Emotional Communication and the Rhetoric of Antiracism II: Bound by Suffering
In my last posting, I explored one way people use others to relieve themselves of their suffering. This use of others involves a special kind of communication. For that communication to be successful, its target audience must respond in a specific way: they must make the suffering communicated to them their own. For this to happen, the target audience must, on some level, share the purpose embedded in the communication. They must need to have what they are being offered.
In the rhetoric of Third Wave Antiracism, the target audience is offered a type of suffering called envy. But why would the intended recipients of the communication accept what is offered to them when what they are offered is the opportunity to suffer? One possibility that can play an important role in social and political processes is that they accept the communication because they imagine that, by taking it on, they will become worthy of love.
If care is associated with love and the need for care is identified with suffering, love can come to be associated with suffering. If that happens, we know we are loved when someone notices we are suffering and cares enough to do something about it. Taking the idea one step further, caring for others can be our way of communicating our own need for care and therefore our own suffering so that caring for others is our way of projecting our need for care onto them and experiencing our wish to be loved through them. Out of this can emerge the envy of suffering that can connect the two parties to the communication offered in the rhetoric of Third Wave Antiracism. For those who are receptive to it, the rhetoric creates a special bond. This is not so much a bond through which suffering is dispelled. Instead, it is a bond through which a group is created and bound together by suffering.
If we think of this type of communication as a larger social and cultural phenomenon, we can see the difficulties that may arise. Envy attached to suffering makes any systemic effort to alleviate forms of deprivation, and related suffering, problematic. Why? Because it runs up against deeply embedded forms of emotional communication that work in the opposing direction, especially those that involve a powerful emotional attachment to suffering. Borrowing a term from one prominent social justice movement, when suffering is what makes us matter, it can be hard to give it up.
Furthermore, when envy plays a prominent role in shaping connection, so also does aggression. If we consider once again the emotional communication embedded in the rhetoric, it should be apparent that aggression against the target audience is a significant element in it. This aggression is not only directed at the audience; it is also communicated or transmitted to that audience so that an important part of their response is likely to be aggression directed at the source of the attack. This is aggression against black people intent on overcoming racism in our society, so it is likely to be felt to be deeply problematic. Indeed, at an unconscious level, the communication aimed at overcoming racism can be seen to provoke a racist response since it provokes aggression against black people.
This makes the rhetoric of antiracism a self-validating judgement of white people that leaves them with two options: meeting aggression with aggression or turning their aggression against themselves by accepting the judgment that they are racists. In the first case, the rhetoric spawns or intensifies the racism it is ostensibly meant to eliminate or reduce. In the second case it intensifies the role of envy. By placing the entire connection on the plane of guilt and innocence, it intensifies envy of suffering by making envy the envy of innocence born of suffering.
This happens when suffering is evidence of innocence rather than guilt, or when a social movement is meant to do the work of transforming suffering from evidence of guilt to evidence of innocence. We envy the suffering of others when their suffering makes them worthy of attention, which it does only so far as they do not deserve to suffer. We tend to see suffering as undeserved when, in the depths of our psyche, we feel that our own suffering is undeserved. Then, through projection, we find in others who represent undeserved suffering the site of our own.
Members of disadvantaged groups, especially when they have been allocated that role through political and cultural processes, represent not only suffering but also innocence, an innocence they can only maintain so far as whatever guilt they might have has been absorbed by those whose envy of their position only reinforces their convictions about their own guilt. The more vocal the insistence that white people are all responsible for the suffering of black people, all of whom are assumed to suffer, the more the relationship provokes envy and the impulse to meet aggression with aggression. The more that impulse is repressed, the more intense the need to atone for it. It does no good for those who are targets of the emotional communication embedded in the rhetoric of Third Wave Antiracism either to retaliate against the aggression in the rhetorical attack or feel bad about themselves. Either response only serves to perpetuate the badness and confirm that nothing can be done about it except to pass it around. The problem lies in the method of communication, which serves to perpetuate suffering. It does so precisely because it is emotional communication: the communication of emotion.
To resolve the problem, we need to replace emotional communication with another form of communication that has another purpose: not to create a feeling state in others but to provide them with an idea. If, rather than seeking to provoke an emotional response, I can tell you in so many words how I feel about myself, then I do not need to make you feel the way I feel. But I cannot do that if your response, a response I have provoked, confirms that I must not own my feelings but become a conduit for transferring them onto others. What blocks the transition from communication of emotion to the communication of an idea is the threat posed by bringing the idea to awareness. Emotional communication represents an interpretation of the world enacted rather than known. It is a method of connecting that communicates something vital about us and blocks it from being known. If we feel safe in having the embedded interpretation known, in saying what it is in so many words, then we create a space for breaking out of a relationship dedicated to the perpetual sharing of suffering to one of creating a shared bond to overcome all of the forces that recreate it on a daily basis.