Thanks for your response, Bob!

I think it’s important to shift attention away from individuals toward patterns of group behaviors that comprise the cultural practices of dominant groups. This kind of shift allows for variation within groups (e.g., there are of course plenty of white folks who don’t make social problems worse), as well as opportunities to generate greater accountability for group behaviors. Individualism (e.g., the view that people are what Alan Watts calls “skin-encapsulated egos”) is metaphysically untenable, for all things — especially including people — are relationally-defined, and therefore we must understand how our existence relates to that which surrounds and comes before it. White folks don’t like to do this; we seem to use individualism (e.g., “I’m a good person, don’t say all white people are racist!” or even more interestingly “I’m not racist, I have a Black friend!”) as leverage against the recognition of our role in maintaining systems of oppression. We created these systems, we continue to maintain them, and we are the only ones who might be able to dismantle them. White men take up the bulk of this responsibility, and the White Man’s Burden is a historical reference to this responsibility that I reframed in this piece. These subtler points don’t come across in the main piece, so I appreciate this opportunity to expand upon these nuances. The key idea here is that it’s not about individually bad white people, but instead about collective imitations of white supremacy that harm both white folks and those who suffer the consequences of white supremacist social structures. There are indeed plenty of individually bad white people, but individualism and white fragility prevent these discussions from going very far.

This said: yes, whiteness, which more specifically refers to the sets of behaviors white Americans repeatedly perform as cultural practices, appears strikingly similar to narcissistic defense mechanisms (e.g., denial, projective identification, gaslighting, etc.), all of which aim to maintain an illusion of perfection that isn’t based in reality. “I’m exceptional, not exceptions!” is a narcissistic mantra that many white folks also adopt when responding to discussions about racism. There are also core cultural wounds that have yet to be healed among white folks in the US, including the economic and cultural devastation that occurred among Southern white folks when slaves were emancipated — which parallels the early childhood wounds that later develop into narcissistic complexes. There’s a lot more to be said here that might turn into another essay.

Thanks for your time and energy! I appreciate your contribution to these complexities.