Psychoanalytic accounts of racism cannot reduce it to a single psychological principle.

Evidence

It is not that such analyses do not shed some interesting light on structures of feeling and fantasy that may be evoked by popular iconographies of race, or that the dispositions they describe may not feature in the biographies of some individual racists. The problem arises in the conflation of different levels of analysis and/or their reduction to a single alldetermining principle of psychological causation. For, to take Kovel’s example, the double standard cannot simply be read off from child-rearing patterns, even in their most normative aspect. … And Riviere’s suggestion that her white female patient’s fantasies of seduction/betrayal/revenge over a black man are part of a common culture of racism in the Deep South leaves unresolved the question as to whether this is a normative instance of the racialization of female desire, or of the feminization of racist desire. Are we dealing here with the translation into primary process thinking of narrative themes integral to the popular culture of this time and place; or is it a case of secondary elaboration of a perverse sadomasochistic fantasy, couched in the idioms of racist myth and folk tale? — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1288

Categorization

• QUESTION: The either/or the author poses — is this racialized female desire or feminized racist desire? — is a genuinely open theoretical question worth chasing.
• DEEPTHINKING: The conflation-of-levels critique of psychoanalytic racism theory is a dense methodological argument with broad reach, but it’s an argument shared with most social-science critiques of psychologism — arguably below the top-5% threshold.
• XREF: connects to: Racist skinhead masculinity cannot be explained by a single shared psychological drive — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1376