BK on Identity

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

That sounds about right, except that I first read the book in 1977. It came out
originally in 1970, and he must have been working on it for a while before then, in
a period, therefore, when reading Marx was a new thing, and looking at issues of
political economy in anything more than a corporate liberal way, in what then was
still "the new left," was something that lay in the future. At the time I read it I
remember thinking that the argument, though mostly valid, had a somewhat ethereal
character, as it mostly looked at racism as an intrapsychic process, abstracted
from concrete reality. However, Kovel gives it a historical dimension by
distinguishing three kinds of racism -- dominative racism, aversive racism, and
metaracism -- which roughly correspond to slavery, jim crow, and the kind of racism
that has followed the gains of the civil rights movement. He says in the preface to
the edition that came out in 1983: "At the time of writing WHITE RACISM, I was
deeply immersed in training at a medically orthodox Freudian psychoanalytic
institute. I knew little of social theory, and less of marxism in the formal sense.
Not until the work was completed did I realize that I had been developing a marxist
sensibility, while using psychoanalytic concepts to express it. (In fact, it took a
review to convey this insight to me!) I think this was a good thing, since marxism
has always stood in need of an opening onto subjectivity, yet it could be no better
than the freedom with which I was able to use my psychoanalytic language."

Though criticism of psychoanalysis from the left has been valuable in many cases,
it is at its least useful when it draws on a vulgar and undialectical scientism, of
the Grünbaum, Crews, etc. sort. Kovel shows how illuminating the "opening onto
subjectivity" can be.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Doug Henwood wrote:


> Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema wrote:
>
> >Joel Kovel's WHITE RACISM: A PSYCHOHISTORY lays out some of what went into the
> >process which assigned different values to different physical appearances, and
> >made light, European skin a paramount value. It is almost true that
> >this process
> >itself created races as social categories. Kovel's argument is primarily
> >psychological, but has political-economic implications, inasmuch as he links
> >racism to anality and to the process by which social relations became mediated
> >through money.
>
> A review of that book when it first came out - around 1981, I think -
> said that Kovel needed Marx to complete his analysis. Kovel read Marx
> seriously for the first time as a result, and was convinced.
>
> Doug