It is a truism that worth repeating: impulses that remain in the unconscious never disappear; they merely remain hidden until they can find ways to express themselves. When a psychologically healthy resolution to conflicted impulses is established, the outcome is adaptive and ethically and morally acceptable. For example, it is a commonplace for Surgeons to have sublimated their sadistic tendencies, draining the urgency and erotic charge from them, and direct the impulse toward helping people. The difference between the knife cut from a sadist and the knife cut from a surgeon is the difference between life and death.
When impulses are defended against with less evolved and mature defenses they are more likely to find expression in ways which facilitate a greater degree of gratification of the original impulse.
One of the more common defenses against unacceptable thoughts, easily seen in young children, is called reaction formation. A 3 year old with a new sibling often struggles with intense anger at the intruder who has taken his place as first among his mother's loves. The child quickly learns that open aggression against the newcomer is unacceptable. An exaggerated and aggressive "love" often replaces the original undisguised hate. "I don't hate little baby Jimmy (who mommy loves more than me and spends all her time with); in fact I just love him to death!" In fact, some children "love" their little siblings so much they want nothing more than to show the intensity of their love by hugging their little sibling...intensely... to death. That is one important reason why wise parents do not leave very young children unattended with newborns. Eventually the hate is subsumed by affection, attachment, and love but it often persists as part of the core of a sibling rivalry that can last throughout one's lifetime.
Shelby Steele, on the 50th anniversary of the dispatch of American troops to the capital of Arkansas by President Eisenhower, touches on issues related to unveiling the unconscious as he discusses our evolving race relations, in The Legacy of Little Rock.
... Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative--that they were not racist--in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Once the hatred lurking beneath the gentility was revealed the Nation had to change. We have come a long way in 50 years but as civilized as we wish to appear, the unconscious persists in its primitive and enduring structure. What defines our character is how we deal with our unconscious impulses.
As I have described elsewhere, the first object differentiation the infant's mind makes is between self and non-self (other). All future relationships rest upon that distinction. As we mature, our sense of self continues to differentiate at the same time as we are building up a stable constellation of those whom we see as close to us. We distinguish our nuclear family, our extended family, later our school mates, our co-religionists, our town, state, country, as belonging to that which arises from our self and are taken as more like-self than like-other. Tribalism is explicitly based on highlighting the distinction between self and not-self.
The Neuro-Physiologists have shown us that much of the input from the more mature and more evolutionarily recent parts of the brain is inhibitory in nature. This makes a fair amount of sense. We start out as impulse ridden entities demanding instant gratification and as we mature we learn to temper our desires and delay gratifications. In the same way many of our defenses are inhibitory of our impulses. It is a fact of life that racism has its underpinnings in our physiology. This means that as time goes on we must first learn to inhibit our automatic assignment of members of another race as "others" before we can include them as part of our extended self, ie our tribe. America has done a better job of this than any other society on the planet but our progress needs to be recapitulated constantly.
As Shelby Steele points out, after Little Rock and the early days of the Civil Rights movement, white Americans were forced to acknowledge the distance between their ideals and the reality on their TV screens. Once a threshold was reached, America changed. Open racism is no longer acceptable behavior in our culture. In fact, as so often happens when pendulums swing, we have almost certainly overreacted and now have to deal with the fact that almost any white person willing to talk about race risks being labeled a racist if he or she strays from PC orthodoxy. However, my main interest in this is to point out the "reaction formation" that is at the heart of much of our current liberal ideology about race.
Two years ago in a post on Race and the Unconscious, I pointed out the racism lurking within affirmative action and commented:
Ultimately, however, the black population of our country will never be able to succeed until they realize that they are unconsciously buying into an unstated meme saying that they are unable to compete; as long as they believe they cannot compete, they will never be able to compete.
A growing black middle class suggests more and more black Americans are resisting the traditional victimhood that is a prerequisite for affirmative action. However, the white liberal elites continue to insist that any attempt to discuss or change the system is racist. As suggested, reaction formations become more and more obvious as time goes on and this is no different.
A recent study asked Does affirmative action hurt minorities? Authors Vikram Amar and Richard H. Sandler wondered if the mismatch between abilities and expectations were setting up young minorities to fail in law school. They point out that the data is insufficient though highly suggestive but are most struck (though I suspect they are not surprised) by the response of those who hold additional data which could assist in understanding:
Racial preferences may be setting up many black and Latino law students for failure.
IMAGINE, FOR A MOMENT, that a program designed to aid disadvantaged students might, instead, be seriously undermining their performance. Imagine that the schools administering the programs were told that the programs might be having this boomerang effect -- but that no one investigated further because the programs were so popular and the prospect of change was so politically controversial.
Now imagine that an agency had collected enough information on student performance that it might, by carefully studying or releasing the data, illuminate both the problem and the possible solutions. What should the agency do?
This is not a hypothetical question. The schools involved are dozens of law schools in California and elsewhere, and the program is the system of affirmative action that enables hundreds of minority law students to attend more elite institutions than their credentials alone would allow. Data from across the country suggest to some researchers that when law students attend schools where their credentials (including LSAT scores and college grades) are much lower than the median at the school, they actually learn less, are less likely to graduate and are nearly twice as likely to fail the bar exam than they would have been had they gone to less elite schools. This is known as the "mismatch effect."
If the data shows that affirmative action harms minority law students (and it is a good possibility that the effects translate to other fields) this would be an important piece of reality that would call out for better understanding and investigation. Only if we understand why something exists can we hope to begin to redress its deleterious effects. Yet the liberal elite will not even tolerate an examination of the data (much like the response to the Larry Summers apostasy).
Liberals, just like conservatives, must overcome their physiology and psychology. Most conservatives I know acknowledge their biases and try to overcome them so as best to approach each person as an individual. Liberals, trapped in denial of their biases, must constantly work to prove the absence of racist tendencies. They "protest too much", a classic reaction formation. The liberal credo seems to be:
"I don't think blacks are inferior; in fact, I don't believe it so strongly that I insist we give them advantages in getting into law school because otherwise they would fail."
Never mind that such unearned success seems to be leading to failure at a much higher rate than expected; in fact, such thoughts are unthinkable. Any more such racist "love" from liberals, aided and abetted by the charlatans of race, and black Americans can forget about equality now and forever.
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