Psychoanalytic theories read racism as unconscious projection onto blacks, not as response to them.

Evidence

For Kovel, too, race fantasies are applied only at second hand to “races”; the full range of meanings in race fantasies cannot be understood, he says, unless their infantile root is taken into account; racism is a kind of acting out, a system which facilitates the expression of infantile desire without conscious knowledge. For him racism is a special kind of negative Oedipus; the black man represents both the father and the son in their destructive aspects - the father with the omnipotent phallus, the son who lusts after the mother’s body. In attacking and dominating blacks the white man is both a father castrating the son and the son castrating the (black) father; that is why the more black men are humiliated, the more they are invested with prodigious sexual capacities and are the object of sexual envy, that is, they are envied for possessing the libidinal power (the phallus) that has been renounced or lost by the whites. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1282

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what a psychoanalytic ‘acting out’ theory of racism claims — useful grounding when vault material invokes Kovel without his mechanism.
• XREF: Connects to vault-wide CRT definitions distinguishing psychodynamic from structural accounts of race (Omi & Winant racial formation). — connects to: Psychoanalytic readings of racism are hunches, not explanations, until tested — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1292; Psychoanalytic theories of racism have often been reductive and themselves racist — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297; Psychoanalytic accounts of racism displace rather than escape reductionism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalytic readings of racism are hunches, not explanations, until tested #qualifies (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1292
• Psychoanalytic theories of racism have often been reductive and themselves racist #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297
• Psychoanalytic readings reduced Southern anti-black racism to displaced oedipal anxieties #exemplifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1281
• Racism functions as unconscious acting out of infantile oedipal desire. #contradicts (0.80)
• Psychoanalytic accounts of racism displace rather than escape reductionism #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1297
• Something intrinsic to psychoanalytic method generates misrecognition about race #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1264
• Psychoanalytic racism theory should target institutional practice, not treat racist individuals #qualifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1407
• Psychoanalysis deflects institutional-racism critiques by pathologizing those who raise them #qualifies (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1258