BK on Identity

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Because racism sets up a hierarchy of color values for the human body surface.
Light skin (called, usually inaccurately "white") is thus seen as pure, and dark
skin (called, usually inaccurately "black") seen as impure, and hence deservedly
stigmatized and disvalued. Money and social relations mediated through money, and
therefore capitalist social relations, establish an overdetermined attention,
psychodynamically, to anality in the process of personality development. This is
because capitalism requires withholding, retaining material, restraint in the
process of accumulation. Again psychodynamically,  money symbolizes, in a
defensively sanitized form, excrement and darkness. When, historically, money
became the increasingly dominant form of mediation in relations between people,
issues of anality became increasingly influential in relations between individuals
and groups. The experience of using money, glittery "clean" metal in its original
form, and as an abstract form of value, defends symbolically and consciously
against the anal experiences of work and accumulation in capitalism.

This is an extremely condensed, and, I hope, comprehensible, version of an
exposition Kovel lays out in many pages. Notice, though, that it is quite
consistent with the point others have made in this discussion about how racism is
an aspect of capitalism and not of earlier stages of social development. Like many
applications of psychological analysis to social material, Kovel's argument
abstracts from other aspects of reality. This is a weakness, in that it is quite
one-sided, and a strength insofar as it enables us to look very closely at the
psychological part of social reality. His typology of the three sorts of racism --
dominative, aversive, and meta-, does help us make sense out of many realities we
encounter here and now. For example, the end of legal segregation began to make
aversive racism obsolete. Hence even conservatives have trouble defending racial
profiling by police. So they either pretend it really doesn't happen, or otherwise
distance themselves from it. At the same time, they are clear-cut metaracists in
that they refuse to acknowledge the continuing influence of institutional racism in
distributing advantages and disadvantages in society. Kovel's analysis of
metaracism also goes a long way to explain the attitudes of people like the Black
conservatives such as the guy that defended Ashcroft in his confirmation hearing.

There is an interesting literature on the various changes in the character of
anality in the centuries of capitalist domination of social relations. For example,
the theory of spermatic economy, (see G. J. Barker-Benfield's THE HORRORS OF THE
HALF-KNOWN LIFE, and some of Stephen Marcus's work) clarifies a number of attitudes
among Victorians towards masculine and feminine sexuality by showing an unconscious
equation of excrement and sperm. It seems to be demonstrable, for example, that as
capitalism in England and North America became less accumulationist in the course
of the nineteenth century the colloquial term for orgasm and ejaculation changed
from "spend" to "come."

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Yoshie Furuhashi 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.
> >Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
>
> Why is racism linked to "anality"?
>
> Yoshie