Racism functions as unconscious acting out of infantile oedipal desire.
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
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Explains Kovel’s psychoanalytic concept of racism as a ‘negative Oedipus’ — the black man as both father and son within white fantasy.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s own framing of sacrifice and unconscious projection; also to Freudian readings of colonial/racial domination.
Related
- Psychoanalytic theories read racism as unconscious projection onto blacks, not as response to them. (similarity 0.88)
- Unconscious racism names how primordial feeling-structures become racialized (similarity 0.80)
- Psychoanalytic readings reduced Southern anti-black racism to displaced oedipal anxieties (similarity 0.79)
- Psychoanalytic accounts of racism cannot reduce it to a single psychological principle. (similarity 0.79)
- Study of racism’s psychic roots neglected pre-Oedipal mechanisms until Theweleit. (similarity 0.78)