Racism hinges on denied libidinal attraction to the racial other

Evidence

The psychic processes that Baldwin captures so powerfully, and that scholars of lynching theorize, are central for post-colonial theorists who maintain that ‘we find an ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racism, a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion.’ Robert Young, considering the ‘desire in fantasies of race, and of race in fantasies of desire’ that is so evident in English fiction, suggests that colonialism is less about the Manichean categories of colonizer/colonized than it is about ‘the intricate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and dysfunction.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 173 (#expands, via linked claim)

It is in the interest of confronting a ‘fascist poetics,’ and out of the need to move beyond the mythologies (of cultural difference) that so easily reconciles the West to the sexualized torture of Arabs and Muslims, that I have pursued an interlocking analysis of prisoner abuse. Drawing on scholarship on lynching, I have been advancing a theoretical framework that suggests how white masculinity is constituted simultaneously against warmth and sensuality as well as against desire for (oneness with) the racial other. … Culture has been the language of contemporary narratives of terror. Cultural difference, understood as their cannibalism, their treatment of women, and their homophobia, justifies the savagery that the West metes out. ‘The Christian in me says this is wrong,’ Charles Graner, one of the soldiers charged with abuse and the alleged ringleader, is reputed to have said, ‘but the corrections officer in me can’t help making a grown man piss himself.’ The West has appointed itself as the corrections officer to the non-West, and Charles Graner should not be understood as a man who has simply taken his duties too far. For what else is a civilized man to do in his encounter with savages but civilize them? — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 190 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Those distantiated in virtue of their racial distinction are at once rendered desirable in virtue of their difference; those fashioned as somehow fantastic are at once constituted, ambiguously and ambivalently, as the objects of fantasy, pursued as rnuch as fabricated, desired as much as denied, in those terms. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 54 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A black visitor’s presence triggered fears of interracial dating and baptism — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 157; Racism involves a libidinal attraction that is disavowed as repulsion. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 173; Racist desire aims to eliminate the Other’s desire, not to assimilate it — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1391 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Racism involves a libidinal attraction that is disavowed as repulsion. #expands (0.97) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 173
• White masculinity is constituted against and through desire for the racial other #exemplifies (0.93) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 190
• Racially marked others are simultaneously desired and denied in modern social orders #expands (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 54
• Racist desire aims to eliminate the Other’s desire, not to assimilate it #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1391