From the narcissistic pact of whiteness to co-responsibility: a look at the racial cultural complex

 

 

Carmen Lívia G. Parise^I; Guilherme Scandiucci^II

^IPsychologist and Jungian analyst, member and administrative director of the Jungian Intitute of São Paulo (IJUSP/AJB), affiliated to the IAAP, co-coordinator of Arché - IJUSP's archetypal psychology nucleus and of the department of gender sexuality at the AJB, co-editor of the Revista Self and founding member of the Aisthesis Collective. e-mail: carmenlivia@hotmail.com
^IIClinical psychologist and professor, master and PhD in Psychology at the Institute of Psychology at USP, MA in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies at the University of Essex (United Kingdom), founding member of the Aisthesis Collective. e-mail: guiscandi@gmail.com

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article proposes a critical review of racial issues in Brazil and its relationship with Jungian and post-Jungian psychology. We begin with a brief historical review. Then, we brought some contemporary debates on the subject, identifying the main publications of post-Jungian psychology and its relationship with the clinical work. The idea of cultural complex opens important keys to analyze it, as well as some ideas of the archetypal school on the subject. There is a strong racial complex present in Brazilian psychological life, which permeates psychotherapeutic care. As a conclusion, we point out the fundamental importance of listening to the multiple in the face of a homogeneous discourse present today, in a more or less direct and violent way.

Keywords: racism, cultural complex, psychological clinic, analytical psychology.

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"Race", racism and Brazilian society

Let's start with some data: according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE)¹, the population of Brazil is today composed of 56% of black people, who represent 75% of those who live below the poverty line. Less than 30% of the leaders in national companies are black, and 67% of the prison contingent is also black. 75% of children and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 are victims of homicide; 75% of those killed by the police and 76% of victims of violent deaths. It is difficult to hide the fact that here, class matters, but race is also a potent fuel for the production of asymmetries. These asymmetries were also evident as soon as news was released that contrasted the profile of the first people to be infected in the COVID-19 pandemic (white, middle and upper classes, newcomers from vacation trips abroad) to that of the first to die (maids, black, poor)².

Considering all this, we ask: why data like these do not leave most people perplexed? Even better: why are we often not even aware of them? Why is it not often surprising that we have so few black colleagues in psychology? Contrary to what it may seem at first, racism is a problem for all of us and if we, whites, do not engage in this struggle, this reality will not change.

The theme of race relations has gained increasing space in society in recent decades, being a subject for the media, academic events, meetings of the most diverse societies. The observation of structural racism strongly present in Brazil is one of the most important, and the need to have anti-racist attitudes has become crucial for anyone looking at this serious problem in the country.

To begin our debate on analytical (or Jungian) psychology and racial issues, it is necessary to define the term "race". This term has no objective basis in biology and genetics to support it; it is, therefore, a concept created in the midst of complex social relations, an arbitrary cultural artifact (MORGAN, 2002; IANNI, 2004; ADAMS, 1996). Or, as researcher Munanga (2003, p. 22, quoted by Trinidad, 2011, p. 25) puts it, "[...] the semantic field of the concept of race is determined by the global structure of society and by power relations. who govern it". The concepts of black, white, mestizo have different meanings in different countries such as the United States, Brazil, South Africa, England etc. In this way, the content of such words is ethnosemantics, political-ideological and not biological.

Also according to Trinidad (2011), the 19th century was a watershed in terms of the meanings attributed to the concept of race, which maintained, in common, the inferiorization of those considered different. The polygenist theories of this century understood the word race, and began to classify humans in terms of physical and mental capacity. Thus, individuals of the "white race" were considered superior to those of the "black" and "yellow race", given their hereditary physical characteristics. Blacks, for scientists, would be the most stupid, emotional, least honest and intelligent and, therefore, more subject to slavery and all forms of domination (MUNANGA, 2003, p. 21, cited by TRINIDAD, 2011, p. 28).

The term racism always denotes three dimensions: a conception of biological races (racialism); a moral attitude, in treating members of different races differently; and, a structural position of social inequality between races (Guimarães, 1999, p. 62, cited by Trinidad, 2011, p. 33). In the case of Brazil, it is essential to look at the beginning of the 20th century. Miscegenation - which, until then, had condemned the country to failure - was suddenly transformed into a solution. Defending the presence of the three races, the country constituted itself as a racial democracy. Thus, mestizo culture was, at that moment, the way out of the racial impasse (Trinidad, 2011). From being a villain, she becomes a quality for a very mixed people. We are facing the famous Brazilian "racial democracy", today known to be a false idea, a kind of persona of Brazil, given the structural racism prevailing in our country.

And what is the responsibility of whites in the anti-racist struggle? Well, to start answering this question, let's turn to the idea of narcissistic pacts of whiteness, coined by the psychologist Maria Aparecida Bento. Such pacts are characterized precisely by the silencing of whites on the racial issue. They are unconscious, intergroup alliances, characterized by ambiguity and, with regard to racism, by the interdiction of blacks in a space of power, by the permanent effort of moral, affective, economic and political exclusion of blacks in the social universe (BENTO, 2014).

Another idea that underpins such pacts is the invisibility of race for white people. Whites have no race, non-whites do. We see ourselves as the standard of humanity, while others are seen as different. In this sense, another psychologist, Lia Vainer Schucman, asks us: when was race a problem for us whites? When did we think about what it means to be white? When we think of ethnic clothing, why do we think of Asian and African clothing, but never suits and ties? When did we think: today I'm going to leave the house dressed as white? (SCHUCMAN, 2014).

Thus, it is evident that when we talk about racism today, we are not talking about something related to the moral sphere: it does not mean that someone is or is not racist because they are a good or a bad person. Every day we learn to be racist, because racism is structural, it is a pillar of our society, it is a foundation on which it is structured. And how is Brazilian society shaped?

Brazil was structured from a racist colonial project. Racism was in the discrimination of skin color, but also in the disqualification of the symbolic elements that make up non-white cultures and that produce a displacement of the being to non-white places. In our colonial heritage, we have learned to identify as a "noble" part of culture what we institutionally cultivate, which has white European origins. The European soul devastated the indigenous and black souls by destroying their religion, their mythology, their worldview. An ontological semiocide that served as a presupposition and excuse for physical genocide. Along with the bodies, the meaning of the Other was also being exterminated. This mechanism was directly related to the plantation-type colonization that prevailed in Portuguese America, where the life of the colony was at the service of the enrichment and development of the Metropolis (NOVAIS, 1997).

Today, our civilization remains founded on an uneven structure. Someone needs to do work that is worth less money, who feels less important, so that someone can perform a supposedly more important and better-paid job. A typical example would be the case of domestic workers, who take care of our homes and children so that we can dedicate ourselves to our careers. And it will be precisely racism that will make these people continue to be so devalued, that the work they occupy will continue to seem worth less. Even when they occupy the same positions as whites, blacks earn up to 30% less, according to the IBGE.

This condition will be supported by the idea of race, in which a phenotype would have an internal continuity, determining moral and intellectual characteristics, for example. In the West, the white phenotype is attributed a moral, intellectual and aesthetic superiority. The distribution of economic and political power here helped to spread these ideas, which engendered the production of subjectivities that, in turn, produced this racist power. In this context, we were all formatted racists.

Thus, whiteness is "a place of racial, economic and political privilege, in which raciality, not named as such, loaded with values, experiences, affective identifications, ends up defining society" (BENTO, 2002, p. 5, cited by SCHUCMAN, 2014, p. 92). That is why today it is said that it is not enough to not be racist, we need daily anti-racist practices: from being concerned with black representation in our work environments and in the references used in our studies to the simple fact of having at home, for example, black dolls for sons and daughters, not only for blacks to feel represented, but mainly for whites to stop feeling "the center of the world". We need to recover and update our constitutive plurality and diversity: legitimize parts, make the necessary historical reparation and include the neglected logics. Only in this way will we be able to promote the decolonization of the Brazilian psyche.

What about analytical psychology? How does racism appear among us and in the ideas we cultivate? Well, for some time now some authors have been pointing out the racism present in some views and postures of Jung himself (ADAMS, 1996; BREWSTER, 2017; DALAL, 1988; LU, 2020). The figure of Carl Jung is known to be controversial and ambivalent about some themes; on race relations, certain positions of the author may be intensely problematic. In our point of view, we have to start from this to advance the discussion. The intention here is not to make accusations or even recriminate the ideas of the man Jung, which are often dated and in tune with his time. What concerns us is to understand how such ideas can influence the Jungian field today and the importance of being revised in order to work our theoretical basis in an anti-racist direction.

The well-known article by the psychoanalyst Farhad Dalal (1988) on Jung's relationship with racism raises important questions to be recognized, and sometimes to be critically answered as well. When Jung discusses blacks and the so-called "primitives", we have a problem (JUNG, 1976; 1970; 1974). As Dalal shows, there is a clear narrative about "primitives": they have a lower consciousness. Example:

Powell says "The confusion of confusions is that universal habit of savagery - the confusion of the objective with the subjective". Spencer and Gillan observe: 'What a savage experiences during a dream is just as real to him as what he sees when he is awake.' What I myself have seen of the psychology of the negro completely endorses these findings (JUNG, 1974, vol. 6, p. 30, par. 46).

Second, Jung equates the consciousness of blacks with the unconscious of whites (they would be close). And finally, the black adult is compared to the white child (once again, they are close in his view). Examples:

I would put it the reverse way: I would say the thing that comes first is obviously the unconscious and that consciousness really arises from an unconscious condition. In early childhood we are unconscious; the most important functions of an instinctive nature are unconscious, and consciousness is rather the product of the unconscious. It is a condition which demands a violent effort. You get tired from being conscious. You get exhausted by consciousness. It is an almost unnatural effort. When you observe primitives, for instance, you will see that on the slightest provocation or with no provocation whatever they doze off, they disappear. They sit for hours on end, and when you ask them, "What are you doing? What are you thinking?" they are offended, because they say, "Only a man that is crazy thinks-he has thoughts in his head. We do not think." If they think at all, it is rather in the belly or in the heart. Certain Negro tribes assure you that thoughts are in the belly because they only realize those thoughts which actually disturb the liver, intestines, or stomach. In other words, they are conscious only of emotional thoughts. Emotions and affects are always accompanied by obvious physiological innervations (JUNG, 1976, vol.18, p. 10, par. 15).

For, though a child is not born conscious, his mind is not a tabula rasa. The child is born with a definite brain, and the brain of an English child will work not like that of an Australian blackfellow but in the way of a modern English person. The brain is born with a finished structure, it will work in a modern way, but this brain has its history. It has been built up in the course of millions of years and represents a history of which it is the result. Naturally it carries with it the traces of that history, exactly like the body, and if you grope down into the basic structure of the mind you naturally find traces of the archaic mind (JUNG, 1976, vol. 18, p. 41, par. 84).

Jung emphasizes the emotionality of blacks, as a whole race, in any country. It is associated with impulses, aggression, lack of control, with no great reflections on the part of the black individual. Jung does not study, for example, the philosophy of Yoruba origin, but tends to see the thought of this people as primitivism; which is not entirely negative, but he looks at Africans with great curiosity, given that the European would have lost this direct connection with the soul, in his view. The very emotional white person is a sign of attention, possession of the complex etc. The emotional black is the natural, normal. Let's see Jung's following statements:

These people live from their affects, are moved and have their being in emotion. Their consciousness takes care of their orientation in space and transmits impressions from the outside, and it is also stirred by inner impulses and affects. But is not given to reflection; the ego has almost no autonomy. The situation is not so different from the European; but we are after all somewhat more complicated. At any rate the European possesses a certain measure of will and directed intention (JUNG, 1965, p. 270).

[…] because somewhere you are the same as the negro or the Chinese or whoever you live with, you are all just human beings. In the collective unconscious you are the same as a man of another race, you have the same archetypes, just as you have, like him, eyes, a heart, a liver, and so on. It does not matter that his skin is black. It matters to a certain extent, sure enough he has probably a whole historical layer less than you. The different strata of the mind correspond to the history of the races (JUNG, 1976, vol.18, p. 46, par.93).

Thus, in the evolution of consciousness, there is a delay on the part of blacks. Europeans are ahead and need to deal with the shadow, given that the ego is essential and elastic (JUNG, 1976; 1970). Blacks, in Jung's view, are at the infancy stage of humanity. The author also has serious suspicions about hybridity and the mixing of different "races", as shown by Kevin Lu (2020). His observations on the Americans are no less problematic, as blacks, there are understood to be spontaneous, laughing, and emotional. Jung (1976) also demonstrates clear prejudices towards Chinese inhabitants of New York.

It would be difficult not to see that the coloured man, with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike directness, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected the American "behaviour" (JUNG, 1970, vol.10, p. 493, par. 965).

Fanny Brewster (2017) cites, by way of example, the way he - and later the Jungians - reproduces society's racism in a hierarchy in which blacks were at the bottom and whites at the top. She claims to have felt. in her own body as a black woman and Jungian analyst, the stigma present in the Jungian language when she refers to black people as strange, different, primitive, Other (BREWSTER, 2017).

For Brewster (2017), there is also silencing, since in the face of all the racial hatred present in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century - including the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan and the lynchings of black people - it is not found in Jungian literature. mentions of the impact or influence of white racial violence. Are we also under the stupor of narcissistic pacts?

Brewster (2018) tries to give voice to what has been silenced in his countless studies. In Archetypal Grief, for example, she is dedicated to understanding the intergenerational psychological effects of child loss experienced by enslaved women in the Americas and its ongoing effects on contemporary society. These losses would generate a cultural trauma that would last for generations.

There is also appropriation, without attribution of authorship or influence. One of the great differentials of Jungian psychology is the fact that it is epistemologically hybrid, composed of ideas that approach other ontologies, which takes it in a direction beyond the modern white man, as it promises an encounter beyond simply two egos. The way Jung works with the idea of participatión mystique, for example, presupposes this influence: collective relationships, far from the modern concept of individuality (Jung, vol. 6). The differentiated ego, which separates subject from object, becomes undifferentiated, and the person is exposed to a psychological experience of greater contact with the other, something that occurs, for example, in the transference relationship in analysis.

The roots of American psychology remain European, despite Jungian psychology drawing on African and indigenous sources. What does a true Jungian multicultural psychology look like? Understanding that racism as a possible archetypal energy is always present in the consulting room is a good start.

In addition to the production of Fanny Brewster, much has been thought in psychology, both in the sense of understanding racism and its catastrophic effects, and in the direction of building an anti-racist psychology. An important exponent of such psychology is Grada Kilomba, a Portuguese psychoanalyst and artist of Angolan origin.

According to Kilomba (2019), "the black" was like an invention of the white, he does not exist by himself. His identity, as a subject, is in trouble, since everything that the white person expects or even needs is projected onto him. The white man fantasizes about blackness, from an Other alienated from himself and projects this Other onto the black, depriving him of contact with a Self that is not mediated by this gaze. And the worst: the projected part, in this case, will be the "bad" part of the ego, preserving intact the positivity of the white. The defense mechanism used will then be the denial of these bad parts in us, which results in splitting and projection. Kilomba claims that if the original information is that we are taking what is theirs, that information will be refuted and projected onto the other: they come here and take what is ours. Following the author, the approximation of guilt would make us, at first, still make use of intellectualization or rationalization, with considerations such as: "we are all human" (KILOMBA, 2019).

Analytical psychology follows this reasoning by understanding, sometimes, projection as a defense against anxiety or unacceptable parts of the personality being placed on a person or object external to the subject - which would give him a temporary release (SAMUELS et al., 1998). Evil and ugly are in the other, crudely said. But Jungian theory also speaks of projection as a means by which the contents of the internal world become available to the ego's consciousness: projection would then go beyond a defense mechanism, and could be the beginning of the elaboration of a split in the psyche. In Kilomba's (2019) proposition, this would correspond to the moment when the white man manages to go through the shame of realizing his privileges, and finally comes to recognition of whom he, in fact, is. Only from this could there be reparation, in the sense of shaking up the structures of power and making a difference.

 

Post-Jungian psychology and new possible dialogues

These problematizations are significant for clinical work. There are few productions that directly address the racial issue in psychotherapy. Polly Young-Eisendrath (1987) published a very critical article about the lack of black Jungian analysts in the United States. Michael Adams (1996) explores the topic in depth, in a book dedicated to the topic of racism issues, which will be addressed later. Helen Morgan (2002), a white British analyst, in turn, writes about a Freudian slip of her black patient, who says she fears going through "whitewashing" - racial tension becomes explicit.

In Brazil, we have some examples of works that deal with the theme. Vivian Buck (2014) reports a clinical case in which transference and countertransference issues are interpreted from the effects of racism. Guilherme Scandiucci (2018) also reports a case of a black patient with a "white persona". Bruno Mota (2019), a black author, analyzes the cultural complex linked to slavery and structural racism in Brazil. Esteves and Tancetti (2020) explore the racial violence suffered by black women and the lack of awareness of such a cultural complex among analysts.

Kimbles (2014), a black American author, has an exquisite chapter on how personal and cultural complexes are intertwined in the unconscious. As a black analyst treating a white patient, he is faced with fantasies of enslavement and sexuality interpenetrated by family issues (relating to the father complex). It discusses the clinical case in detail and shows the importance of racial relations in the process of analysis.

We believe that some concepts linked to the post-Jungian universe dialogue better with contemporary thinking. The notion of anima mundi, for example, present in Jung and expanded by James Hillman (1993), is a criticism of the investment of psychic energy in the ego and an opening for the presence of the psyche in the collective environment, with a focus on the urban environment. It is not difficult to make connections between the anima mundi and the critique of the Anthropocene, something that has been discussed by environmentalists in recent decades. But with race relations being the focus of this article, we will expose how post-Jungians can contribute to such a debate.

In addition to the dynamics of individual consciousness and unconsciousness, analytical psychology also has important contributions to the issue regarding the functioning of culture and the collective unconscious. In his book "The Multicultural Imagination: Race, Color and the Unconscious" (1996), Michael Adams will argue that racial categorizations are not natural factors, but cultural artifacts or constructs that are arbitrary, so race would only exist in the psychological reality of racists. In this sense, issues related to race and racism can be thought of from the perspective of the unconscious, as well as sex.

The author will postulate the raciality of the unconscious, not as if there were a racial instinct or as if the psychology of people of different races were different, but because he understands that the collective unconscious comprises archetypal and stereotypical, ethnic-cultural factors. The construction of psychic reality would therefore be mediated by categories or types (archetypes or stereotypes) naturally inherited or so culturally ingrained that they would appear to be inherited (ADAMS, 1996). This aspect deserves to be observed both in our social relationships and when we are working with patients. Perceiving ourselves as racialized, insofar as racism can be a stereotypical energy, can be a good guide for our listening.

Another important idea brought up in the 2000s by Samuel Kimbles and Thomas Singer is the cultural complex. Such complexes would emerge from the cultural unconscious, a layer that is in relationship, simultaneously, with both the archetypal layer and with the personal layer of the psyche, and also with the shared external world. They are formed through repetitive and historical group experiences that are rooted in the cultural unconscious and take the collective psyche of the group or the individual or collective psyche of the individual autonomously, and may even use quite irrational forces in the name of their logic (SINGER, KIMBLES, 2020).

If, on the one hand, cultural complexes provide a sense of belonging, identity and historical continuity, on the other hand, they can generate stereotypes and prejudice, since they are bipolar, that is, their way of functioning makes the group or individual ego identified. With one part of the unconscious cultural complex and another part being projected onto another group or onto one of its members. In this sense, they can pose a threat to diversity (SINGER, KIMBLES, 2020).

Thus, the importance of knowing the cultural complexes in which we are immersed is justified: a culture that is not in the power of a complex has more autonomy concerning the relationship between the groups and people that constitute it, since their consciences are not taken by charged emotional contents that can alter their perceptions and behaviors. Being aware of the cultural complexes that cross us, collectively and individually, may allow us to wake up from the numbness to which narcissistic pacts submit us.

The aforementioned black researcher Fanny Brewster will speak of a racial complex that operates in each individual, but also at the collective level. Its unconsciousness can have catastrophic effects of projection and destruction, but if we set out to truly look at him, we can get in touch with white privilege, white anger, the consciousness of white fury. She understands the issue of racism as a shadow that is in the complex and that acts directly in the case of whiteness, projected through this destructive shadow (BREWSTER, 2019).

It is evident that, as far as clinical issues are concerned, the issue is not limited to racial differences in psychotherapeutic care. The cultural complex operates in many ways, and sometimes more silently. How much violence is there behind a universe in which most of white analysts attend to white patients in private clinics? How much pain and torture of all kinds did crushing and exclusionary racial segregation take? The whiteness of clinical practice is everywhere and, while complex, crosses any service on the edge, as well as gender issues.

The soul of the city (anima mundi) can also be looked at from the point of view of the racial complex. As whites (in the case of the authors of this article), we freely circulate in the central parts of the city - even more so in the case of the cis man, of course. It is a kind of openness to the urban psyche, unlike those with dark skin. What is the psychological experience of being chased in a supermarket? A group of young whites can roam the night having fun, well or poorly dressed. Needless to say, if it were a group of young black people, there would be a high possibility of being violently searched, in the best of cases.

If we think about the case of indigenous people, the situation is not different, especially in times when fascism shows its claws. The native peoples, as we know, are in even worse condition today, losing their lands to mining and other illegal practices. Definitely, non-whites are subjected to a necropolitics - in the well-known expression of Achille Mbembe - that has advanced in great strides.

We have failed as a society in terms of democratic plurality. We cannot, as analysts (Jungians or not), avoid perceiving and critically thinking about the presence of the racial cultural complex, as obviously the soul is crossed by centuries of spilled blood that drains from the skin with more melanin. This situation evidently persists on the outskirts of Brazilian cities, as we know that the police are yet another state agency that ensures the proper functioning of necropolitics. In our view, none of these escapes the psyche, whatever the clinical situation in question.

Returning to the issues of psyche and color, what all these theoretical constructions seem to have in common is the idea that racism is psychologically grounded in oppositional thinking. James Hillman (1986) will say that the whitening of the West occurred simultaneously with the blackening of the rest of the world, and that people identified by color become identified with color.

In this sense, Hillman (1986) will postulate that supremacist fantasy is archetypically inherent in whiteness, in white consciousness. To do so, the author first resorts to the Indo-European root of the word: to be clear, bright, shining. It takes up the fact that North Europeans, mainly Germans, see themselves ethnically and religiously chosen by the Christian god, as if they were instruments of the Spirit to proceed with "advancement", with the attainment of new cultural marks in the civilizational scale that registers the degrees of distance between nature and culture. Hillman will try to understand through an archetypal approximation with the color white, and in this way he will come across some ideas of white constellated in our cultural tradition.

The author will then postulate that white forms its own white shadow, its own disease, which because it is white is indiscernible for consciousness defined in terms of light. Therefore, we feel free from the shadow of white supremacy. As if the language of the white, by virtue of its archetypal resonances alone, could restore purity, eliminate sin, guilt and shame.

However, the author warns that in white supremacy, the shadow is white, but it is still shadow. The bad here is not like an absence of the good, but like an excess of the presence of the good: the shadow of this white is mixed, imperceptibly, in the lunar unity that it forms, in the belief of the completed opus, without shadow. This is the supremacy-induced illusion, which will see its own shadows in black, not because they are inherently opposites, but because it is archetypically given that white imagines in opposition, white supremacy depends on oppositional imagination. And when the perception of white here implies the simultaneous perception of black there, we have projection. That is, the entire shadow of white logic itself will be projected onto black.

Hillman brings up another point of extreme relevance. If white thinking is oppositional and if the white supremacy of this ego is a white "purity" that it phobically tries to preserve, then the white self would require a black other, not only to perpetuate a defensive ego, but to subvert it - or at least to revise it (HILLMAN, 1986).

It is worth remembering that the color black, archetypically speaking, threatens the very center of identity, what we have understood by "I" until then, and this is also its virtue. This color dissolves meaning and hope for meaning. It is a herald of change, of invisible discovery and the dissolution of connections with all that taken as truth and reality, solid fact or dogmatic virtue. It darkens and sophisticates the gaze so that it can see through (HILLMAN, 2013).

If we look through these projections, understanding that what is projected onto the black is whatever the white ego thinks it is negative, perhaps we can arrive at an interesting equation. Negative is also the opposite of positive, of what is manifest, visible, revealed. If we follow this reasoning, perhaps we can say that what was put in the blacks also speaks of a subtle essence referring to the white psyche, since its hidden and violating attributes belong to the adjective of Hades, the realm of the dead, the multiple unconscious possibilities.

Thus, the message embodied there would be psychic. It would take us down, into the deep, the psychological and would rob us of our "assets" and threaten our hitherto established ego through its locked doors to the Other, the different. They would bring the repressed back: death, what is not in the world of consciousness, of the living. We are facing the metaphorical death of the white ego: the white ego must metaphorically die.

If we enter this psychological dimension, perhaps we can free blacks from carrying the sociological shadow of primitivity, since we would come to question the developmental fantasy of the ego; of vitality, if we question the heroic force of the ego as the only driving force, and of inferiority when we dialogue with the moral or political fantasy of the ego. By making a transition from virginal white to lunar white, perhaps we can lead whiteness to reflect on ideas such as the limitation of its freedom, the expansion of its ethnocentrism to universal collectives, the dyeing of its whiteness with variety, which would challenge its superiority and tarnish their innocence.

If we stop putting things in opposition, we can go beyond white supremacy. We become polychromatic, not monochromatic. Every act of consciousness is supremely unconscious. "There is no light all white, no immaculate perception. We are all mulattoes of the mind", says Hillman (1986, p. 48). To free differences we need a thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation: an affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; a thought of the multiple, of the dispersed and nomadic multiplicity.

We can't get out of our skins, but we can get out of our white mind. It is urgent that we do so because racialism, as a mythical construction of racial difference, is the semiotic center of the genocidal mentality. It is time for us to understand that this domination does not harm only a phenotypically marked layer, but all of us, as this unconsciousness does not allow us to recognize ourselves in our own constitutive diversity.

We are the result of a civilizational experience of discomfort, of non-place, an institutional project of death of bodies and knowledge. To get out of this thanatical logic, we will need to rely on the multiple, the diverse and the plural as founding conditions of the psyche. It is necessary to think from the point of view of diversity instead of looking for an alleged unity because the soul making - of an individual or of a people - takes place in countless ways and feeds on the tensions pregnant with the new, with the differences in movement.

This idea is also present in the Bantu philosophy, a people to which most of the enslaved blacks brought to Brazil belonged. For the Bantu, moyoo is the vital force that keeps us alive, a force that is not permanent, but that is renewed, mainly through encounters, through "crosses" between Me and others, between different cultures. A perspective of being through the crossroads, from the affections and tensions that occur when cultures cross and that can be expressed by the ubuntu philosophy: I am because we are, I am me and the other, I plus the other (PARISE, SCANDIUCCI, 2021).

We can learn from them and support our ideas and our daily practices from the idea of the multiple whenever we are faced with homogeneous discourses, where only one truth prevails. The diverse and the plural are a condition of psychic living and civilizing life. When we learn to live with difference, inside and outside of us, and more than that: when we learn to honor it, we will be able to reinvent life in the cracks of this horror project.

And I believe, I do believe

that our dreams

protected

by the sheets of the night

when they open one by one

on the clothesline of a new time

our tears flow

fertilizing all the earth

where black seeds resist

reawakening hopes

in us

(Conceição Evaristo).

 

References

 

Received: 08/03/2022
Revised: 12/07/2022

 

 

1 Source: http://www.ibge.gov.br, accessed in 05/19/2022.
2 See, for example, Health at a glance report, prepared by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and five partners, including Brazil. Source: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/negros-tem-15-mais-chance-de-morrer-por-covid-19-no-brasil-diz-ocde/. Accessed on 06/30/2022.