Emotional Communication and the Rhetoric of Antiracism I: Getting the Message

Sometimes, if we pay close attention to the rhetoric of social and political conflict, we can learn something important about what is at stake. A good example is provided in an article on the website Persuasion in which the black linguist James McWhorter summarizes the tenets of what he refers to as “Third Wave Antiracism.” These tenets include:

“You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.”
“If you’re white and only date white people, you’re a racist. But if you’re white and date a black person you are, if only deep down, exotifying an “other.”
“Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does. But all whites must acknowledge their personal complicity in the perfidy throughout history of “whiteness.”
“Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. But it is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom discussions.

— https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists-1bf

McWhorter’s purpose is to criticize the rhetoric of Third Wave Antiracism, which he considers illogical, even nonsensical: McWhorter writes, “I suspect that deep down, most know that none of this catechism makes any sense.”

Clearly, the tenets do not make sense on some level. Yet, there is also, I think, a level on which they do. This is the level of emotional communication. To consider any rhetoric as emotional communication, we need to begin not with its flaws in logic but with its emotional impact: the emotions it provokes in its target audience and what those emotions could mean. What appears as a set of statements meant to define the appropriate response of white people to the situation of black people, through an emotional communication lens, can be understood as an attempt to make white people have the emotional experience of black people, or at least of those black people involved with Third Wave Antiracism. Considered as emotional communication, the message offered to white people by black Third Wave Antiracists might be something like this:

I want you to know how it feels to be me. To be me means to know that whatever you do is the wrong thing and that what makes what you do the wrong thing is that you are doing it. The wrongness is in you, which means you are the wrong thing. We live in a world that is bad because you are in it. You must accept that you are the badness in the world. By accepting that you are the badness in the world, you take responsibility for all the harm done there, no matter how remote the harm or how little power you have to affect it. But, if you take responsibility and seek to engage in acts of atonement aimed at rectifying the harm, this will do no good. So long as acts of atonement are done by you, they cannot be good but must be bad. In short, emotional communication of this type seeks to have the target population feel a dilemma that is also the dilemma of black people—an eternal sense of badness.

How might this work? When what you do is bad because you are the one doing it, then there is literally nothing you can do. It’s not about how we might actually solve problems. Instead, doing is the problem! More precisely, thinking about doing is the problem because the only thought attached to doing is the thought that everything we can think of doing is the wrong thing.

The intent of this type of rhetoric prevents thinking because it insists on the validity of thoughts that negate each other: the thought that we should understand black people and the thought that we are racists if we think we do; the thought that we are accountable for what we do and the thought that we are accountable for things we did not do; the thought that, if we do not adapt our institutions to the special needs of black people, we are racists, but if we do adapt our institutions to the special needs of black people we are also racists because we are implying that black people have special needs. Trying to integrate these thoughts creates not solutions to problems but the conviction that thinking about the problem is the problem.

When we think about something we attend to it. Thinking becomes the problem when what is being attended to is both what we most want, and what we most want to prevent. In the case of Third Wave Antiracism rhetoric, the point is to make white people pay attention to black people (make black people “matter”) without discovering anything about them. Why do I argue this? This type of rhetoric negates the significance of the need to be attended to itself. Indeed, need must be attended to without neediness becoming known. Put another way, what is wanted is care without acknowledging that care is what is needed. If that is the case, then the dilemma has, I think, a more general significance: If we cannot draw attention to our neediness, then our need will never be met. But if we do draw attention to it, our state of neediness and dependence will become known to others who may use our neediness against us. The solution to the problem embedded in the rhetoric is to transfer this dilemma to the target audience so that white people “get it” but do not get that it is the feeling state of those communicating it to them. This turns out, of course, to be an unsatisfactory solution for all parties involved.

There is yet another aspect of the link between thinking and paying attention. Thinking makes what we do deliberate or intentional: something we decide to do. Thinking about doing assures that we are present in what we do. To be attended to is to be present; specifically, to be present for and therefore, exist for the person who attends to us. A rhetoric that prevents thinking about us makes sure the other (the target audience) is not aware of our existence, to assure that we do not exist for them. It expresses the conviction that what will be discovered is our neediness and dependence, our inability to be or exist in our own right, the inadequacy of our inner resources—of the self—to be the determining factor in doing and relating.

The dilemma of the antiracist is an archetypical human dilemma, which is the reason that it can resonate with its audience, even if it is, on another level, illogical. While illogical on one level, it contains an important emotional truth shared by many people regardless of their race. The emotional communication, no matter how hostile it may seem, is intended to create an important emotional bond between the speaker and his or her targeted audience. The nature of this bond might become clearer if we consider how the rhetoric imagines the change it hopes to promote.

If we consider the emotional communication in the rhetoric to be a communication about change—the need for change and how change can come about—it offers a message that might go like this:

 For my suffering to end, something has to change. And, since the something that has to change is a state of mind, the something that must change is something in me. For me to change, what I need is to deposit my bad feeling about myself—my suffering—into you and make it your bad feeling about yourself. Then, it will be up to you to change how you feel about yourself so that I can change how I feel about myself. But now that you contain my bad self, because you are bad, and what you do is bad, which means that you cannot make the needed change in yourself and thereby also in me. So, while your acceptance of guilt and acts of atonement are what I want, they do not change anything in me. The only kind of change that can be accomplished this way is the change brought about by the sharing of suffering that would moderate my feelings of envy. This communication, then, is my effort to share my suffering with you rather than rid myself of it.

The struggle against racism understood in the way just summarized is meant to overcome an important difference: the difference between those who suffer and those who do not. Overcoming this difference may not eliminate suffering; but there is something important it can do: it can moderate suffering by reducing or eliminating the envy attached to it. Where suffering is concerned, envy acts as a force multiplier, and, because of its power to do so, it eclipses the real underlying source of our suffering to the point that we come to believe that envy is its real source. The problem is no longer the underlying reason we suffer, but the consequences of our suffering in the eyes of others who do not suffer. The focus on envy transforms suffering from an internal state into a relationship and fosters the dilemma outlined above.

One of the reasons our focus shifts from the original source of our suffering—the absence of adequate attention paid to us—is that, due to the nature of the underlying cause of our suffering, there is nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about envy: we can make sure that others suffer as we do, thereby ridding ourselves of envious feelings. By sharing our suffering, we take the onus off of ourselves. It is, after all, the onus placed on us—our status as bad selves—that is the cause of our suffering.

***

We envy others when we interpret the fact that they have what we do not. At the same time, we sense they are favored over us. To reduce the suffering associated with the evidence that we are not favored, we need to remove the evidence by taking away the things others have. Or, we can also devalue them. While it appears to be the things that we desire—but do not have—that matter, what matters is instead what they represent: a special relationship with the source of the good things. Envy, conceived in this way, appears to be a two-party relationship but there is always a third party involved, whether we are aware of its presence or not. The third party is a fantasy that defines what the possession of valued objects might mean for us; therefore why objects are valued. This fantasy originates in formative experiences with those we depended on to provide us with the things we needed. When those things were provided to us, we were good, and when they were not, we were bad. Because being good means being worthy of having the good things, this fantasy is also a fantasy about ourselves.

Ultimately, the bad feeling associated with envy is the bad feeling we have when we conclude that our deprivation is a response to, and indicator of, the fact that we are unworthy of love, which is to say that we have a bad self. Envy is a “desperate attempt to protect the self from painful feelings of personal inadequacy or lack” (Maguire). The bad self is a bad feeling about the self, and it is made worse when we measure the worth of our selves against others who possess markers of the presence in them of a good or worthy self. Greed and envy are ways we manage this situation and make it at least minimally tolerable.

What sort of formative relationship can make envy an especially important part of relating later in life? One possible line of thought focuses on the aggression provoked in us by the failure of those we depend on to provide us with the things we need, most importantly the nurturing relationship and the atmosphere of safety it affords. Aggression directed toward those we depend on can be a dangerous thing. Envy can be considered a way to manage that danger by displacing it onto a safer target: those we imagine have replaced us in receiving the attention of our caregivers.

The fact that others have something we do not also establishes in our minds that the needed object is scarce and, as a general matter, ownership of scarce things is a marker of worthiness for what we did not get: love and the care that signals the presence of love. A scarcity of goods derives its influence upon us because we must exclusive possess them—otherwise they would not be scarce. If you feel secure in your connection with the source of what Balint refers to as “primary love,” you don’t need much in the way of possessions that can substitute for love. And you need not feel any envy towards those who possess surrogates for love because you have the real thing. Envy is a wish to deprive others of what we do not have. This is the envy that causes problems if it looms too large in public life.

In my next posting, coming soon, I explore one way people use others to relieve themselves of their suffering. I will connect this to how whites need to take up a certain kind of suffering in order to be good-it helps them overcome any bad feelings about our racist past.

Balint, M. (1969) The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression. London: Tavistock.

Maguire, M. (1997) Envy between women. In: Lawrence M., Maguire M., Campling J. (eds) Psychotherapy with Women. Palgrave, London.

McWhorter, J. (2021) “The Neoracists,” Persuasion, https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists, retrieved 2/25/2021

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