Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXV, 2006

MAPPING RACISM

BY DONALD B. MOSS, M.D.

The author uses the metaphor of mapping to illuminate

a structural feature of racist thought, locating the degraded
object along vertical and horizontal axes. These axes establish
coordinates of hierarchy and of distance. With the coordinates
in place, racist thought begins to seem grounded in nat-
ural processes. The other’s identity becomes consolidated, and
parochialism results. The use of this kind of mapping is il-
lustrated via two patient vignettes. The author presents
Freud’s (1905, 1927) views in relation to such a “mapping”
process, as well as Adorno’s (1951) and Baldwin’s (1965).
Finally, the author conceptualizes the crucial status of prim-
itivity in the workings of racist thought.

INTRODUCTION
For nearly 100 years, American psychoanalysis, under the influ-
ence of a variety of forces—commercial and intellectual, ethical
and political—has slowly found ways to identify, resist, and undo
the deforming weight of its parochial, heterosexual male origins.
Individually and organizationally, we have thereby become more
cosmopolitan, more worldly. We have seen theory and practice
reshaped not only from the inside—by force of clinical experi-
ence or conceptual inconsistency—but also from the outside, by
the determining—and, in this case, the progressive—forces of his-
tory. In recent decades, these historical forces have been partic-
ularly effective—and particularly noticeable—as we have begun

271

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 272 DONALD B. MOSS

the long task of dismantling the homophobic and misogynist

foundations that have constituted an important part of our legacy.
As for the deformations inherent in our parochial whiteness,
however, we have remained peculiarly stuck. As a result of forces
that we have yet to even name, let alone to counter, we work in a
professional environment that is essentially segregated from peo-
ple and cultures of color, deprived of contact with them. Within
that environment, there are scant signs of either influence or in-
filtration by what, to the racial category of white, exists as the ra-
cial category other. We have yet to effectively listen to that other.
I am thinking here of “effectively listening” in perhaps its
strongest sense, as a transforming experience of reception, akin
to the listening we do clinically. Listening psychoanalytically en-
tails not only hearing what the other has said, but also, and more
importantly, noting how what was said has made its way into us,
and, in its passage, has changed us. In listening to the other, we
invite the other to take up a location inside of us. Listening, in ef-
fect, moves the object from an external location to an internal
one.
Since we have yet to find ourselves in sustained, mutually influ-
ential/mutually transformative contact with peoples and cultures
of color, American clinical psychoanalysis remains parochially
white. Our clinical credo holds up here: actual experience is a
necessary, though not sufficient, precondition for change. While
imagined experiences with a charged object may produce reveal-
ing and helpful dreams, daydreams, and symptoms, if neither
acted upon nor interpreted, such experiences do little to de-
stabilize the status quo. Parochialism cannot be successfully over-
come by acts of imagination alone.

THE TENACITY OF PAROCHIALISM

Our explosively multicultural historical surround provides us with
abundant opportunity to counter our parochialism, but, in the
face of that opportunity, we seem to be hunkering down more than
opening up. Note the stark contrast between the explicit multi-

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 MAPPING RACISM 273
cultural ethos of academic psychoanalysis and the relative indif-
ference to that ethos that seems characteristic of clinical analysis.
The only cultural group whose historically grounded pain has
won our continuous theoretical, clinical, and institutional focus
has been Holocaust survivors. There has yet to appear a sustained
psychoanalytic literature addressed either to or about the racial
others whom we have mapped out beyond the reach of our
clinical, theoretical, and programmatic margins. To the extent
that we are operating parochially, we focus on people who can
be constructed as seeming like ourselves—insiders, people with
whom we feel we can stably identify.
Identities, like identifications, tend to feel grounded in nat-
ural processes, more like the consequence of bodily essences—
of “blood”—than like the outcome of conflicted desires. I and we
have an apparently self-evident foundation. This received, self-evi-
dent dimension of identity is the hallmark of parochialism. Pa-
rochialism can be thought of as the result of a restricted, inhib-
ited range of identifications that, in turn, feels natural and war-
ranted. Parochialism refers to conscious dimensions of identity.
In clinical work, we assume a posture congruent with a parochial
one. Psychoanalysts identify with their patients. We see the narra-
tive through their eyes. We work in a first-person plural posture,
forming a benign parochial group of two. Parochialism runs
amok not via the restrictions stemming from its explicit set of
formative identifications, but via the potential for violence stem-
ming from its implicit set of retaliatory disidentifications.
While it may now be virtually impossible for contemporary
white analysts like me to avoid confronting both our own and our
discipline’s histories of misogyny and homophobia, it remains re-
markably easy to pay no serious, sustained attention to our par-
allel histories regarding race and racism. Both formally and in-
formally, we now think and talk seriously, even urgently, about
the conceptually unstable sexual foundations from which ema-
nate our no-longer-primary dichotomies of masculine/feminine,
gay/straight, lesbian/heterosexual. We tend to think out the con-
sequences for ourselves and for our practices of whether we are

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 274 DONALD B. MOSS

straight/gay, man/woman, homophobic or not, misogynist or

not. Even the problems presented by transsexuality have gained
some respectful attention in our informal dialogues and in our
clinical-theoretical literature. These changes in how we think, talk,
and write about our excitements, our fears, and our identifica-
tions regarding sexually grounded matters—bodily matters—have
been driven by forces originating both inside and outside the con-
sulting room. The same cannot yet be said about race and racism.
Parochial disidentifications are not entirely private matters.
Parochialisms place us within groups. These groups, in turn, af-
firm our place, our lineage, the available repertoire by which we
make sense and order out of experience, including experience of
the most private sort. Parochialisms promise to limit the set of ur-
gent problems we have to deal with. We disidentify with them and
theirs, identifying with us and ours. In this sense, parochial con-
striction differs from psychopathological constriction. Unlike pa-
rochialisms, psychopathological constrictions do not have as a
primary determinant an affirmation of public identity, of belong-
ing. Parochialisms, then, extending beyond the field defined by
psychic reality, cannot be confidently addressed with psychoana-
lytic methods alone.

THE BRACKETING FUNCTION

OF THEORY
Clinical theory brackets and defines psychoanalytic fields of work.
This bracketing is a necessity. To effectively work on psychic real-
ity, analysts must, per force, exclude other “realities.” To speak of,
and to work with, psychic structure is to necessarily speak of and
work with aspects of mind whose forms evade historical and con-
temporary vicissitudes. From this point of conceptual refuge, ana-
lytic theory has developed enormous interpretive power. Pro-
tected from history, analytic theory has found myriad ways of
reading history. These readings are grounded in a vocabulary of
steady and timelessly present signifiers: sexuality, aggression, con-
flict, compromise, wish, and so on. In order to maintain theoreti-

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 MAPPING RACISM 275
cal and disciplinary consistency and coherence, we aim to protect
these signifiers—these fundamental concepts—from historical, po-
litical, and social flux.
Psychoanalytic theories, like any others, are, in this sense, con-
ceptually conservative. In order to maintain internal coherence,
theory must protect its own conceptual spine. I think, for in-
stance, that, in principle, psychoanalytic theory must resist the
premises that allow for Foucault’s (1980) hyperhistorical argu-
ment that sexualities can be “invented”—that homosexuality, for
notorious example, might have somehow begun at a certain mo-
ment in time. If sexualities and sexuality were, in principle, “in-
ventible,” then the psychic structure and psychic realities derived
from them would, in principle, appear as both contingent and
epiphenomenal. Psychoanalytic theory resists both this premise
and this corollary. Although it provides the vocabulary to concep-
tualize an endless range of sexual variations, it offers no vocabu-
lary at all, I think, to conceptualize sexual “invention.”
This agonistic purchase on historical determinism—no mat-
ter the distortions it may yield—might be axiomatic for any effec-
tive theory of psychic determinism. That axiom would inflect all
that we do. Our every working concept is, I think, infused with the
latent—and oppositional—tensions that bind historical and psy-
chic determinisms. These tensions, after all, provide force and
form to the central questions that hover over most of our work:
“What happened, what is happening, and what, finally, is real?”
We can sense these tensions, as well as our disciplinary tilt
toward the psychic, when we reflect on the place of race in our
working models. In effect, race has no place in those models.
Race is too historical. It carries its historical determinants as
brashly and as undeniably as sexual fantasy carries its psychic
ones. As with the idea of “invented” sexualities, clinical theory has
no ready capacity to house a notion so loud with historical de-
terminants. These historical determinants do not readily dis-
solve in the medium of clinical analysis. I think that, in doing
clinical work, many of us—invested in clinical efficiency and ef-
fectiveness—may feel an inclination to bracket race out of our

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 276 DONALD B. MOSS

field of work, and with that, to bracket out the historical weight
carried by racialized bodies. We would want to exclude from our
working field those problems for which our theory seems to offer
little conceptual orientation.
We all hope to optimize the possibilities for clinical analysis.
In order to practice analysis, the history(ies) that we will be in-
clined to work with will appear to us in the form of their psychic
mediations. For example, in order to focus on the transference,
on the analyst as a psychically mediated object, we will bracket
out representations of the analyst that constitute him/her as a his-
torically mediated figure. We allow for the dissolution of our his-
torical selves in a kind of psychic solvent. We do not, in princi-
ple, insist, in the face of a counter-“factual” statement, that “that
is not what I meant,” or that “that is not who I am.” On the con-
trary, we permit, even encourage, the dissolution of the poten-
tially public historical record of the clinical dialogue into its
private, and dyadic, psychic representations. Those representa-
tions constitute the principal material with which we work.
In fact, psychoanalytic theory is explicitly designed to function
as a kind of solvent in which historical determinants dissolve and
psychic ones crystallize. Any of us, then, eager for workable ma-
terial, might want to let the historically racialized signifiers that
mark us, as well as marking the person in front of us, dissolve. We
could then seek the familiar set of transhistorical psychic signi-
fiers that will allow us to think effectively—psychoanalytically—
about this and any person whom we might clinically encounter.
Like gender, racial identity puts a biological cast on subjec-
tivity. Just as the object in front of us might be constituted, first
and foremost, as a “woman,” she will also be constituted, first and
foremost, as a “black” woman. Within the subject/object world
defined by racial identities, “blood” trumps mind. That is, when
racial identity is an operative component, the racial adjective is
primary; all others follow. This is particularly true regarding
sexuality. The racial other is always a sexual other. I have never
heard a clinical report in which an interracial sexual relationship
has not, on racial grounds, become an explicit object of inquiry.

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 MAPPING RACISM 277
Once we place the object in a racial category, we are also placing
the object in a sexual category.
Of course, it is not psychoanalytic theory per se that insists on
this; it is history that does. The racial category of the object mat-
ters because the racial category of the object has mattered. The
meanings of race today are directly continuous with its meanings
of yesterday. This historical continuity is, in principle, what might
be meant by historical determinism. To the extent that race re-
mains a historically “real”—that is, historically determined—cate-
gory, there will exist historically “real” regulations regarding sex-
ual congress between races. Psychic and historical determinisms
converge in the construction of the racially charged sexual ob-
ject. Establishment of free racial congress would mark the end of
race as a historically “real” category, and only then would race be
adequately thought of as primarily a product of psychic determi-
nism.
I am reminded here of Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality” (1905), particularly the section on “Deviations in Re-
spect to Object.” One such “deviation” that Freud could theoret-
ically have described would have been the “deviation” in respect
to the object’s “race.” The sexual charge attached to the racial oth-
er reflects the other’s interdicted/exceptional status. Sexual con-
gress with the other must be, even when nominally permitted,
transgressive. Race, then, comes to us as a supplementary cate-
gory of sexual object. In disidentifying with and thereby locat-
ing the racialized object, the parochial hopes to identify and lo-
cate him-/herself. In coming to map out and know the sexuality
of the racial other, the parochial also aims to map out and know
its own sexuality. As concave fits together with convex, and as
neurotic fits together with perverse, the parochial and his/her
racial other fit together in a relation of inverse complementarity.

PLOTTING THE COORDINATES

The racial other constitutes a distinct category of object, a cate-
gory whose members are felt to share crucial similarities to each

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 278 DONALD B. MOSS

other. Membership in the category is determinative. Membership

locates the object in an object world that is itself sectioned and
mapped by category: men here, women there, gays here, children
there, good objects here, bad ones there, and so on. To the ex-
tent that they are lived as distinct, all distinct object categories oc-
cupy locations on this map.
The object maps I have in mind function at both personal and
cultural levels, consciously and unconsciously. These maps orient
us as we try to work, as we try to satisfy the exigent demands of
both fantasy and idea. The maps provide information: where we
might find what fantasy compels us to look for. Fantasy, forged by
desire and necessity, shaped by thought, drives us into the object
world to do our work. The object map I have in mind points to
likely locations—internal and external—where likely objects can
be found to assist us in the work at hand.
Like all categories of mapped objects, the category of racial
other is mapped onto vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical
axis reads difference hierarchically. This hierarchy is anchored by
idealized types on one end, degraded types on the other. Objects
are lined up according to their distance from the idealized and
the degraded. This axis imposes measurement: Just how beauti-
ful, how kind, how just, how fitting, how maternal, how . . . is the
object in question? The object map’s horizontal axis measures
distance. We experience closer ones as insiders, as intimate, in-
ternal, similar, and sanctioned. The more distant ones we experi-
ence as outsiders, strangers—external, dissimilar, interdicted,
and so forth. One object, then, might be located at a point that
marks it as both intimate and degraded; another, say, as distant
and idealized.
I mean the mapping metaphor here to pertain not only to
conscious experience, but also to unconscious fantasy. Conscious-
ly or unconsciously, in desiring an object, in wanting it for pur-
poses of our own, or in forbidding ourselves from wanting it, we
are also, necessarily, locating that object, mapping it both ver-
tically and horizontally. We look for and locate our objects in

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 MAPPING RACISM 279
what we take to be their proper or improper places. We move to-
ward and away from them; we seek or flee them. This movement,
in order to feel coherent or purposeful, needs to be mapped.

TWO CLINICAL EXAMPLES

Mr. B
Mr. B, an Asian man in his twenties, was considering propos-
ing marriage to his girlfriend. In his first session, he described her
as

. . . wonderful in every way. She loves me. I love her. We

get along. We want the same things—kids, the same kind
of careers. But, and this is very hard to say, I have prob-
lems with how she looks. She’s about five pounds over-
weight. She doesn’t dress exactly right. There’s some-
thing wrong, and I can’t stand it. I know it means some-
thing bad about me, but I really feel it’s about her.

In subsequent sessions, he elaborated:

All my life, the one thing I couldn’t stand was to look like
an Asian geek—thick glasses and pencils in my pocket.
Everything I did was to be an American, to look like one,
act like one. The clothes, the cigarettes, the cars, the
women. Especially the women; they had to be perfect,
like in movies. That’s where it started, in the movies. My
parents sent me to the movies to learn what to be. They
never spoke their own language at home. I couldn’t stand
how our refrigerator smelled. It smelled Asian. I want-
ed to smell American. I loved to eat fast food. My breath
would smell American. My parents only wanted me to
speak English. We were nothing and we were supposed
to become American. I need a woman who looks like the
American ones in the movies. I hate myself for this. It
won’t go away, though.

As Mr. B’s treatment progressed, the search for the “woman who
looks like the American ones in the movies” was transposed into
a search to define our clinical work as an effort to “do things right.”

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 280 DONALD B. MOSS

“Okay, then, we have it now, but what do I do?” he would of-

ten ask. “How can I do something without knowing what’s going
to happen? Thinking’s no good if it doesn’t tell me what to do.”
Here the racially inflected object map now reveals what was an
initially hidden third dimension. In addition to its object-ori-
enting function, the map has an overall orienting function. As
Mr. B says, “Thinking can drive you crazy. You can go insane if
you don’t know where you’re going.” For Mr. B, anywhere on the
map is, in effect, home. Mr. B seems to use the map itself as a
steady, and steadying, object. Under scrutiny, its racialized surface
may dissolve, but its axes remain. Race affirms the orienting pow-
er of those axes; the axes affirm the orienting power of race.
The map defines and locates all of its subjects and objects as
specimens, as representative figures of their particular location.
Race intensifies the meaning of location. It has the effect of thick-
ening the local accent. Raised as a racial specimen—a boy whose
parents insisted he not learn the language they spoke—Mr. B re-
mained located as a specimen, self-identified as a specimen, and
therefore seeking an object who herself must be a specimen. “My
parents were what I shouldn’t be. They wanted me to be what
they were not.” I once said to Mr. B that he seemed afraid that,
in speaking his mind, he might lose it.
“I have this daydream,” Mr. B recounted. “I go into a public
bathroom, and someone says something to me I don’t like. I go
up to him and bang his head against the sink, over and over. I
walk out, not knowing what’s happened to him or what’s going to
happen to me . . . . There’s my mind speaking. It’s no good. Tell
me what to do with that.” Off the map, off the grid, violent, out of
his mind—this is Mr. B’s vision of what happens when race and
its supporting axes dissolve.

Mr. A
The following vignette took place shortly after a highly publi-
cized robbery/homici de near where Mr. A li ved. A group of
poor, “black” youths was arrested and charged with the killing of

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 MAPPING RACISM 281
a “white” woman. The killing had taken place on a gentrified, up-
scale street. The victim had been repeatedly described and pic-
tured in the media as well educated, particularly attractive, prom-
ising: an easily idealized image. The crime was pitched to all of
us, then, as conforming in its particulars to a widely shared fan-
tasy of racial/class crime: the “black” underclass had senselessly
erupted into a homicidal outburst in a sector of the city thought
safe from exactly this kind of crime.
The day before the session to be reported, Mr. A had been
speaking about what he and I had come to refer to as his “cold-
ness,” a long-standing state of remove, from which it seemed to
him that no one had any rights to witness or stake claims on what
he called his “inside life”:

I’ll do what I’m supposed to do, but don’t expect me to

feel what you suppose I should feel. I’m responsible to
you for my actions, not for my feelings. I’ll have sex with
you, I’ll be a good lover, but don’t expect that while I’m
doing it, I’ll be thinking only of you. My desires are
mine, not yours. Your job, and my girlfriend’s, as far as
that goes, is to help me do right by myself and by you.
Your job is not to help me feel right. Feelings are mine.
I owe nothing to anyone about what I feel.
I go along with what the philosophers say: you have
to rechristen what is called evil and turn it into your
greatest good. That’s what I feel about my coldness. Is it
bad or is it good?
Like with the killing downtown. I was very upset
watching the news about it—there were tears in my eyes.
My girlfriend saw me upset, which upset me more. Makes
me seem weak. Why was I so upset? I couldn’t tell her;
I wouldn’t tell her. All I said to her was that the woman
killed could have been her.
I would have known how to deal with those people!
They wouldn’t have been able to do that to me. I’ve been
in black bars. Me and my friend are the only white guys
in the bar. We can hear people talking about us. There’s
trouble coming, and we just turn around and look at
them. The look says everything—they back off. No one’s

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 282 DONALD B. MOSS

ever touched me and my friend. My friend’s spent time

in prison. No one’s ever touched him. He’s dead now.
It’s the saddest I’ve ever felt. That’s what started my break-
down, that he died.
I told my girlfriend it’s not fortuitous that now, just
now, we don’t have the death penalty. We should, for
cases like this. In the old days, in my old neighborhood,
something like that happened, we would say how we
would catch and string up those niggers. We’d mean it,
too. That would be authentic—that would be real! The
most disgusting thing about this is how the paper chick-
ens out from saying they were black. I’m disgusted by
the gaps in the paper. The race of the killers isn’t named.
That doesn’t make it go away. Revenge is good—it re-
stores order. It’s crucial to restore order. To name things,
to name things as they are. To get things back in their
proper places.
I hate when people say revenge is no solution. They’re
so stupid. Revenge isn’t supposed to be a solution. It’s
passion; it’s real. It’s not to correct something or to be
just or moral. Revenge isn’t good; it’s meant to be what it
is. A real thing happens, and then another real thing hap-
pens in response.
That’s why lynching had meaning. Most of the people
lynched were guilty. They did something. Society came af-
ter them. People tore through the walls of jails, tore
down the doors. They tore through walls. There’s some-
thing good and right and real about that kind of pas-
sion. People are insisting on keeping things in their place.
I’m worried now. These are the kind of ideas against
which I’m always checking, checking, checking. I’m al-
ways thinking: what if these ideas leak out?

Here I commented to Mr. A that it was the first time he had made
any explicit connection between any of his ideas and the need to
“check” them.

I think the ideas have just leaked out here. There may be
consequences. I may now be kicked out, my treatment
discontinued. You could hate me now. Suddenly I’m a

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 MAPPING RACISM 283
bad guy; you could call in the authorities. No one’s sup-
posed to think like this any more. You could try your best
to block my progress.
It’s not bad, what I’m saying; people do want to string
them up. It just can’t be said. I’m trying to say that things
have to be kept real. That reality counts, that race is real,
and if black people did the killing, we should say so, and
if they’re strung up, it’s better than faking reality, put-
ting them in jail, waiting twenty years for the death pen-
alty. And then forgetting what really happened—what
really made the crime happen. Who really did what to
whom. Race is real. If you can’t say what’s real, you might
as well be dead; saying what’s real keeps you alive. Stop
saying it and you’re dead. Killing that girl is a crime.
Stringing them up is a crime. It’s not doing it that’s that
important; it just has to be said. Not saying what’s real,
making it go dead, is also a crime. Race is real, that’s all.

Here, too, in its unambiguously malignant form, we can hear the

power of the map. For Mr. A, race must be real because the map
must be real. The map must be real because, without it, perhaps
nothing is.

CRITIQUES OF THE MAP:

FREUD, ADORNO, AND BALDWIN
Freud (1927) perfectly catches the spirit of restrictive object maps
when he writes, in “Future of an Illusion”:

It is true that men [sic] are like this; but have you asked
yourself whether they must be like this, whether their in-
nermost nature necessitates it? Can an anthropologist
give the cranial index of a people whose custom it is to
deform their children’s heads by bandaging them round
from their earliest years? So long as a person’s early
years are influenced not only by a sexual inhibition of
thought but also by a religious inhibition and by a loyal
inhibition derived from this, we cannot tell what in fact
he is like. [pp. 47-48]

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 284 DONALD B. MOSS

Not only is Freud catching the problem straight on here, he is

also demonstrating a scope and reach that might serve us still as
a cosmopolitan norm for psychoanalytic thought.
Employ ing an ent irely dif f erent rhetorical str at egy from
Freud’s, but sharing Freud’s aim to reveal the deforming power
of hierarchical object maps, here is an emblematic anecdote from
Theodor Adorno (1951):

In early childhood, I saw the first snow-shovellers in thin

shabby clothes. Asking about them, I was told they were
men without work who were given this job so that they
could earn their bread. Then they get what they deserve,
having to shovel snow, I cried out in rage, bursting un-
controllably into tears. [p. 190]

Adorno is here being educated as to his and others’ proper

places. He is being given a lesson in object mapping. The lesson is
difficult. We can hear its attendant mix of compassion and rage,
identification and disidentification, incomprehension and guilt.
The coordinates to be learned are clear: the objects in question
are to be located as both inferior and distant. In principle, then,
they cannot be heard. Adorno, an eager student, aims to achieve
this act of silencing. He does this by an appeal to justice. The ob-
jects and he each “get what they deserve.” Justice is achieved when
subjects and objects are put in their proper places.
Here is a third effort—this one by James Baldwin (1965)—at
illuminating the map and some of its malignant consequences:

Now if I, as a black man, profoundly believe that I de-

serve my history and deserve to be treated as I am, then
I must also, fatally, believe that white people deserve their
history and deserve the power and the glory which their
testimony and the evidence of my own senses assure me
that they have. And if black people fall into this trap, the
trap of believing that they deserve their fate, white peo-
ple fall into the yet more stunning and intricate trap of
believing that they deserve their fate, and their compar-
ative safety and that black people, therefore, need only

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 MAPPING RACISM 285
do as white people have done to rise to where white peo-
ple now are . . . . The history of white people has led them
to a fearful, baffling place . . . . They do not know how
this came about; they do not dare examine how this
came about. On the one hand, they can scarcely dare to
open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a
personal confession—a cry for help and healing, which
is, really, I think, the basis of all dialogues—and, on the
other hand, the black man can scarcely dare to open a
dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a person-
al confession which, fatally, contains an accusation. And
yet, if neither of us can do this, each of us will perish in
those traps in which we have been struggling for so long.
[pp. 724-725]

Adorno, a white boy, hides, hoping for silence, in order to ac-

commodate the map’s violent teachings. Baldwin, a black man,
cries out, hoping for dialogue, to undercut the map’s power to
locate.
I want to look more closely, more speculatively, at the pre-
dicament that Adorno marks out. We can easily sense the insta-
bility of the young boy’s solution. The sight of the snow-shovellers
marks a moment in the history of his relations to the objects
around him. One dimension of his experience of that moment is
that these objects impinge upon him; they exert force. His rela-
tion to these objects, his experience of that force, will continue to
press upon him—press upon him, as though from the outside, but
also in the way that a psychic drive presses, as though from the in-
side. This drivelike force exerted by historical figures like the snow-
shovellers warrants scrutiny.
Freud (1915) conceptualized the drive as “the demand made
upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with
the body” (p. 122). We can say something analogous about the force
exerted by our ongoing relation to charged objects—the ones
capable of leaving us in a rage, crying uncontrollably. That force
can be conceptualized as the demand made upon the mind for work
as a consequence of its connection with others.

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 286 DONALD B. MOSS

I think that, just as we can actually feel our connection to our

bodies as a “demand for work,” so we, like young Adorno con-
fronting his mapping lesson, can actually feel our connection to
objects as a demand for work. Whether the source is our own
charged body or our own charged objects, this work is always
yet to be done. We can feel the demands placed upon us by
those charged figures who, when we map them, fill us with rage
and make us weep uncontrollably. The emblematic snow-shov-
ellers here impose a demand that both comes from, and drives
us into, history. There they are: charged, forceful, making a his-
torically grounded demand upon us—there, and not here—hun-
gry, wanting, working for us in their thin, shabby clothes. What
young Adorno does not notice and what we, as psychoanalysts,
do notice is that, no matter what they “deserve,” we remain bound,
via identification, to those snow-shovellers.
Identification, then, liquidates all the coordinates on the hier-
archical object map. Identificatory justice—if one can coin such a
notion—might have us all, like the young Adorno, asking ingen-
uously about the snow-shovellers. In asking about them, we ask
about a set of unfinished relations and unfinished histories, there-
by deferring our lessons in map-making. The map is constructed
only after we have stopped asking about these relations and these
histories.
Adorno’s snow-shovellers function as unwanted familiars, rep-
resenting in their familiarity a return, a reappearance, of aban-
doned objects, abandoned histories—of what we might have hoped
had been permanently deposited into the past. Their present-day
appearance, like the present-day appearance of the racial other,
disturbs our confidence that now, at last, we might be able to put
the past to rest. The racial other, then, is a marker of unfinished
historical business, a sign that, as Marx (1852) put it, and as Freud
just as well might have: “The tradition of all the dead genera-
tions weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (p. 437).
There is much about our past that remains unthought and, in
that sense, evaded. The object, racial and otherwise, provides us
with the chance to think history again. Clinical listening can be

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 MAPPING RACISM 287
conceptualized as a sustained effort at capitalizing on that oppor-
tunity. We are adept at what we do, with the limited range of ob-
jects with whom we practice, but we have not yet begun to realize
our responsibility to the other who is marked off by race.

ON IDENTIFICATIONS AND THE

POSSIBILITIES FOR DIALOGUE
Racism maps the human species into exclusive transhistorical
groups. These groups are supposed to be separated by essential
differences. This division establishes a continuous hierarchy. Rac-
ism’s ideal object tops the hierarchy; its degraded object an-
chors it. Racism’s subject locates itself in the hierarchy, between
and in relation to, these two poles. Racism, then, seems to found,
to mediate, and to define three kinds of relations between sub-
jects and objects: two vertical—one upward and one downward—
and one horizontal.
Racism defines the relation between its subject and its de-
graded object as disidentificatory. The demand to disidentify
from the degraded object emanates from racist thought with the
force of raw principle. Equally raw and equally forceful is the de-
mand we feel to disidentify from racism’s disidentificatory strat-
egy.
As analysts and citizens, we feel compelled to distinguish our
own hierarchical logics from racism’s. We renounce any partici-
pation in the malignant sports sanctioned by racism’s disidentifi-
catory hierarchy. Our ethically driven impulse to disidentify from
racism’s logic will directly oppose our efforts to think and work
psychoanalytically on—and therefore from within—that logic.
In principle, identifications create, at least transiently, a feel-
ing that communication has no limit, that there exists an unim-
peded, open line between two parties. In the clinical setting, this
feeling of limitless communication appears and vanishes beguil-
ingly. Psychoanalytic clinicians are particularly alert to its com-
ings and goings. We try to indirectly read the operations of wish
and defense by reading, more directly, fluctuations in our sense

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 288 DONALD B. MOSS

of openness and identificatory contact. Contact, taken to its limit,

is what, for the moment, I mean by identification—the sense that,
no matter what is about to be said, access to the object will not
be lost. Without the belief in such contact, one is confirmed in
the idea that there are, indeed, sectors of mind that, if spoken,
will result in abandonment. And without such contact, interpre-
tation aimed at these unspeakable sectors comes, as it were, from
outside, and is therefore reduced to the status of mere commen-
tary. Psychoanalytic work for both parties becomes a matter of
fulfilling preexisting obligations. If the sentiments and fantasies
associated with the logic of racism remain walled off from identi-
ficatory contact, the resulting sequence is more likely to produce
rueful anecdotes than disruptive change.
Because it is so fundamentally grounded in points of identi-
ficatory contact, I consider the theory and practice of psycho-
analysis to be basically incompatible with what might be called
the theory and practice of racism. Internal to the structure of
psychoanalytic thought is the accumulated clinical experience of
patients saying “No” to both the manner and the particulars of
interpretation. In clinical theory, this “No,” this elementary ex-
ercise in refusal, has a privileged status. Intended as both self-
defining and limit-setting, it is the founding developmental and
political unit of discourse. It points to and marks points of con-
flict and opposition that both dot and constitute the borders be-
tween subjects and objects. Its patterns of usage reliably map the
complementary relati ons li nking the f orces of desire to the
forces of regulation, power, and subjectivity. “No” is a claim of
sovereignty. Interpretation challenges that claim. Since neither
party in analysis accepts the other at face value for very long,
much of what actually takes place can be thought of as an ex-
change of “No’s.” The very possibility of effective clinical work,
then, will hinge on each party’s handling of this volatile exchange.
In the theory and practice of racism, the specimen object’s
“No” can be dismissed immediately. Protest is read as pretext, as
sham. The operations of racism include a direct reading of the
specimen object. That object is thought to be legible to the clear,

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 MAPPING RACISM 289
learned eye. Such readings affirm the presence of fixed, natural
hierarchies. The logic of racism is guided by neither idea nor
perception. Knowledge of and conviction about the degraded ob-
ject has come not through piecemeal construction, but through
shared experiences of revelation.

PRIMITIVITY
There is scant sign of idiosyncrasy in the degraded manifest ob-
ject of racism. No matter that the determinants of this object may
derive from our most private, and thus particular, experiences
of desire—met and unmet—racism constructs and targets the ob-
ject as a completely standardized one. The central feature of rac-
ism’s standardized degraded object is its primitivity. By primi-
tive, I mean here dangerously, excessively appetitive. Racism’s de-
graded object cannot control its own appetites, and this is its es-
sential character. As such, racism’s object wants too much and
wants what it cannot be allowed to have. Its appetites are uncon-
trolled and therefore transgressive. No matter the peculiarities
marking any of the local variations in racism’s degraded object;
this quality of primitivity, of excessive and uncontrolled want-
ing, resides as an essential, invariant feature. In this, racism’s de-
graded object resembles the objects of homophobia and mis-
ogyny (Moss 2003). Greedy, rapacious, insatiable, corrupting, and
violent—the objects are all identifiable by a cluster of character-
istic excessive hungers; and, as such, each of them is figured as
an incarnation of primitivity. For the degraded object of racism,
as for the others, this character of primitivity is an intrinsic, natu-
ral feature.
To the extent that individuals and cultures can be said to be
structured and organized at all, their structure and organization
aims, at its base, at the control of appetites—their own and oth-
ers.’ The primitivity of racism’s object, then, marks a limit, serves
as a sign, of the finite reach of structure and organization. Ap-
petite eludes structure. Appetite—what Freud called drive—is
marked by both direction and force, an object and an intensity.

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 290 DONALD B. MOSS

Racism’s object, in its primitivity, poses a two-dimensional threat

to structure and organization:
(1) the objects it targets, and
(2) the force with which it targets them.
The primitivity of racism’s object—its appetites—poses a fun-
damental, and peculiar, threat to individual and cultural struc-
ture and development. Primitivity—appetite itself—aims to con-
sume. In the name of structure and organization, it therefore must
be checked and combated. By definition, the appetitive threats
posed by the primitive are grounded in nature, the source of ap-
petite. Within the sphere of racism’s thought, structure and organ-
ization set the only effective limit on nature’s appetites to its
otherwise limitless presence. Membership in the sphere governed
by such thought, then, depends upon one’s capacity to systemat-
ically discipline and regulate one’s appetites, one’s desires. Vio-
late these disciplinary regimes and risk exile.
The incest taboo is representative here: that sexual appetite
must be regulated establishes the precept that all appetites can
be regulated. Racism’s degraded object, then, potentially violating
all such regulation, can be granted only conditional access to the
culture. Because it embodies primitivity, racism’s degraded object
must not be allowed to integrate, to vanish, or to blend in; rath-
er, it must be kept visible. It must be readily and effectively iden-
tifiable; its presence and movements must be detectable. Its en-
ergy can be tapped; in moments of calm, it might be put to
work, rendered useful; in moments of threat, though, it must be
quarantined; and in moments of emergency, it might have to be
eliminated.
Racism aims to protect structure and organization from the
threat posed by the primitive. The posture of protector by which
it knows itself is revealed in the disease metaphors it uses to
name its object, to imagine its object’s modes of action, and to
envision the proper means of controlling its object. Racism’s ob-
ject (like its kin, the objects of homophobia, misogyny, and anti-
Semitism), if left unattended, will spread, infect, infest, weaken,

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 MAPPING RACISM 291
sap, and destroy. It is a disease, a sickness, a cancer, a malignancy,
a corrosive. This passage from a recent New York Times article, is
representative:

We, the Afrikaner people, opened up this country, de-

veloped this country, put this country in the front ranks
of the world. And it is now on the rim of becoming a
typical banana republic. Black Africa is wiping out every-
thing we have brought. We would like to bring it up to
a civilized level. Control the object of racism and the re-
sult is an “opening up,” a “development”; set it loose,
and the object of racism “wipes out everything.” [Swarns
2002, p. 1]

Racism, then, like medicine and the other therapeutic disci-

plines to which it indirectly claims affiliation, locates its own
roots in the deepest, most vital roots of the civilization from
which it stems. Like those other therapeutic disciplines, racism
locates its object as a pathogen, and defines its own mission as a
disciplined fight against pathology.
A newspaper reported the execution of Elmo Curl, at Masta-
don, Mississippi, as

. . . a most orderly affair, conducted by the bankers, law-

yers, farmers, and merchants of that county. The best peo-
ple of the county, as good as there are anywhere, simply
met there and hanged Curl without a sign of rowdyism.
There was no drinking, no shooting, no yelling, and not
even any loud talking. [Allen 2000, p. 17]

The degraded object of racism is here eliminated “without any

sign of rowdyism.” The only sign of appetite displayed by “the best
people of the county” is the appetite—regulated and sanctioned,
no matter how deadly—to rid the county of an unwanted primi-
tive.
Rationalized violence against the racist’s object, like rational-
ized violence against the misogynist’s, the homophobe’s, and the
anti-Semite’s object, is predicated on the necessity of protecting
structure and organization—the vital order of things—against fatal

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 292 DONALD B. MOSS

infiltration. The target is not merely the perpetrator of this or

that crime, and the goal is not merely the elimination of this or
that group of criminals. The target is something more fundamen-
tal, closer to the source of crime itself, a transgressively crimin-
al appetite, latent, permanent, and polymorphous—something
particular that, for generations, racism has found in its object.
As structure and organization seem to depend upon the mastery
of nature, so the racist’s object is simply a concentrated precipi-
tate of what must be mastered, the incarnation of surplus drive
and surplus nature, both marginal and deep. The very possibil-
ity of continued civilization is at stake. Racist thinking, like mis-
ogynist and homophobic thinking, is the thought of myrmidons.
The primitive object in our midst signifies a breached wall, an
incomplete project.
Racism knows itself as a voice of and for civilization. Racism’s
object, primitivity incarnate, then, is necessarily sensed as disloy-
al to that self-same civilization. Racism’s object owes its allegiance
elsewhere. Although it may reside in and submit to the demands
for appetitive control, this appearance is best thought of as sub-
terfuge. Racism’s object awaits the propitious moment; in the
metaphor of disease, it is opportunistic. It aims to seduce, ab-
duct, corrupt, defile, and undo.
The degraded object of racism is self-evidently dangerous. No
matter how violent the measures necessary for its control, those
measures all share in the civilizing aim of enhancing structure,
promoting safety, and diminishing threat. In this sense, racism,
targeting primitivity, appeals to commonsensical reason. After
all, commonsensical reason also targets primitivity. Like common
sense, racism grounds itself in what it knows to be the self-evi-
dent principle of self-preservation. As with common sense, this
principle pre-dates and supersedes the claims of any particular
experience.
Without needing to appeal to experience, reason knows the
threat of primitivity as a threat. Primitivity is reason’s negative
complement, as wet is to dry. Within the reach of racism’s rea-
son, the primary function of personal experience is neither the

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 MAPPING RACISM 293
discovery nor the generation of new ideas. Experience only con-
fi rms what reason already knew. For racism, as for common-
sensical reason, the evidence of experience lacks the power to
disturb its underlying premises. As we gather experience, reason
would have us grow more tightly tethered to the self-evident
principles of self-preservation. Racism would have us do the same.

CONCLUSION
Racism, then, is a way of thinking. People use it to tap into the
wisdom of the ancients. This wisdom is codified, with the code
deriving from and describing a taxonomy. Racism organizes the
human world into hierarchically arranged groups. Racist thought
is vertical thought: upward lies safety, below is danger. And in
this, too, racism resonates with common sense. “No definition of
the human species . . . has ever been proposed which would not
imply a latent hierarchy” (Balibar 1993, p. 197). That is, no defi-
nition of the human species can be proposed that does not lo-
cate the human in antagonistic opposition to the other-than-hu-
man, the primitive.
As the object of racism defines the frontier between the hu-
man and the primitive, so, for Freud, does the drive define the
frontier between mind and body. Racism’s hierarchy speaks as,
and for, the human against the primitive. Consciousness’s hier-
archy speaks as, and for, the mind against the body.

REFERENCES

Adorno, T. (1951). Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Ver-

so Editions, 1974.
Allen, J., ed. (2000). Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.
Atlanta, GA: Twin Palms Publishers.
Baldwin, J. (1965). The white man’s guilt. In Collected Essays. New York:
Library Classics of the U.S., 1998.
Balibar, E. (1993). Universalism as Racism, in Masses, Classes and Ideas.
London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1980). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction,
trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books/Random House.

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 294 DONALD B. MOSS

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. S. E., 7.

——— (1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. S. E., 14.
——— (1927). The future of an illusion. S .E., 21.
Marx, K. (1852). The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In The
Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1972.
Moss, D. (2003). Introduction: on hating in the first person plural: think-
ing psychoanalytically about racism, homophobia, and misogyny. In
Hating in the First Person Plural: Psychoanalytic Essays on Racism, Ho-
mophobia, Misogyny and Terror. New York: Other Press.
Swarns, R. (2002). In a new South Africa, an old tune lingers. New York
Times, Sec. A, p. 1, Oct. 7.

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New York, NY 10003

e-mail: donaldmoss@mindspring.com

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