Systemic Empathic Failure Across Difference, or Why A Very Frightening Number of White People Vote for a Diagnosably Mentally Ill Criminal to Be President of the United States
Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership”.
I have written previously about interpreting Dr. Derald Wing Sue’s work on micro-aggressions through the Polyvagal Theory plus One lens, the comprehension of which renders micro-aggressions a sub-category of micro-rupture. This clarification arises when we comprehend the defensive responses of the Autonomic Nervous System, which has dealt with threat evolutionarily by surfacing one of a variety of neural platforms: fawn, fight, flight, freeze, and shutdown. Through this interpretive framework, we can see that micro-aggressions are a response to perceived threat, which is something that generally arises, in United Statesian culture, a White Supremacist culture, when White people, unaware of their own White Supremacy, act in ways that aggress people of color covertly. A micro-aggression is largely disturbing because it represents a ‘schizophrenia of action’ a splitting between conscious cognition (explicit awareness, e.g. mind) and bodily response (implicit awareness, e.g., body): wherein the aggressor is not consciously aware (in a verbal sense) of what they are doing, while their bodies (in a space-shaping sense) are completely aware of what they are doing. Micro-aggressions function to control space: to put People of Color in their ‘proper’ (in a White Supremacist construction) place, e.g., to constrain their space. When People of Color take up more space than that which they are assigned by White Supremacy, micro-aggressions arise to re-assert the dominance of white space. Schizophrenia is the operative invisibilized structure of all supremacies, as their very construction is contingent upon a doubleness: a knowing/ not-knowing. At the root of sociological whiteness is this schizophrenia: white people must be consciously unaware of white supremacy (at an explicit level), while our(their) bodies are unconsciously totally aware of it, benefiting every day. The splitting required to enact this doubleness makes white people crazy. I use crazy in the sense specifically of a person not knowing oneself, or how they will react. This is why white people, when confronted with their racism, act in highly dangerous and unpredictable ways. This is why white people, when confronted with their racism, deny it completely while enacting it. See ‘There’s not a racist bone in my body’ and other formulations. The bodily unconscious has a deep investment in shielding conscious awareness from what it knows, because if conscious awareness got the news, it would destroy many white people’s sense of being good people. White-identified people, like all people, have an identity investment in perceiving themselves as being ethical. To benefit daily from a systemically oppressive structure and to do nothing to dismantle it is evil. To be aware that you are complicit with evil is, syllogistically, not to be a good person. The antidote, obviously, is for white people to take an active role in dismantling this structure. But until more white people realize this, our/their unconscious defends against this knowledge, to the daily detriment of People of Color, as well as their own detriment. This doubleness to which I’m referring does not exist in those who are declaredly White Supremacist, just in those white people in the United States who are unaware that their bodies are White Supremacist. Overt White Supremacists are not enacting schizophrenia, they are simply evil.
We noted that while aggressing to control allocation of space is one possible response, there are other possible responses that are elicited by other neural platforms of behavior that perform the same function (control space), albeit in different ways, which can include escape-oriented behaviors, as well as shutdown behaviors, as well as fawning behaviors. All of these behaviors are experienced by those impacted as ruptures, as harms of various kinds. All are deployed consciously or unconsciously in response to perceived threat, with the objective of controlling space for the purposes of re-establishing in the White person a perceived bodily sense of safety without discomfort. It is necessary to make discernments between these different methods of controlling space because it situates racist actions within the larger framework of human reactions to perceived threat, a framework necessary to disruption of these patterns within a larger social framework, because while we seem to lack the political will in this country to address racism directly (it’s hard for a political system that depends on White Supremacy to dismantle one of its core tenets), the framing situates these activities within a larger conversation about public health, medicine, and human well-being, which is a necessary re-framing in order to disrupt this toxic structure. I will duly note here that the public health emergency is not simply for People of Color. The schizophrenia of Supremacy is a core determinant of illness among the White population (see our research at Applied Mindfulness, Inc. and The Restorative Practices Alliance). People whose identity formation is structured around doubleness are not well mentally (see Dissociative Identity Disorder, etc.).
Supremacy is the hierarchizing of humans. It can be enacted along various lines of difference: race, gender, ability. We have names for many of these ‘isms’, e.g., racism, sexism, audism. Social locations that are more centered (e.g., in the United States, cis-gender, White, Christian, Affluent, Male) and which are the unearned beneficiaries of hierarchizing structures are required to have less awareness of how they operate. We often refer to this as privilege. Because of the systematic failure of empathy in humans, most of us tend to generalize our experience as a norm. We tend to believe that because we are like ourselves, other people are like we are. Before I point out how stupid this is, I want to simply re-iterate how common it is. Many of our habits of relating to ourselves, others, and even our habits are communication are referenced in this. At its heart, this confusion arises in an individualistic culture that exalts the individual, and has experienced a breakdown of collectivist identity, and of the idea of a commons. In the modern west we are socialized into narcissism. We are taught that growth and development is about individuation. That success is about accumulation and not having to depend on others. At a psychological level, this creates humans who are self-referenced, rather than self and other-referenced. We are trained to prioritize our own comfort, personal satisfaction, and ‘getting what we want’ over a balance between our needs and those of others. The western construction of identity arises from a defensive response, and is organized around an antagonism between self and Other. We believe that in order to ‘win’ someone else has to ‘lose.’ We believe that there is a scarcity of resources, rather than an abundance, and so we have to ‘take care of our own’ and not worry about ‘them: those people.’ Again, before I point out how stupid this is, I want to re-iterate how common this is. It is an invisibilized foundational assumption of the modern (non-indigenous) identity formation. Despite evidence to the contrary on all counts (the earth situation is endlessly abundant: there is a solar reactor in the sky producing more energy than humanity could ever possibly harvest) there is a political benefit to those in power and those who would maintain a status quo when we think like this. This failure is as deep as language, as deep as the arising of modernity.
We do not, in English, have a commonly used word for inter-being. This awareness that ‘I am because we are’ is a conceptual formulation that we have identified in our research in the Nguni Bantu, Filipino, and Unangan languages (see Keywords: A Field Guide to the Missing Words, Kram, 2020), and is actually quite common in non-European languages. A language of inter-being recognizes that each of us is part of the fabric of a larger community, the borders of which are inclusive, and which extend in fact to everything. Buddhism calls this co-dependent origination. From a place of Unity, in consciousness, and then deployed in action, which through a neurophysiological lens takes place through the Connection System, there is no need for a construction of Self opposed to Other. There is no need for Supremacy. We can, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, inter-be. There is no Other. There is no Enemy. The Other is that part of our ourselves that we are unable to acknowledge, become intimate with, and Love. Until I know that part of myself that is a murderer (and I assure you gentle reader, you have within you a murderer that could be seduced into action were the circumstances dire enough- I’ll add also that you might kill yourself versus someone else, but that’s the same impulse oriented inwards) I will always suffer from the illusion that the murderer is someone else, an Other, someone to be feared, and probably caged, disciplined, punished.
What we do, through Supremacy, is to take all of the depth psychological content that we are unable to own in ourselves (those parts of ourselves that are too scary, uncomfortable, or dangerous to be acknowledged) and project it onto an Other. This solves one problem (whew, I don’t have to deal with that) while creating another much deeper and more dangerous problem. Racism is a white issue, because it is White Supremacy that has ejected white evil onto the black body. Sexism is a male issue, because it is Male Supremacy that has ejected male evil onto the female body. The deeper and far more dangerous problem created by Supremacy, for those who are in the ‘Above’ location (i.e., the ones who are ejecting our depth psychological content onto someone else) is that it prevents us from becoming human.
As a White person, until I own my own perpetration, I will never become fully human. Until I own my complicity in a system that was designed to project my evil onto innocent bodies of color, I will never know myself. This is the core spiritual wound of the United States, and why it is arrested in a state of perpetual adolescence. We are not getting older, as years drag by, because our development is arrested by a refusal to confront our core collective trauma. As a semi-rhetorical question, what do you call a group of people operating from a mentality of Supremacy who commit genocide against the Jewish people? Nazis. What do you call a group of people operating from a mentality of Supremacy who commit genocide against Native American peoples and enslave Native African peoples? Americans. United Statesians. What is at stake in dismantling Supremacy is no less than the psychological well-being of all white people in the United States.
In the lack of this awareness, we’ve managed to cook up an entire manual that pathologizes the contortions that those whose social locations are not centered have to go through to try to be ok. This begins at the root of modern European psychology, with Viennese doctors studying the ‘irrationality’ of women. What was not studied at that time was the violence of men and its impact on women. We have an entire arsenal of pathologizing terminology that we apply to black men and boys. ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder,’ ‘Intermittent Explosive Disorder’, etc. What we don’t have is ‘White People Are Terrifyingly Dangerous’ Disorder, though that is the root disorder from which these other adaptations spring.
