Psychoanalytic readings reduced Southern anti-black racism to displaced oedipal anxieties

Evidence

This paper has been the single most important influence on subsequent psychoanalytic interpretations of racism. In Sterba’s analysis, blacks are interpreted as playing the role of an imaginary young sibling - they are unwelcome intruders and as such provide a defense against or displacement of the patient’s oedipal anxieties. Sterba argues that the repressed fear/hatred of the father associated with the boy’s passive homosexual desire for him is projected onto blacks. Why? Because in the culture of the Deep South at this time blacks were legitimate scapegoats; therefore they could be the substitute object of both homosexual desire and its aggressive disavowal, thus allowing a benign paternal imago of the (white) father to be sustained. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1281

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s standing interest in structural vs. individual explanations of social harm (echoes the moral-panic material). — 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