Psychoanalytic readings of racism are hunches, not explanations, until tested

Evidence

Such conjectures will readily come to the mind of anyone who is at all familiar with how to apply the procedures of psychoanalytic thinking to the study of popular racism. But the point is that they are just hunches, not explanations, and treating one as if it were the other is precisely the kind of a priorism that we have to guard against. In fact we could only arrive at a fully fledged interpretation if these initial conjectures were tested through a lengthy process of working through the boy’s fears and fantasies about school and home, as well as what he thinks about blacks. The same graffiti written by another boy might turn out to have quite a different unconscious resonance. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1292

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1292
• XREF: connects to: Psychoanalytic theories read racism as unconscious projection onto blacks, not as response to them. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1282; Psychoanalytic accounts of racism displace rather than escape reductionism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”