the end of the paper and I'm going to cut after this, but we we it was it through some studies it suggested that that child is learning through the parents who to be afraid of how to respond. If the child is on an elevator with mom or dad and a black person enters the elevator and the

00:31:20 parent cinches up, that child realizes like, "Oh, wait a second. I'm in like they they sense the threat that the parent senses." And so all of the what Fenom calls the historical racial um cultural cultural schema like we have one in America and that is bestowed or bequeathed to children quite early and even if they they may not know who the other is at two but as soon as they know who the other is they know who the other is because they learn quite early

00:31:53 who the other is and that's why the boys said that we have to function with double consciousness to protect as a defense mechanism from the other that can hurt us from that look the sorean look that phenomenon I think is capturing you know I have a I have a Don I was just going to add one more thing so you you said that the the thing that psych psychoanalysts have done a good job of doing is getting to the why of like one or the the what

00:32:23 the need the necessity for this other right sometimes and and what's Now that I'm thinking about this paper that we wrote, I think that is the one thing the parent often don't explicitly share with the child. So the child learns who the other is but doesn't know the necessity of it yet. I have I have a slightly different thought about the psychoanalytic necessity of this and maybe it's not really psych a psychoanalytic idea because I think all of our psychoanalytic ideas about how

00:32:54 that happens have to do with sort of a deficit model of early childhood. We have shame we have parents that shamed us didn't recognize us. So we need to sort of get rid of that shame onto the other person. But I think there's something more that comes from the culture. Yeah, definitely. That's a mythos. Yeah, a mythology. It's a positive thing, right? And so that mother and we can look at this in terms of child development, right? So we tend to look at child develop primary interubjectivity way. But Trevor and some others have talked about secondary

00:33:24 interubjectivity, which is when the child and the mother jointly attend to objects in the world. So the world then becomes something that they learn about together, but it also becomes humanized. It's part of their relationship. And there was a famous study by MD where they had a mother look at an object with disgust. A day later the child reacted to that object which was a neutral object with disgust. Yeah. Now wait this goes and the next step in child development is joint reminiscence

00:33:57 where the mother and the child tell stories together. And one thing that they that's a that's a robust finding is that children remember their previous days experiences the most when they are taking their mother's experience that she added to the equation. So there's a way in which these narratives these this mythos this white supremacist mythos among white people that we aren't even really fully aware of. It's unconscious. it it's it's it's it's a it's a storyline and a

00:34:28 narrative that seeps into our bodies, right? We're already acting it out all the time is is is sort of the the implication of your paper. I am contending with this more and more as I'm growing aware of this is that this is in me and to some degree it's in my senus in my blood. One thing I would just before before I just respond I I think that's of helpful. I also think that if we think about it in a circular sense, right, that culture goes back to family goes back to culture. They're not really in opposition. And I think that you can see

00:34:59 that, you know, you know, George Leoff has that idea of the strict father morality culture. I don't want to get too much into politics, but these are very hierarchical kinds of uh family cultures that use we think alienated recognition, shaming as a kind of way of saying you only learn things because you've been taught that you're bad and that was bad. And bullying is not necessarily discouraged. It might be a way of actually saying this is how I belong to this particular culture. When I see a bully, I'm in the right place. I

00:35:29 should be doing that. And that's so uh reinforced you circularly you know through the culture and its creation and its productions back into the family and its and its style uh of of parenting. But for kind of gets into that when he talks about the development of the sense of reality and so then it becomes embedded intracychically. Yeah. and and Fernan pushes in his book, he pushes away from the individual to what he calls a sociogenic. And so I

00:36:01 think even any any attempt to make sense of this through a sort of individualized mind is a mistake in my opinion. I I just I don't think we'll capture it because even if you um were to um disabuse the singular mind of these notions culturally they're so we're so imshed in them culturally that one individual mind being liberated does not solve or or that was that was the section of the book that I found the most compelling

00:36:32 because what Fenan was basically saying is he was raised as though white it wasn't he didn't realize that there was something wrong with him until he entered the white culture, until he went to France. Yeah. And all of our theories focus on either we we have this idea of of of of mental illness, right? If it's it's the onus is on the individual or it's on the family. We were raised a certain way, etc., etc. But Fernan realizes that it's about his fittedness in the world. That was what was wrong. And so the world is as much a subject of critique as the

00:37:04 individual. It's essential that we be able to do that as psychoanalysts. Yeah. But the individual and collective processes are not necessarily always different. The reason to understand the individual process. For instance, what you just described in the research of how disgust is communicated. You have to do that on you can't you can't just talk about some generality. If you're going to look at people, you're looking at how individual psyches function and then you're trying to see how that interacts with or maybe is

00:37:35 parallel to the collective. And if you don't, otherwise you get rid of psychoanalysis altogether, which you know, might be okay for you, but not for me. Uh, you know, I I just think we need to reconceptualize. Yeah. But wait one second. So, so, so I want to take I want to point out that Fenon was a psychoanalyst and I want to point out that Fenon did understand collective processes through his psychoanalytic understanding. And when he for instance is talking in that book about how the the uh the black

00:38:06 bourgeoisi is trying to mimic whiteness or you know the put on the white mask and so forth. He's talking about something you can also identify in an individual. For instance, you can actually watch an individual try to avoid shame by talking in a certain way or doing something where they're conforming to the outer culture, which by the way is also true around things like bullying and being aggressive. Men, that is to say, boys,

00:38:36 have to mimic a certain kind of aggression in order to belong. So that that And then you still have the very interesting question of which boys really uh shall we say uh have absorbed that uh within themselves through their various relational experiences versus those who are just conforming to what everybody in school is doing. There's a big difference. And usually the kid that

00:39:07 becomes the bully is the one that got it in their family as well. You really can see that difference. So when you consider uh what we're talking about, we're still saying that there can be a tension within people between those who in a sense are fully organized around and committed to othering and those for whom that's a conflict or potentially conflict which I think is really politically important. Mhm. But maybe the psychoanalytic question to what Daniel said is is everything

00:39:39 mediated through personal experience in the family or there is some kind of social cultural thing that hovers that's what I just said about instance directly for example I come from a country that coat just called the most racist country in the world. I can hear can hear me hear me now? Yeah. Yeah. I just said I I come from a country that Tanahi Coats just called the most racist country in the world and I tend to agree with him which is Israel

00:40:13 but we did not have black people racism in Israel because there's no black people mostly or the ones that have been brought to Israel are Jews from Ethiopia and it's a whole history is different. There is another kind of racism. It's racism against Arabs, against Palestinians specifically. But when I came to the United States, which is many years ago now, I realized that I'm struggling with racism in the

00:40:44 American version, too. And I don't know how I got it cuz I don't know how I got it. But I think it it came to me. Welcome aboard. It came to me from the it came I think there's two things one to go to George's point I think collectivist are organized by othering or even more as said by scapegoating so you you create a line we are here you're

00:41:15 there and there's always a function of you're there and you're different and maybe you're less or you're my enemy or something like this so I grow up like this and in my version it's the Arabs okay but I come here and that that category is less prominent, but I think somewhere is sort of ontologically I'm looking for another category and that's what lands because that's what's in the air here. In other words, you're you're you're

00:41:45 putting blacks in the place of Arabs to some degree in your I realized that it goes into the same place somehow. So I'm saying it's not even nobody no mother held my hand in the elevator but it somehow is it's in the air. Mhm. Mhm. Can can I So there's this this was this extraordinary research that occurred. Some of it went into the authoritarian personality by Adorno. They wanted to understand anti-semitism after the Holocaust. They went out and they did tons and tons of research and they loo

00:42:16 they had scales for anti-semitism and it correlated very nicely with ethnationalism like we're pure, the Jews are bad. Okay. But then they started to get inklings that these people who hated the Jews might hate some other people too. So they they widened the scope and it turns out the people who hate the Jews are very happy hating blacks. They're very happy at that time hating Turks, hating Mexicans. And so it it made their them completely reorient their project. Now it couldn't be a project just about anti-semitism because

00:42:47 that was a variable, not the constant. The constant they called the authoritarian personality. But I really like the term xenophobia because it reverses the lens from us talking about the maligned group to what's going on in the people who do this, right? All these words that we have, they're so important because they tell us who needs to be protected. You know, uh, Islamophobia, homophobia, uh, anti-black racism, uh, add to the list, right? They all name the group that's being otherred. They do not

00:43:18 reverse the lens. And xenophobia does. It says, "Wait a minute. These people might actually be comfortable hating a lot of people, and we have to understand what's going on with them." Just a second point I wanted to make really quickly, and I don't have that much to say about it, but there is an amazing archive at the institute that I run. Uh it's it's from the folks who were sent over after 1945 and what was called the Dennazification Project. the denazification project. This was David Levy and a bunch of other people had to figure out who was in the community of

00:43:49 Nazis and unredeemable, who was semi-redeemable, who was like a quarter redeemable, and who was just like going along because they needed the job. Cuz that's what we didn't do in Iraq, right? That's what we didn't do in Iraq. And so they wanted to try to not simply, you know, fire the whole German people, which wasn't really. And so they had to try to come up with questions about what you're wrestling with. How much did the culture create and how much was internally motivated in people who marched along

00:44:21 with the Nazis? And it's still a really tough question because to Jessica's point, it's really hard to infer from individual to collective. We have to do it. It's politically very important, but if you give me something that's really solid, I'm going to be surprised because I don't know anything that's really solid. It's a huge inference. We don't know how to think of a denominator of collectives. We have a lot of theories. Sartra had a theory. Uh, you know, but the the the there is a lot of difficulty. We have group psychology has a theory. There's Beyond. There's other

00:44:53 people like that. It's still really hard to do, I would argue. I want Oh, sorry. I was struggling with Hegel's phenomenology. Oh yeah. And you know when he talks about the spirit Mhm. and I'm kind of thinking now about how he sees the other from the view of exploitation as a resource. So when you were talking about

00:45:24 from your perspective, I'm thinking, oh, okay. Maybe this gives some meaning to what we're seeing, what we're seeing right now. And I don't know how we get away from that because exploitation seems to undergard all this. You're making an incredibly important point and this happened with Sartra. He had this theory of othering and Bowvoir really came along and said there's no history in your theory and that means there's no power. There's no sense of

00:45:55 history. And so they change and he wrote this great book about the position of the Jews in France. But that's such a big problem. How do you integrate power and history in a way that helps us understand in a richer way the ex the value of having another, right? Because I the way I think about it is there's this thing that happens all the time and I think of it as ontological and and if you're relatively loose um in terms of your own capacities to communicate with others it moves back

00:46:28 and forth. It's not locked in the way Fenan felt it was locked in. Then there are these very very toxic situations very destructive situations that have led to genocides where it locks in. And how does that happen? What's the key element? And we could go back to family and that's what some people do and the authoritarian personality goes back to family. Uh but is it also culture and then yeah we need philosophers and we need political theorists to help us. Didn't only believe in the family. Remember that he believed that capitalism was also a you know force.

00:47:01 That's the other of this conversation so far in a way is is political economy is just bringing up the issue of exploitation the issue of capitalism. I think that's right. There's somebody who did try to integrate the individual and the social I think in an interesting way and that's Pierre Berdu uh who was a contemporary phenons I believe and he also spent a lot of time in Algeria and he had this concept of the habitus yeah and the field I'm sure I'm sure you you some of you know about this

00:47:31 the basic idea habitus is it's like it's like a series of habits right but it connects always to a field and it could be an academic field a family field or the political field and there are those who are brought into those fields in a very sort of natural way. They're educated into them and they're their ser their set of habits or dispositions in the world match perfectly with the structures of society. That would be white people in America, right? And then there are those

00:48:01 whose habitus don't match. They are they don't have access to that kind of education. They're brought up in different worlds and there's this what he refers to as social symbolic violence. But you notice that you introduced Bourjier just at the moment where I said the word capitalism. Picking up on what Janice said, talking about exploitation, you move over to somebody who is deliberately boring trying to find uh another social theory where he can get away from that painful issue of exploitation.

00:48:32 Well, he talks about exploitation. Yeah. But but in how does he talk how does he talk about it though? But not not until he doesn't talk. But it seemed like you were maybe wanting to introduce it. Yeah. This idea that that there's in the background of all of this uh some system, right? It's a it's a it's an economic system to some degree that can be seen as uh the super orordinate aspect of what drives uh people to commit. You were saying that even last night. Why would people commit

00:49:02 to an identity? What what do they get for it? Well, some sense that they might rise up in this capitalist system. Uh so the question I would ask like it it it may be difficult to infer from the individual to the culture but I think the question that I would rather ask is like is turn the the inference the other direction like and see these individuals as symptoms of a culture. So, like something you said made me think of, you know, James Baldwin is talking about when he grows up, when he was growing

00:49:33 up, he would watch the cowboy movies and he'd root for the a certain figure and then as he got older, he realized like, oh, wait, I'm I'm the other. I'm not him. I'm the other, right? So like but but I think about all the other little boys who watch like it's just embedded in our culture to see the relation a certain way and and exploitation at the root. I just wonder sometimes or the suspicion paranoia I don't know that I have is

00:50:04 like I don't know that we have the courage to admit certain core values about our culture. So when they pop up in an individual we treat them as some sort of aberration and they are They may not be an aberration at all. They may be a symptom to and that's centuries long that's trying to tell us something about how plagued our culture is when it when it comes to the other. That's called yes healthy paranoia. But you could the thing is that that also it even you know there's no reason

00:50:35 really to only go from one direction. You keep going back and forth between the directions I think and you as you tack back and forth you get a richer picture but you don't have to exclude anything. The thing about the about going from the cultural direction I think is still that that what is most um denied in many ways in our society in America is the fact of exploitation. Uh racism is understood uh in many ways as

00:51:07 if it were inequality. So it's not just inequality. Exploitation is not simply inequality. Exploitation is where the inequality is produced because somebody is taking something away from somebody else. Power as you say. So power h the history of of power the history of people taking something away from other people seems to go all the way back. But uh it changes at a certain point, right? And it it changed in the modern era in terms

00:51:38 of col colonial power and it changed therefore the nature of slavery and uh slavery had existed before. So now we have this other kind of slavery and the thing is that the the powers that shall we say ruled our society really didn't want to give up slavery when slavery ended. not just those who had been enslavers but also those in the north who decided to support them because they really didn't

00:52:08 want their wage slaves to be doing any better uh than they were and they and reconstruction threatened that. So we know we have that history whereby reconstruction was suppressed by people in the north supporting the southerners who re introduced uh you know this the enslavement you know without the uh literal bondage. So given all of that our problem I think is that

00:52:39 something is also denied not only the dignity of the other not only the equality of the other what's denied is in the self and see I don't think there is any uh problem in in I don't think you need the word xenophobia because you got the word racism but you the word racism is I mean it's a general word but the problem is when racism is is divorced forced from its particular historical roots here which have everything to do with exploitation and

00:53:11 economic power and that's a way to disenfranchise people and as we know to split people up so that they can't uh revolt together and and so I think that there's this really big issue around what is denied is in the self what isn't acknowledged is the exploitative self the predatory self if we're going to talk about you know the self and others if the self were the white you know what's denied is that predation that exploitation and that having power

00:53:43 in the entire society it's not only I want to exploit you know these few workers and get wealth I want to make sure that I protect my wealth by exploiting everybody and now I I just I'm sorry you go ahead um the okay I just want just just to be clear what I'm denying then in the self psychologically isn't just that I have hatred of the other. I'm also denying that I I have hatred of the other combined with the desire to exploit and use.

00:54:13 No, no, I understand. I think what's in the way, what's often in the way in this collective way. Um, and and this is something you just mentioned. There's a lot of mythology that is used to help in that denial. So like I think a lot of the other Rers I just maybe made that word up but a lot of the other Rers are a they're they don't even have to grapple with themselves because the mythos allows them not to. So the one of the things I work on, right, IDB Wells during the in in her book in 1895, The

00:54:45 Red Record, when she's trying to make sense of of the the just brutal destruction of black men, women, and children, she in the first chapter, she sort of works through the system of rationality that has been that's at the root of lynching. And and she says it goes through three phases. And so really fast, the first phase was the the whisper of of of negro insurrection. And so then in order to stop that, people justify going into cities and towns and destroying as many black lives as possible because there was whispers of

00:55:15 an insurrection. So her what the point that she makes is really interesting is that there's a rhythm. An excuse would come and then no evidence for the excuse would follow and so a new excuse was needed. Right? So then the second excuse was oh we don't want to be dominated by black people. This is during the reconstruction era. Um, and so like the as the ballot was being utilized and and political positions were being obtained, the this idea that this is a white man's government, her words are just like that was the the next rationale. Then once

00:55:46 reconstruction was all but destroyed like in its effect, there was a new excuse that was needed. And she says the excuse that was needed was the introduction of the myth of the black male rapist. And she says that's the most effective. And part of why it was the most effective is because it's less concrete than the other two. Like you they're always all around like the allegedly like but you're saying that the immigrants were No. No. So, so what so what I'm saying when you say this that that the the the self that this I this um inability to

00:56:17 misidentify and you know she Wells dies in you know 1930 so like I I think there have been more excuses that have been built on top but that sort of rhythm between excuse and that like rationale I think that's what keeps the self from even having to deal with who they really are and the excuses come they they preempt any introspection and the other And you can continue to other because you have good reasons to other and then you can hide um behind those. But yet the other is desire

00:56:50 and owning that desire is really challenging. People don't want to the the desire to be with Oh, okay. Well, there's both. The desire to rape that is just the Well, the desire to rape, the desire to have Yeah. you know, the desire to be like, you know, oh, look at they go tanning and they want to get as dark as me and then but it's about desire too.

00:57:21 Yeah. Well, those desires you're and that desire internally is also hated that they have that desire once you start probing and peeling that onion and it comes out well it connect and gets projected into exactly that rape kind of claim you mean? Exactly. Can I just build on this point? I want to expand it past America because I think it's a really really um what past the American story, right? that that my argument is that the second wave of globalization which starts with

00:57:53 the conquest of the new world but really kicks up uh you know in the 19th century where the west goes out to dominate the world makes for ultimately a crisis where you have to name what's happening and and so xenophobia becomes the name. Racial science is a very specific name about racism. It doesn't cover certain things, but that's a good one, too. And then, you know, that is got layers of mythology in each place. So, there's layers of mythology about the Chinese,

00:58:25 there's layers of mythology about the Arabs, the there's layers of mythology and and the classic cases are um the Arab world, Mississippi, and uh the Asian world. And those are like every test case, test case, test case. So a and you know there is a way that that and you see the exploitative option of going to India as a person who hasn't made any money and has nothing really

00:58:56 happening in the British Isles and becoming a minor king. You know there is the exploitative option. So exploitation to your point becomes a crisis because at some point liberals and socialists start to realize how monstrous this is. You know, when you have the free Congo, a genocide of 10 million people, uh, people start to wake up. They wake up up to a point. Here's what here's what I think happens, right? Okay. I had an interesting

00:59:26 conversation. Yeah. He said, "Start to I have an interesting interesting anecdote. My son asked me fairly recently. He said, "Well, if you were born in the South, do you think you'd be a slaveholder?" And I said, "Oh my god." Well, I I mean, that kind of boggles the mind. I can't really imagine being another person, etc. But then it got me thinking and I thought, what if I was born into a family of slaveholders and all of my interests were around that institution? In order to feel good about myself, in order to have integrity, I would have to

00:59:57 really believe a myth of white superiority. Yes, sure. I would have to believe it. And that would support your wealth. And that would support my wealth. So there is the exploitative aspect of it, but there's also the mythos. Yeah. that I think comes into play and I think that mythos ends up becoming the more important aspect and I think little by little it enters into all of our storylines about the culture and it no we no long we can say oh yeah I don't believe that everybody's equal right but we still have all the stories and we it's still in our bloodstream in a way

01:00:30 yeah and I I don't know what to do about this but you you started us here like by pointing to the Declaration of Indep by by by pointing us to the Declaration of Independence, right? Like it at that moment when that is being penned, this brutal institution of enslavement is at it's happening and one of the primary participants is the individual penning this very document. So that so built into the framework is this mythological tension where already

01:01:01 one is trying to I mean these very lofty ideals about who the we are. I mean, it was clear to him. He doesn't write it even in a footnote, but it's clear to him who the Wii is not, right? And and so like like I think if if it wasn't women either, didn't you? No. Sure. I mean, we I I didn't say who not was the Wii, but the Wii. We know we know he knew who the Wii wasn't, right? And so he knows who he means. And so like built into the fabric of this is this sort of attempt to justify one's

01:01:32 position. Um, and and I don't know what we do with like the guilt that that seems to suggest, but like we see that at play and it just seems like the unfolding since then has been this long story of well, we're not really that bad because or you know, but if they wouldn't have done and and you know these long this long story justification. Yeah. When I was a kid in fourth grade in Washington DC, they started integrating the schools because of Brown versus uh state of Kansas. And so what happened

01:02:03 was that one day we ca we come to school and the kids in the playground in my white school are talking about how the kids from the black schools are going to come over and beat us up. Oh Lord. Now I have been raised to be as anti-racist as you could be raised to be as a white person uh in Washington DC at that time. Uh, and I was part of a community that was, you know, supposedly anti-racist and I had black friends when

01:02:34 I went to the school before I went to this public school, right? And didn't think anything about it. And and I actually found myself getting scared and thinking, what if this were true? And it was one of those weird experiences of being totally split in the way that you're talking about, al where something is entering into you culturally at the same time that cultural permeation again. We're back. Exactly. But and and so I so I go home and I go to my mother. She's in her office uh and I you know I with my friends and uh we

01:03:07 we tell her about this and she's just like what are you talking about? And she reminds me that of the you know the little kids that I play with uh Charles and Raymond and so forth. And you know I kind of get myself back together again and I feel this terrible shame like how could I think this? I not only have a relationship with Charles and Raymond, I have a relationship with their parents. And uh it's true that they work there with along with my mother, but you know, uh I I'm driving around with their dad in the Jeep all the time,

01:03:39 you know, and here I am thinking this. So this is the most shameful experience practically, you know, of my of that early part of my life. Uh and you feel as though you are being interpolated. You are. So when you see how that how that happens, you see like I could see I mean I knew these other kids by the way were I knew actually who they were and that they were very different very different from me and very much not getting that message from their parents that I got. So then

01:04:12 what happens I think is you become this unwilling conscript this you know purveyor of something that you feel is alienating you from yourself you don't recognize yourself as the person you thought you were and that so talking about guilt and shame I think that's been in my experience subsequent you know being in the civil rights movement watching how people white people react acted. What did I see? I saw, you know, adult

01:04:44 versions of this and I saw people feeling tremendous guilt and shame around othering and not being able to talk about the fact that this is something that inevitably goes on in a society like ours and that divesting ourselves from that is sure it's a moral obligation, but you can't be moralizing about it. So most of my work has this subtext about how do we get beyond moralizing around this right and I think the biggest problem is in many ways as I

01:05:16 said the thing you have to acknowledge about the self it's not really the thing about the other it's what you have it's you know it's what you're saying about the self uh yourself who am I and acknowledging hatred But also acknowledging that desire as you say that whole ambiguity but are we saying that othering is kind of an instinct that lives between individuals and societies and organizes

01:05:49 but I don't think this was just othering I think this had to do with the idea that um also it wasn't just that they were other remember that it was exactly what Jasper was talking about it's what just makes me want to cry what Ida Wells was talking about. She's talking about the fact that people rationalize something that is so horrible and then you as a child are not necessarily fully on board with

01:06:22 this, even if you don't have parents like mine. Like I watched this exNazi who I was tutoring English to in Germany. I watched him when his nine-year-old son came in and said he'd learned about the genocide of the Indians. Not that he used that word, God forbid, right? Because dad dad was in the Navy during World War II, you know, German Navy, tried to pretend he had never been a Nazi. But anyway, dad, what about the Indians? What do we what did what do people do to the Indians? Dad gets all flumxed.

01:06:53 This nine-year-old knows this is not right. So there's something about how we are really internally destroyed in some way in our own sense of self by this that I feel also has to be brought out. But I think we can distinguish between that child for instance, let's just pretend, and the capacity to use education to break down a rationalization, right? I mean, in a

01:07:24 way, the postwar effort in Hollywood and in the curriculums has been an attempt to say we can cognitively win this battle. we can actually teach people about what happened with genocide, what happened with slavery, and we'll change the way they think. And I think that's been pretty successful in some ways. The tougher problem is the people who want to hate. They don't care about your DEI lessons. They won't go. They're not interested. They're deeply committed. So

01:07:55 I think we have to distinguish the little, you know, the children who can, you know, watch Birth of a Nation and ask their parents about it and then realize that's a crazy racist film and the people who like it. Yeah. But you have, if you had been around when I was, you you'd have seen that people who were critical and had the cognitive change still felt overcome and overwhelmed by the moral responsibility and by the fact that they didn't know how they were going to process that emotionally. And that is a

01:08:26 really big problem for people today because I don't think we're just dealing with the the the people who want to hate or learn to be bullies. I think part of the the distortion that we're experiencing in our society right now is people who are trying to be good. But you think there are people who want to hate. Yeah. You know what Adorno said? He said they fall in hate. It's a great phrase like the way we fall in love. That's it now. But where they started they're seduced into hate.

01:08:58 Well, that that I think we're caught talking about many different things so we can get confused. But that too, maybe they're in a state of fear. I see that sounds or non-belonging. I mean, I mean, this is the thing. We can we can make a long laundry list of what they are. We have to try to think laundry list. I was arguing psycho analytically that fear precedes hate. You talked about in your in your book in your book on Lynch and Ida Wells. Ida B. Wells. Ida B. Well, sorry. All are one of the founders of my

01:09:29 sorority. Really? Really? I did well. Many apologies. I'm sorry. I did it. What is the B actually in any event? I don't remember what the B is a B. Well, the people that hate the 5-year-old that talked to you that way. I think they are performing superiority. Yeah. I think it's a way to it it it be and I think and I think that performance has a function, right? So like so Fernan is talking about this

01:10:00 little kid on the train. And I mentioned a little kid that I had that interaction with. Ida B. Wells mentions a little kid um where coming from a lynching. I think they were 8 years old. A little girl 8 years old. And she was like, "Hey mommy, we lynched that n-word last night, didn't we?" So like that like they what do these kids have in common? I don't think it's much different than the officer who murdered Mike Brown and when trying when asked why he did it. Oh, he was swelling up and his eyes turned red and he like like this demon language and

01:10:30 the shoot the the officer who shot Laquan McDonald. Like I think they're they're channeling the same thing the children are channeling. And it seems to me this is a suspicion that their identity is deeply rooted in that hate. like I need to in order to belong. That is a group that I want to join in in hating. I need to fit in here. Oh, we don't like them. Oh, they're monsters. Oh, they're demons. Okay. Like, I'm going to buy in and espouse that narrative so that I can be a part of the

01:11:01 community. It may actually be it may be rooted in this longing that we all have to be a part of a of a be a member in a group. And if this is the terms to be, if this is the terms of membership, then I will apply. And then when I'm confronted with the shame of feeling these ways, I will narrativize my way out of it. Oh, my grandfather, my uncle, oh the the right like well, I'll find a way out. And even

01:11:31 that escape hatch is rooted in identity formation. It seems interestingly enough there's been some studies about uh split with split brain patients where they can sort of give one image like a naked person to the right brain where the brains are split and the left hemisphere will make up a story about what what's going on that has nothing to do with the reality. Well, I think that happens emotionally. If you're in a state of rage and hate, maybe you put together a story of superiority or you put together a myth. Yeah. And that myth enters into the

01:12:03 culture and sinks down into us and sediments into us. I think yeah a problem is the condition perhaps condition of belonging and then when there are certain conditions of belonging then we all have to succumb to them. We all have to accept them if we want to belong. Right? So I I I really keep thinking it's more in how collectives are organized and what are the condition that they put on us to be part of them that hate becomes a feature.

01:12:34 I don't know if individuals want to hate but I think individual wants to be don't to belong and then belonging requires hate. Yeah. They fear ostracism if they don't perform the hate and the superiority and and and I think but I think then there's this next step which was that you know when uh for instance with the Germans when they heard that the Russians were coming now the Russians were in fact quite violent with with the Germans but at the

01:13:06 same time even before they got there and were violent the Germans were telling these stories about what the Russians were going to do to them, which was of course what the Germans did to the Russians, right? I mean, so there were this was this is a big thing in the postw World War II discussion there. I think I think people I think that projective back and forth that do or done to relation that you get hooked into once you're in that relation to another group or to another entity, let's say. Uh you you keep swinging back

01:13:37 and forth. You might be thinking, "One moment, I did this to them, but then I did it because they did it to me and so on and so forth." So, the real thing is that what you can't get out of is the idea that somebody's going to have to do something to somebody because we live in a world where of doer and done to. And you're raised in this world of doer and done to where there's no else that you do, right? It's always about power. So to a large extent what happens I think for people who started out in that exploitative world

01:14:09 is they're in that do or done to world they believe they're making an exception for their personal life although they usually aren't. and and then uh as a result there's no other possibility uh than that those who we are oppressing are going to reverse the relationship and do it to us. There's no other possibility than that the enslaved people will rise up and they will kill us and they will do to us. And I think

01:14:39 that that has to do we we really that is a collective mentality. It's not I mean it exists in individuals as well but I think it becomes a collective mentality people can the Israeli people are functioning for instance in this belief that there is nothing else to do because if they don't do this the Arabs will come and do it back to them and there's no possibility for them to acknowledge or even perceive when somebody comes to them in peace they they they don't

01:15:12 believe it. Mhm. Can I bring you keep bringing up this point and I think it's worth developing a little bit. So what constitutes different kinds of communities, right? And you're saying that it's important to think about what I call the border conditions like what's in and what's out. Everyone has those. How porous are they? How rigid are they? How are they constructed? they could be constructed in relatively less or you know more or less uh to what Carl Schmidt said the German theorist hate the people who are outside or just

01:15:43 really think of them as different and then how unbelievably demanding uh is it once you get inside the collective right so there are ways of thinking about the border conditions and then how restrictive the conditions are inside the community the reason I I I feel like I know about this is because I studied psychoanalysis and the history of psychoanalysis is a beautiful little forum to understand how different communities build themselves around these things and then get broken because of hatred. But

01:16:16 that's why I want to say this is a dangerous thing I'm about to say here, but I want to say something for the Declaration of Independence. So you look at me, right? Well, you you brought it up. you brought it up and I want to say that there is something about the that double consciousness of Thomas Jefferson and then Ben Franklin edited that line, you know, so them going like this is who we think we are and then everyone going like what are you talking about? That's not who that still is

01:16:48 the fantasy that it creates a myth. Let's talk about myths that are not just negative of that's who we are which maybe has a virtuous uh effect which is then everyone goes like wait a minute what about women what about the people who are enslaved and and so you know when I I have this problem when I I I talk about like John Lock and tolerance and stuff like that and people say well John Lock you know owned shares in in in a slave center I'm like yes he did and that's why we also have to say that but we also have to say that putting forward

01:17:19 a model of a community that's tolerant was incredibly critical because that was an ideal that he couldn't manage. He wanted to be tolerant to almost nobody. You know, Catholics were out, Quakers were out, black people were definitely out. But he said his double consciousness in this case was no, no, no, I'm tolerant. I'm not going to do this intersect this intersectarian war between Christians. We accept everybody except those those and those. And that then becomes a thing.

01:17:52 It becomes not just like a a a uh theory but a myth. And then people start to go like but wait what about the Quakers? Well, what about the And I feel like that's the way history moves. And that if you um you know uh try to think about those things it gives you a little bit more hope that incremental steps that even though they're ironic like Freud and women like he couldn't quite gas he couldn't do it but you know he took some steps and then people take the ball from there and that's I think how you know

01:18:23 one can maintain a progressive belief in history despite all of the horrors. Okay. So I just want to piggy back on that the dangerous thing you just said. What I want to preface it this push back with what you said was beautiful. I've love however or but I don't know the word. I I'm not negating. Yeah. Okay. And and um what is interesting to me is that I sometimes suspect that the that aspiration

01:18:54 that fantasy is a way to hide very brutal behavior. I agree. Right. So like I'm going to put it's it's pure meth. I don't just ideology and the reason don't forget that they were trying to rationalize why they're they're getting rid of the king. No. So but they did have that other thing. Here's one. Unfortunately, this is still critical discussion, but I think we're we're getting a signal that we're going to have to wrap it up. Unfortunately. Uh yeah, time flies.

01:19:26 This is like last night. Oh, no. I was I was just going to say like along they these individuals have been pushed in in in concrete reality. One of the things that's really interesting, you know, the the the black thinkers that I that I study, they're constantly holding up the Declaration of Independence like, "Didn't you say this? Didn't you say this? Didn't you say this?" And it's not met with, "Oh, yeah, I did." That's not the reaction. It's often violence and oppression and furthering, like beating down. So I I

01:19:56 just wonder if sometimes aspiration is a way of hiding. It's another way of hiding. Yeah. I hate to end on that dark note. I think it's a validly dark right in the beginning you no it was the the the statement in the beginning was right which is who did they mean by we? They only meant themselves and they only were trying to justify their own political revolution. The only the the only mitigating thing I could say about that which I think we should actually bear in mind is that

01:20:28 going against absolute monarchy required a certain kind of courage. So some of the people who were willing to go against absolute monarchy the people around Tom Payne and the people back in England like for instance Mary Walstonecraft who were affected by this and then writes the declaration of the rights of women. The the fact the fact is that attacking absolute monarchy was a prerequisite for even beginning to attack the idea that some that there was

01:20:58 infinite exploitation was permitted. So it is ambiguous. So let's let's let's stop there and we're going to have a little time for question from the audience. How does uh we depressed you? Do we pass a micro Ed? Do we I think you walk up to that microphone. Okay, if you have a a question for us. Early on, I I had this question. Uh, in my experience, I I worked in a in a helper helping profession. And you

01:21:31 know what? There were some there were a few haters there, not racial haters, but haters. talking to the mic a little bit more a little bit and but I think it benefited me and it happened you know after another kind of profession that I had here the only explicit uh reference to improving things in other words maybe more like the family

01:22:01 where I grew up in where you know it it was all of a particular ethnology, right? My children have have an ethnology, not in every case, but you know, they're married to someone who's different, right? Or when I went to school, I you know, had an interest and made friends and, you know, girlfriends and things like that, right? Who were very who were very different.

01:22:31 My parents never my my parents never brought up any of that. Mhm. But one thing was mentioned that was explicit. You mentioned about I I now I have a difficult with memory. Um the Quakers and that is some the one specific you know mention of you know putting pe helping people get on the right side. Yeah. And I'm I'm kind of disappointed with that.

01:23:03 It was very it was very good about the problem. Yeah. It's the solution. Yeah. That interests me that I give greater value to. I I just have one tiny maybe it sounds cynical but appreciate that. It's a very I I felt as well part of me would like to extend the conversation exactly that direction. I anecdotally have an I guess information about one of the Quaker schools and the frustration within their community about the capitalization and

01:23:35 the sense that they are no no longer uh being able to sustain even that Quaker friends type of uh egalitarian uh ethos and and and it's it's a it's a it's a open wound for for for even that community that they they can't fight against the competitive exploitative if you will meritocratic kind of laterization of even their community. But can I add to that? I I I'm sorry if

01:24:06 it didn't come through. So let me say what I think are actually really important points. Over the last half century, there have been a lot of victories and they've come about very consciously about how to um move more people into the center through a more poorest boundary in our community. And one of those is desegregation. That's what desegregation has a psychological quality to it. If you're afraid, habituate. It's behaviorism basically. put those people

01:24:38 together and and does that work? Yes, it works for a substantial part of the population. The cognitive aspect, we're not making birth of the nation so much anymore, right? You can crit criticize what we're fed in our cultural diet and now there's a whole another ecosystem that's really really racist. But you could say for the past 50 years it's been a project of of of uh considering the other as us, right? and how successful it's been. We can we can all

01:25:10 agree it hasn't been totally successful obviously but but these are efforts that have huge amounts of value and that we all should remember as they're under attack and do we consider the value in terms also that people feel less exploited right because that would be again at issue is it a more egalitarian direction that we're picking up with the sense that the norms of what you can say or can't say or a movie you can and can't See, it's interesting. We're not making Birth of a Nation anymore, but we're

01:25:42 making um Driving Miss Daisy. We're making Crash. We're making Green Books. So, I wonder if the No. No. So, I wonder if the thing that we're making is this this grappling with what it meant. And like the the this this fight over whether or not we're going to be like the most honest about who we are. Like, that seems to be what's lining up the best pictures of like the last 20 years or or so. We're also we're talking about Okay. Sorry. Oh, no. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe.

01:26:12 Well, I mean, we're also talking about mainstream media and there's been a big shift into digital culture and I think digital culture is a sea change and it has been a race racialized sea change and I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I think one is when we talk in a conversation, we're talking about various things, but we're also talking to each other and we're ma and there's the text and the subtext. We're managing the relationship underneath it all. When we're online, we're anonymous

01:26:43 and we're asynchronous. And so we have the illusion that we're just presenting an idea or ourselves. But in truth, we still are people who want to connect. And we do that in a different way. I think we do that by signaling our belonging to a group, right? When I read a tweet, I'm always thinking, what is this person really signaling beneath that? That's sort of an inevitable part of it. There's a second aspect, too, which I think is maybe even more important. There's this illusion that digital culture is radically democratic.

01:27:15 But under beneath the curtain, it's tech oligarchic and technocratic under the hood. And these algorithms what they do is they they absorb our preferences and feed them back to us more extreme. So it's like we don't get the feedback that brings about a moral third as Jessica puts it. What we do is we have an identificatory hall of mirrors where these identifications are are consolidated and angry. You're you want to step up to the mic?

01:27:46 Uh I have an anecdote. years ago, I uh researched a book in Haiti. And um Haiti, as you likely know, is the only successful slavery vault in human history. And I've worked internationally and I've also worked in Israel, but Haiti is the most racist country I have ever been in. There are 48 different kinds of black

01:28:17 and white color mix. Everybody knows what they are. And I had an experience. Um I shared a house in the Capitol with a woman who was doing her dissertation research. She in anthropology and a white New Yorker. And in her research village there was a child an infant dying of advanced tuberculosis and Wilma adopted this child cure had

01:28:49 gave it proper medical care and it's being raised Ta was being raised in the capitol as an upper class child with an educated woman mother and uh you know English lessons on Saturday mornings the best kindergarten in the capitol and I took T a birthday party and uh they were three year olds and this little boy came up to her and

01:29:21 said I cannot marry you because you are too black and this has stayed with me for decades how profoundly deeply rooted this was because she was a peasant origin child, very dark-skinned. And uh so I throw that out. I have no solutions. Let's do this kind of I don't think Hades the only racist. I

01:29:52 mean we have that. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. You can stand up. Oh yeah. Yeah. You can go first. [Music] Um, well, first of all, I think what we were referencing was colorism. Um, that's how deep racism is. Like, it's often conflated with, "Oh, I can't believe other black folks don't like other black folks." It comes, it comes from an origin of racism and white supremacy. But I think the biggest thing

01:30:23 that I'm seeing here with this conversation um is and correct me if I'm wrong, but um talking about white fragility, that is going to be the deficit or the de that's going to be the end of all. Uh if we can't have honest conversations and say say words that actually we have to deal with on a basis um or just, you know, romanticize, oh well, you know, we'll get along one day. All lives matter. We don't believe that. And honestly, the people that you know that we're talking about don't

01:30:54 believe that. And those people are defining my position as a black woman. Um, so we're talk we're talking about othering. Look at me. I'm a black woman with locks. I'm a black woman that cusses. I'm a black woman that doesn't have children. I'm a black woman that probably, you know, from from a from a white fragilityist uh standpoint probably is not going to be your best friend because it's it's everything that's not not aligning to what how I need to act. So for me as a black woman, no, I don't have the empathy or the

01:31:26 patience for anybody and particularly those that are in power that are just like, "Oh, it's all right. You should be okay with be dehumanized. you should be okay with, you know, being questioned or more importantly, you should be okay with just um just what's going on because it's been happening for years and years and years and and thought about we we just got to move forward. But as a social worker, I would say that uh especially if you call yourself an ally, it's not just about these conversations. It's about actions. It's about checking the people with the MAGA

01:31:56 hats. It's about checking the people that deny applications because this looks too black or this is in what we're talking about others. This is this this the other notion. So just like to say that yeah allyship comes with action. It goes beyond conversation. So very nice to know that everybody's on the same page but nice to know outside of the building you know. So that that's what I would like to say. Thank you. Anybody want what kind of action? I got this for you.

01:32:28 All right. Send me the link. No, we need sojourer truth. So what? Sorry. Sojourer true. I think I attend infrequently to these conversations. Um and this has been the most exciting one so far. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Great. Um I appreciate the

01:33:00 conversation. Thank you. Um and yes, I agree that we that did action is required, but I think reflection is also required prior to action. Um and not just reflection of how others other but how I other and I I I think it's valuable to look at these nefarious circles. Uh but I think what's invaluable is to how these same dynamics operate in innocuous circles. I'm a sports fan. Scapegoating

01:33:32 projection occurs there. My sister loves fashion. Scapegoating projection occurs there. Mhm. So I think um we need to look at how history um has um you know there's plenty of evidence how it's been expressed but how it happens within my own narrative within how I other my brother how I other my neighbor how I'm a meth fan how I other Yankee fans. Um so it's

01:34:02 I I it's there's a lot of reflection before action. I think action can be quite dangerous if we don't reflect. Uh I think there's a tendency at least I perceive this conversation we we you guys were very effective to other others. I think I heard no once say about how I other thank you a quick a quick thought for a second. Oh yeah go ahead. Yeah I I I love that point and and and I think it was a critical there was this there's this critical moment. I was

01:34:33 researching xenophobia and what I discovered was that xenophobia was used in initially as a xenophobic concept. It was about inferior third world people, right, who were so immature along the evolutionary scale that they didn't understand that strangers were not all enemies. How did it flip to a to exactly what you're talking about, a way for the colonizers to actually develop a moral compass about their own action? It required two different stances that help

01:35:06 people wrestle with this and one is liberal tolerance and the other is socialist brotherhood that both of those said wait a minute what are we what are we doing here and that's where you see the debate starting to go flip uh you know where they start to say wait maybe we're the xenophobes not them look what we're doing you know look at what the brothers league is doing in the east end look what happens in Mississippi maybe it's us. I think that's why I I want to defend something like tolerance and and this and this

01:35:37 notion of socialist brotherhood as critical ways of of getting some resistance to the bias that you're otherwise easily easily, you know, uh and I'm really glad that you you are a Mets fan. I'm a Yankees fan, but I love you, man. I just want to say that. I I will just add one quick thing. So, one of the things that the paper that Dr. Gallowinger and I wrote together. It emerged out of a frustration uh well he sort of had the offer but the where I came to the table is I was frustrated in graduate school. Um I took this

01:36:08 metaphysics of race class and we hit the in the implicit bias unit or whatever and it was at the the at the end of it it like sort of the con the grand conclusion was like yeah we all have them so we all have to take the implicit um uh attitude test. Yeah the implicit attitude test. And so like and then the the grand revelation was like, "Oh, you have them too." All right, fine. But but to treat um all biases as like they don't all have the same historical

01:36:39 effect and I think it is critical to understand the part of the reflection is understanding that one all biases aren't created equal. if I have a bias toward cat lovers that we're not talking like that's not what I was talking about in that paper and not I'm not like so to not conflate those and to also understand that the the biases that caused Laquan McDonald's life to be taken prematurely are heavier in the society as structured than maybe the ones I have toward male men or whatever

01:37:12 you know what I mean so like that I think it's important to understand to weight them and to have the the the courage to look at them historically, not ahistorically. And if we look at them historically, they're not all weighted equal. Well, maybe the term bias was invented as in order to obfuscate the basic facts of racism and other forms of, you know, othering. You see, I think you could ar I would argue that positivist social science in America had developed many

01:37:43 many forms of obfuscation and just hitting just a little to the side of really the core of the problem. So now here's my dangerous thing. I what I what the point I was making is that I think if you're part of a sharecropping family at a certain point in Mississippi in a certain point in America's history, some othering may be self-protective and it's worth understanding that, right? No. So what I'm saying so like when we even to just treat it as like othering some othering was for like saved lives where some where others otherings

01:38:15 endangered those said lives let me yeah there's a danger in universalizing other right maybe I'll just make one last point just float back to some of this but in some meta sense like are we saying maybe toward if we're going to belong in a more egalitarian society we need to have a sense of hating in egalitar arianism. You see, that would be the other. We don't really necessarily have a shared other in the nurture and parent family culture that George Leoff describes. So, we have a lot of reason

01:38:46 to notice our differences, but why do we need to do things together toward a shared goal is less clear and less easy than they have it over on the right? I think we see that now. We just saw that unfold, but I'm not going to get into politics. But yes, you But there's a reason that that unfolded and if we don't get into understanding the roots of Haiti, then we're going to be missing. Yeah, I think that's why I was being a little perverse. sense is that it's helpful to understand the very

01:39:18 particular roots of very particular othering to understand the roots of anti-semitism in Germany for example and the roots of uh anti-lack racism uh in slavery. This gentleman's been standing there for a while. So you got a chance there's a lot of energy in this round table which is seems to me very positive thing and I thank you for it. Um, from the moment that uh, Janice you began with we

01:39:51 the people. Yes. I found myself thinking about the Declaration of Independence in a way I really hadn't before. that uh we the people is a kind of cover story uh a cover story that ignited perhaps one of the first moves toward building an American empire which I think is now in a state of collapse and I really hate living during the decline of empire because it totally sucks

01:40:23 you didn't like the whole euro thing either right but I mean I mean that sarcastically because there's been a series of movements beginning in the 60s which when I came of age and started marching and sitting in and things there's been just a series of one movement after another that are undoing the American empire and it seems to me clear that the whole make America great again is an attempt to go back to uh an emp that

01:40:54 empire under the regime of white supremacy Mhm. And uh it's a it's a throwback and maybe it won't last. Who knows? Maybe it will after this last election. But what I really wanted to say was there are awful lot of false we started thinking about there. You know, the royal we for example, uh the Siamese Wii that if you cut Siamese twins apart, they bleed to death. uh which is kind of a a wei of

01:41:27 confluence of sameness. And that it seems to me that we is perhaps the of of all adult developmental stages creating a wei is one of the most difficult whether we're talking about a marriage intimate relationship or a collective a group. Nice. And it's basically a I think of it as an aesthetic project. You know, Art Ron and John Dwey both

01:41:58 taught us that making your world in being in your world in uh every day is either a good aesthetic project or a bad one. Good art or bad art. And so what kind of uh what kind of art do you want to have from a Wii? You could have a Gregorian chant where everything moves in octaves and fifths parallel in the same way or you you could have a Bach fugue where they're

01:42:29 different voices that preserve their difference and move toward and away from each other. And of course I vote for that. Uh and and a last thing I think that making a good art of we involves two things that seem to me extremely important. Curiosity and empathy. But there and I think of curiosity as as the greatest ally of love and empathy as of course something we're trained I'm a

01:43:02 practicing psychotherapist that we're trained to do. But there I just want to end this saying there also are problems about both curiosity and empathy. One is that curiosity is killed off in so many of us through our earliest socialization uh like the uh like like your example Jasper of the 5-year-old pointing and saying there's a negro not with curiosity and openness and

01:43:33 interest. Yeah. But already taught something about this. This is a difference that we might we fear. Right? The problem is the arrow of curiosity and the arrow of anxiety, especially paranoid anxiety go in opposite directions. And finally, there's a problem about empathy because you know you cannot get yourself in every others every other person's shoes.

01:44:04 Uh I ran across a book recently quite lovely by uh a a writer named Aruna Duza called imperfect solidarities and she makes a big case for retain keeping opacity. Not just empathy but opacity because some differences some others are so different you cannot really step in their shoes unless you begin to make them the same.

01:44:34 Yeah. So to keep them other means keeping them opaque and she makes a case for caring that's much rather like lean. Yeah. This is leanian. You know the face of the other just seeing it the living face of the other means you have responsibility and that's how Levanas gets to ethics before as prior to ontology. Yeah. And so I'll end there but you know in uh

01:45:06 Kut's empathic attunement he calls for us to be attuned. you know, we can't get in, but we can be attuned. Yes. I do like the idea. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Something about we and I think uh that's for me that keeps being the the challenge amongst the aesthetics and the empathy and tolerance and all that. Renear spoke about it and Freud definitely spoke about it in

01:45:37 civilization and discontents. we is essentially violent. We exist in societies and in collectives in the condition that the collectives force upon us all kinds of things. And Freud talks about how this uh enforcement of rules of norms moves around it. It gets inside goes outside calls it a death drive at some point. But there's no gathering of people that does not become

01:46:09 uh aggressive towards its own members to keep them in order and therefore violent at least in the margins but always in in principle in the center too. So a we is there it's always a circle of violence that's internal and then how that gets worked out and how that gets often pushed outside through the phenomena of the scapegoat for example somebody spoke that you identify someone inside you and you kick them out you make them other I think

01:46:42 that's that's the big problem of of society is that they are violent inherently and can can they not be viol violent. Can there be some kind of social regulation that is not aggressive? And if we assume it is, then how do we do we distribute in a different way because what we see now is what that's it. Okay. I think we're getting the signal to if there are no other questions, I think we're we're going to wrap up here.

01:47:13 Uh want to say anything or Thank you very much. [Applause]