Yesterday EC asked in an e-mail if there were some deeper meaning to the charges of "racism" being tossed about by a number of Obama supporters. A great deal has already been written, and much more will certainly follow, charging that Republicans are either using thinly disguised racist constructions or expressing unconscious racism in their attacks on President Obama's policies. A great deal will also be written charging that those who use the epithet to silence and marginalize their opponents are either unscrupulous opportunists, using ad hominem attacks when their positions are indefensible, or racialists, who continue to see everything in racial terms long after such a worldview has lost most of its meaning and value. Probably the best outcome so far has the rapidly diminishing utility of the charge of "racism" yet there are deeper strata which suggest that the issue will not be disappearing any time soon.
First, a digression: Our minds are not unitary constructs. Our self image is composed of a multitude of self-representations, some positive in valence and others negative. When the negative self-representations out-weigh the positive, in layman's terms, we have low self esteem. (This is an over simplification since whether or not a self-representation is positive or negative relates to how it approximates one's ego ideal. A "gansta" may consider his self-representation as a thug to be a positive aspect of himself, close to his idealized image of himself, while a college professor would, with some exceptions, consider this a negative self-representation.)
Historically, cohesive groups, ethnic, religious, tribal, have an overarching collection of representations that comprise the group's ego ideals, the kinds of persons who are considered as objects of admiration for each member of the group to aspire to. More complex evolutionarily advanced societies have a great range of idealized archetypes as objects for admiration. In America, the range varies from Actors and Athletes to Rebels and Wranglers and Widget makers. We even idealize certain highly successful criminals. In more constricted cultures, which often includes younger cultures that lack a long history of success, the various ideal types available to the people is more constrained.
One result is that stereotypes often sting because the members of stereotyped groups have an insecurity about themselves and an often denied sense that there is some truth to the stereotype. Thus Jews can be very sensitive to accusations of Jewish greed since that is a trait that many worry they contain within their community. In a similar fashion, many Italians are sensitive to depictions of Italians as members of organized crime because of the historical association of their community to organized crime and the uncertainty about how far removed their community may be in the present from their past. Racist thinking has been deeply ingrained in almost every culture, not excluding the West and America in particular. The damage of such longstanding historical assumptions of racial inferiority is that the the black culture has little in the way of historical exemplars for their idealized selves. In many ways the self-representations of blacks historically have derived from the larger cultures which have devalued them. In a young culture, such other-derived devalued self-representations cannot be offset by countervailing positive images, in part because there is a paucity of such available objects for admiration.
One reason the Israelites of the Exodus had to wander the desert for 40 years was so that they could stop seeing themselves as slaves and two generations later begin to see themselves as free men and women.
One great hope for the American black community, implicitly recognized and understood by black and white Americans alike, is embodied in the smart, extremely articulate, good looking black man who has a beautiful family and the consummate political skill to gain the highest office in the land. If Barack Obama is now found to have feet of clay, or far worse, if his presidency fails, this would be a disastrous blow to the community so identified with him. For many blacks, and a great many liberal whites, the unacceptable thought, handed down from the racists of the past, is that blacks are not as smart as whites. Their accusations of "racism" toward anyone who criticizes President Obama's policies is a reaction to the worry that President Obama will prove to be an ineffective President, thereby confirming their worst (mostly unconscious) fears.
Long ago, the first Psychoanalyst made a brilliant interpretation when he declared that "Methinks the lady doth protest too much", capturing the core of the defense of reaction formation. In a reaction formation, the unconscious unacceptable thought presses upon the conscious mind and threatens to become conscious; the internal censor rejects the idea, forces the thought back down into the unconscious, and covers it with its opposite equivalent. (The unconscious says, "I hate my baby brother and wish he was dead so I could remain the most important" and the Censor, in order to protect the Conscious mind, horrified by such thoughts, responds, "I don't hate my brother! I love my baby brother to death!")
The accusations of racism whenever the President is criticized have taken on a Shakespearean tenor: the unconscious says, "President Obama is failing to convince people of his ideas; maybe he, and by extension all blacks, are not so smart" and the conscious mind reels and replies, "No, he is the smartest, he is the One, and the only explanation for his failings is that those who oppose him do so because they are racists!"
Methinks they protest too much.
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