Racism involves a libidinal attraction that is disavowed as repulsion.

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the aggression/fear ambivalence literature in the reader’s existing material on sacrifice and violence — the erotic charge threaded through domination.
• DEFINE: Introduces the post-colonial thesis of racism as ambivalent desire rather than simple hatred.