The False Consciousness of Race – Part 3

 Detachment and Denial

3. Detachment. A false consciousness is manifest as cognitive and emotional detachment. Over the course of their lives, people discover ways to remove themselves from situations. Sometimes this means physical removal, as when we walk out of a room. Other times it means cognitive or emotional removal, as when we cease to be involved in a discussion and begin to think of something else, or we choose not to feel or become emotionally engaged in what is happening. More often than not, these kinds of removal are an expression of our lack of interest in or inability to connect with someone or the situation. Attention wanders, emotions shut down, and our indifference turns into remoteness; for whatever reason, we just cannot or will not relate to what is going on. This is not necessarily false consciousness in its mode of detachment, but if the participants and situation involve race and racism at any level, it quite likely is.

False consciousness as detachment is indicated when European Americans are unable or unwilling to relate cognitively and emotionally to the experiences of members of other people groups, and regard these experiences as atypical or misinterpreted. Often when European Americans enter a situation where members of other people groups are present, they suppose themselves and the situation to be racially unbiased. In situations where only European Americans are present, the similarity of their experiences will be assumed, and therefore when they share their experiences, they will likely not be discounted but rather validated and confirmed by the common sense. European Americans see members of other people groups shop in the same stores, sit in the same restaurants, travel on the same airplanes, live in the same neighborhoods, see the same movies and work in the same occupations as they do, and conclude that discrimination in these spheres is no longer practiced. As Derrick Bell has observed, “The very absence of visible signs of discrimination creates an atmosphere of racial neutrality and encourages whites to believe that racism is a thing of the past.”49 When members of other people groups articulate their experiences of discrimination and humiliation, patronization and condescension, dismissal and invisibility, and when they declare that they have not been and are not now taken seriously, European Americans are detached because they lack the capacity or are reluctant to relate cognitively and emotionally to these experiences. Because no sense can be made of them, they go unacknowledged and are disbelieved.

This is not to say that European Americans have no awareness of racism. However, European Americans have no experience or consciousness of racism that members of other people groups have; the consciousness of European Americans is detachment. Most European Americans regard racism as the attitudes, beliefs, prejudices and actions of a relatively few bigoted people; egregious acts of racism in our sociocultural world are regarded as hardly representative of the European American community as a whole. Rampant “racism” is thought to be a thing of the past, or at least in significant decline; the social situation is different now and racism is no longer ubiquitous. When racism is considered by European Americans, it is generally in personal rather than social terms, and thus its expressions are attributed to an individual’s racial prejudices, stereotypes or ignorance. False consciousness allows European Americans to regard narratives of contemporary racism and discrimination with detachment and to remove themselves from sociocultural racism. It is a perk that comes with white privilege.

One reason European Americans have difficulty making sense of the experiences of racism shared by others is that they distinguish between an idea, principle or norm on the one hand and its implications or applications in concrete circumstances on the other. One can hold the principles of equality and fairness, for example, and at the same time be disinterested in or detached from a situation where they are absent; the lack of equality and fairness in a particular circumstance does not necessarily discredit the principles of equality and fairness. European Americans are good at believing in the principles but not at expressing them in situations where they could—or should—be incarnated. (Consider the public debates on “liberty” and “justice” during the colonial period of this nation’s history.) This tendency allows them to affirm the principles of equality and fairness, and at the same time oppose a means to achieve them as advocated by others, or dissent from the view that a situation is unequal and unfair. (Witness the debates on, and demise of, affirmative action.) The truth and value of an idea inhere in the idea itself and are unaffected by whether it applies in a given situation. This tendency is a manifestation of false consciousness in the mode of detachment; it reifies an idea as a thing whose existence is separable from the concreteness of the spheres and schemes of everyday life. For members of other people groups in the United States, principles, ideas and norms do not exist as “things”; they do not exist at all apart from their concrete expressions in the patterns and structures of a shared sociocultural world.

Furthermore, detachment is a mode of consciousness that not infrequently involves projection—attributing one’s own attitudes or feelings to another in order to protect oneself from the discomfort of uncertainty, fear or guilt. Saying to another who has shared a racial experience, “You shouldn’t feel that way or think that way,” often masks the speaker’s uneasiness about the situation and the implications if the other’s experience and reading were to be acknowledged. It may also project an accusation of responsibility for the situation (“Well, it was your fault, and you probably deserved it!”) or the innocence of others (“She didn’t mean it like that. She was just doing her job!”).

European Americans may even acknowledge their inability or unwillingness to relate to the experience of racial discrimination and insult—to say nothing of oppression—but what remains is a fractured sense of what they would do or think or feel in a similar situation, and they interpret the experience of others by projecting these sentiments onto them, virtually oblivious to the dynamics of a racial situation (“If it had been me, I would have given her a piece of my mind and stomped out, even if she had threatened to fire me!”). European Americans find it remarkable sometimes that members of other people groups do not think or feel or respond like them in a situation. But most often this merely expresses a projection of hostility, fear, anxiety or guilt; European Americans want to be “objective” and “level-headed” in their assessment of the situation described by others, so they impose their cognitive and emotional sense onto others as the norm.

4. Denial. Common sense tells us that we should accept something if it is true and reject something if it is untrue. While it is not always possible to establish that something is one or the other, we nevertheless have to function from day to day by making judgments regarding the truth or falsehood of information, descriptions, assertions and so on. The fourth mode of false consciousness, denial, is the apprehension of a legitimate assertion as unwarranted, the thoughts and feelings of others as inappropriate, and the events that form a person’s or people’s narratives as untrue, misleading or biased in their favor. In short, denial is the refusal to believe, recognize or acknowledge that another’s rendering may be correct, and so it is regarded as contradictory.

Like detachment, denial is a way of coping with conflicting impulses and claims. But unlike detachment, denial seeks to suppress the assertions of legitimacy that engender the conflict. As noted in chapter three’s discussion of “white privilege,” European Americans tend not to think of themselves as “white” because the world they live in and have internalized adapts readily and attends to their interests and objectives. This “transparency” is a detachment from the experience of others in a “white”-dominated world, but it is also a denial of the experience of these others because it is judged as contradictory. European Americans reject the assertions of other people groups because to acknowledge them not only would mean validating the assertions but might very well lead to a loss of tangible and psychological benefits. Thus denying the assertions of others is at the same time a denial of racism.

In no small part, this mode of consciousness is shaped by significant social  distance between European Americans and other people groups. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that it is a subjective byproduct of social isolation. Some European Americans have casual acquaintance with, and even work or study with, members of other people groups, but population demographics and public opinion polls suggest that the overwhelming majority of European Americans live in virtual or complete social isolation from other people groups. This social isolation tends to produce what Edward Hall has referred to as “fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other.”50

Contending that racism is expressive of racial prejudice and discrimination is a form of acknowledgment, but arguing that racism is only this is denial, and the defense of this denial requires the effective suppression of the contradictory assertion. If I believe I am not racist because I am not racially prejudiced, do not practice discrimination and hold strongly to principles of equality, justice and fairness, I may still retain denial as a mode of consciousness to the extent that the experience of another is disbelieved and rejected because it is viewed as contrary to my internalized norms. Additionally, all that is required to confirm a European American’s sense that another’s assertion of racism is groundless is that it be shared by another European American (“Did you think that was racist?” “No, it’s not racism, just a difference of opinion!”). This legitimates one’s socialization into the in-group and fortifies denial.

The inability to countenance a view that asserts the presence or experience of racism, and the interest in suppressing its expression and silencing its voice, is indigenous to the sociocultural order constructed and maintained by the dominant group. European Americans regard their experiences and sociocultural expressions as the norm, and the experience and expressions of other people groups contradict this. In race relations, European Americans are known to practice two variations of the tree-in-the-forest question (if a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there, does it make a sound?): (1) If there are no members of another “race” present, is racism nonetheless a problem here? The answer usually given is no because if members of another people group are not present, racism does not exist. (2) If members of another “race” are present but no assertions of racism are made, is racism a problem here? Again, the answer is usually no” because if no assertion is put forth, there is no claim to reject, no position to argue, no experience to contradict. In either case, the question presupposes that racism is absent because racism is not the norm—and thus we see a preeminent illustration of false consciousness in its mode of denial. Likewise, if racism is denied or its assertions are suppressed, this is tantamount to declaring that racist attitudes, values, feelings and beliefs no longer exist or are not important—at least for European Americans. Thus consciousness in the mode of denial shields one not only from actual conflict but from the possibility of conflict.

Notes

49  Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: BasicBooks, 1992), p. 5. The idea that casual contact and even friendship between members of different people groups can produce a false sense of sameness that ignores or denies sociocultural expressions of racism is explored at some length by Benjamin DeMott in The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).

50  Hall, Beyond Culture, p. 11.

From No Partiality by Douglas R. Sharp. Copyright (c) 2002 by Douglas R. Sharp. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com


The False Consciousness of Race

Part 1 – Introduction

Part 2 – Dualism and Deception

Part 3 – Detachment and Denial

Part 4 – Dissociation and Colorblindness

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