Abu Ghraib torture expressed racialized psychic pleasure, not stress

Evidence

I believe that what an interlocking approach has to offer is an understanding of just such a possibility of race pleasure in violence. If one considers that what happened at Abu Ghraib had little to do with especially stressful circumstances and more to do with deeply historical processes through which Americans understand themselves as white, then we can better confront the educational and political challenges we face in this new world order by understanding the complex ways in which systems of oppression (white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy) operate on a psychic level through sexual desire and fear. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 152

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that racial violence carries its own libidinal ‘pleasure’ — operating through sexual desire and fear on a psychic level — is a dense, uncomfortable thesis that resists easy summary and deserves sustained engagement.
• SEED: Angle: ‘race pleasure in violence’ as a lens for understanding participatory atrocity — how white self-understanding is generated and enjoyed through the humiliation of raced others, applicable well beyond Abu Ghraib.
• XREF: connects to: Abu Ghraib photographs revealed American culture’s dependence on the sexual-humiliation equation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 194