8 Mile Movie Analysis

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2 Privilege

The black-white dichotomy in the United States has its origin in slavery, when white disidentification with black people was extreme to the point of dehumanization. Tearing people away from their families, stripping them of their identities, buying and selling them as commodities, can only occur if the slave-owning people objectify the enslaved people. Such atrocities in turn reinforce dehumanization, given that one would never treat people that way. While the damage to African-Americans is obvious and devastating, the damage to Euro-Americans, to the perpetrators, is often overlooked. When people dehumanize other people, they become alienated from their own humanity. Defining human welfare solely in economic and political terms makes it possible for perpetrators of slavery, genocide, and prejudice to think of themselves as privileged by virtue of their oppression of other human beings. The damage to white people can be overlooked only when human welfare is defined solely in individualistic economic and political terms. The anguished question as to why people who oppress and murder others so often thrive can only be raised if “thriving” is defined solely in terms of narrow material comfort and riches, and the ability to dominate other people defined as “other”. The damage to the oppressor is at the core of most of the world’s religious scriptures. Jesus, for example, said that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (Mathew 19:24). The notion of charity has at its core the identification of the rich with the poor (the tax deduction notwith- standing). Martin Luther King said that when a white man beat a black slave, his concern was not only with the black man’s body, but with the white man’s soul. Many white people pay homage to these scripture-based ideas on the Sabbath while ignoring them all week. In sum, dehumaniza- tion, alienation from self as from the other, is at the core of whiteness and the damage thereby suffered both by those who identify with whiteness and those who are oppressed because of their exclusion from that “privileged” category.

Altman, Neil. White Privilege : Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wayne/detail.action?docID=6280227. Created from wayne on 2021-12-09 18:06:19.

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James Baldwin (1993) emphasized this point when he wrote that “white- ness” fosters an illusion of immunity from normal human suffering, as if material privilege could confer an exemption from mortality and vulner- ability to physical and psychological pain. People buy in (literally) to this illusion as part of the normal (though pathological) process of socialization into the U.S. racial system. There is a lingering, one might say dissociated or semi-conscious, awareness that we, all of us, are human by virtue of our shared vulnerability. Thus, those of us who feel we ought to be exempt from suffering run faster and faster after this chimera, like a person dying of thirst running more and more desperately after a mirage. As I write, in March of 2019, 50 fabulously wealthy, successful, and prominent people were indicted for bribing college coaches and other officials to obtain admission to elite colleges for their children (Medina et al., 2019). Why do people who have 1.2 million dollars to pay for such bribes need to secure even more privilege for their children? I suggest that the awareness that human vulnerability could not be avoided even with the money and power they had amassed only made them more desperate to find the magic key. Where is the privilege, the power, the success, in this picture?

To reiterate, dehumanization involves alienation from self as well as from others. There is, to be sure, a continuum of the degree to which dehu- manization pervades an individual’s personality and interpersonal related- ness, from the pervasively dehumanizing sociopath, to the “normal” person with emotional empathy for in-group others, family, and friends, who none- theless passes by homeless people on the street without a thought, or who is full of sorrow for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust while remaining unaware of or insensitive to genocides occurring at this very moment to peoples with whom one does not identify, or from whom one has disidenti- fied. Some people seem to have a well-developed capacity for emotional empathy with close friends and family, while remaining capable of exploi- tation, cheating, or even murder, with outgroup people or competitors, e.g. in business. The opposite can also occur, i.e. when people who are humani- tarian with abstract others nonetheless are cruel and unfeeling with inti- mates, with family members. Empathy, the capacity to humanize others, can be a developmental phenomenon. Some people seem capable of great cruelty without guilt in adolescence, developing concern for others only in adulthood. Even in adulthood, none of us can be fully feeling-full for others at all times; human suffering is too painful and too pervasive for that. We all must restrict our identification with, and feeling for, others to one degree or another. Further, emotional resonance based on identification can be dis- sociated, unformulated (Stern, 1997), split off in one way or another when there is too much potential pain or conflict. Given all these vicissitudes of identification and disidentification, it is perhaps most fitting to speak of

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30 Privilege

humanized and dehumanized sectors of the personality, or humanized and dehumanized relationships. What most concerns us here is how the fault lines between these sectors form around racial, class-based, ethnicity and culturally-based, gender and sexuality-based divisions, and how psychic mechanisms like projective identification play a role in generating dehu- manization in various sectors.

Aside from the way that individuals can dehumanize themselves and others in various ways, the point here is that the structure of race organizes the socialization process in order to build disidentification with whole cate- gories of people so as to enable dehumanization. Aside from arguments that such self-other distinctions are inevitable or necessary in identity forma- tion, we must wonder how these distinctions are socialized into individual psyches, along which fault lines, and how the educational and socialization processes might be organized so as to reduce the human damage. The ways that economic and political systems collude with or encourage dehumani- zation is a critical piece of this picture, which is not the subject of this par- ticular book. The way that social systemic forces operate in tandem with psychic defensive operations like projective identification vastly amplifies the destructive impact of dehumanization on both social and individual levels. Dehumanization around these social categories generates the most virulent forms of prejudice and racism, as they make possible, and produce, violence and oppression.

The use of the word “privilege” in unmodified form, as in “white privi- lege”, is an example of the subtle ways that these destructive processes are built into our psyches through language even in forms that are well meaning, i.e. that consciously aim to dismantle prejudice. “Consciousness raising” must always take account of the persistence of unconscious undercurrents.

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