One Woman’s Hatred of White People Reflects Bigger Problems
Recently, there was an article published in “Common Sense with Bari Weiss” in which Katie Herzog interviewed a psychologist named Aruna Khilanani. Dr. Khilanani had given a presentation at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind”, in which she had discussed, inter alia, her longing to “unload[…] a revolver into the head of any white person that got in [her] way”. Reading the interview offered an enlightening glimpse into a deeply hateful way of thinking, and taught me some interesting things. Firstly, there was “a method to the madness”: there were certain lenses through which she seemed to have looked, through which I could imagine the world looking as she saw it. Secondly, I realised that Dr. Khilanani’s worldview was likely a product of the intellectual environment which is now regrettably widespread in the USA.
Throughout the interview, one of the patterns I noticed was that she would explain in racial terms what did not need to be thus explained. For instance, she insists on explaining behaviours which she considers typical of white people with reference to history and politics. For instance, there is this part:
What got passed along were these lies about what actually happened. And those lies are internalized and become part of the culture.
What lie specifically are you talking about?
One lie would be that any time white people say they discovered something. Any time they steal something they use the word “discovery.”
You mean like food? Culture?
This country. That’s part of the rhetoric — “We discovered a country.” You haven’t discovered shit! But this idea is everywhere. Look at food bloggers who are like, “I invented something new,” and you’re like, “Oh so you added flaky salt. You added a twig of parsley.” Everything else is stolen.
Presumably, Dr. Khilanani has never tried to build a successful blog. Anyone who has knows that the blogosphere is often intensely competitive. This is especially true for food blogging. Digital marketing professional Kapil Heera highlights it as one of “Seven Super Competitive Blogging Niches You Should Stay Away From”. In that article, he also writes that “the field has simply saturated” and that “[m]ost of what could be covered has probably already been covered when it comes to food as a niche”. Moreover, bloggers can earn money based on the number of clicks which their posts receive (so-called “CPM ads” “are ads that pay you a fixed amount of money based on how many people view your ad”, explains Jessica Knapp at bloggingbasics101.com), so there are strong incentives to write “clickbaity” titles and exaggerate the merits of their content. There is no need for any psychological, racialised speculation of the kind which she proposes. This part of the interview also shows a lack of intellectual rigour: has Dr. Khilanani fed the numbers of “clickbaity” titles with the words “discover”, “discovered”, “discovers” and “discovery” taken from a representative sample of food blog titles written by white people, into an algorithm to compare their frequency to the frequencies of such titles in food blogs written by members of other races? If she had, I assume she would have mentioned it. This practice of treating anecdotes and subjective impressions as though they were as reliable as systematic studies is something which, as we will see, is more common than one might assume, even in academia.
Another problem is that she constantly assumes that people’s actions are driven by subconscious racist motivations. For example, there is this passage:
It does seem like you generalize a lot about white people but also people of color. Why do you do that?
What do you feel is a generalization?
Like white people having a high level of guilt or not eating bread. That’s true for some people, for sure. But I eat bread.
You asked me before, what is the unconscious? I think the unconscious is coming out right now between you and I. This idea that I’m the one that’s generalizing is, I think, a defensive reaction to my talking about whiteness. You feel put on the spot and so I’m the one that’s generalizing.
In the interview, Dr. Khilanani makes sweeping statements about white people based on the fact that some of them avoid eating bread, so the observation that she is extrapolating is perfectly justified, and it is understandable why the interviewer brought it up. So why assume that it is a “defensive reaction”? If anything, Dr. Khilanani’s responding in this manner to a natural follow-up question about her theories, by pathologising the person who asks the question, looks like a “defensive reaction”. The same could be said of her statement that she “got rid of the couple white BIPOCs that snuck in [her] crew”, “white BIPOC” being defined by her as a non-white person characterised by “internalized whiteness” — that is, she isolated herself from those of her non-white friends who held views which she regards as “white”. Again, we observe a failure to engage with opposing points of view, and their pathologising, in this case as “internalized whiteness”.
This postulating of unnecessary subconscious motivations may be a result of overstepping her bounds as an expert: she is a psychologist, so she sees everything in psychological terms. Furthermore, she is described on the flyer for her presentation (pictured in the article) as a “Psychoanalyst”, which may also partially explain what we have observed. Compare the faults in her reasoning to those of Sigmund Freud, the founder of Psychoanalysis. Writes Dr. Frederick Crews in the Scientific American:
Freud’s standard bag of tricks, not his observations, prompted him to invert apparent motives, decree that every mental event is a “compromise formation” with “overdetermined” causes, and perceive genital symbolism, incest wishes, and latent homosexuality wherever he turned. The only knowledge that can be extracted from such trademark practices is knowledge about Freud. He granted himself an absolute license to “Freudianize” without concern for more plausible explanations, and he routinely misattributed his personal obsessions to others. […] He included, within his theory itself, a “clinical diagnosis” of the pathological urge to “resist” psychoanalytic truth. Neither astrology nor Mesmerism nor phrenology ever approached this apogee of combined delusion and deception (emphases added).
However, none of this seems a full explanation of Dr. Khilanani’s modes of thought, since these problems, unfortunately, are not exclusive to her, but are staples of the current discourse about race relations. They have become disturbingly widespread. For instance, I was assigned Chapter 12 of a book by a certain Patricia Hill Collins called Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment to read for a university course. This chapter surprised me with the lack of logical rigour in most of what it said. For example, the author adduces this as an example of racial prejudice:
Two students, one African-American and the other White, told of how they switched names on their respective papers when they suspected that the Black student’s lower grades reflected the professor’s prejudice. To their chagrin, when the switched papers were returned to them, the Black student got her same old “C” whereas the White student received her “A,” even though they had submitted each other’s work! (Collins 2008: 288).
This is evidence of the sort usually used to prove the existence of Bigfoot. All right, let us assume that the author is relating the story correctly, and that the students had related it correctly to her. This already seems charitable, but let us be charitable. The outcome of this experiment, if it can be called that, can still be explained without postulating racism. Of course, professors can be biased, just like the rest of us. But in this case, the professor may well have been influenced by the two students’ past performance, not by their race. Another possible explanation is that the students wanted their expectations to be confirmed, and therefore, perhaps without realising it, the white student tried less hard than usual, and the black student harder, when writing the papers which they would exchange. The anecdote is virtually worthless as evidence, and yet the chapter relies largely on anecdotes like this one. And, of course, everything is interpreted through the narrow prism of race (and sex, and a few other innate traits). Witness the following passage:
What remains less visible, however, are the myriad ways in which ordinary individuals from all walks of life work for social justice in small yet highly significant ways. One of my favorite examples concerns an invitation that my daughter received to visit a kindergarten playmate’s house. Her classmate was a blue-eyed, blonde boy who was well mannered and friendly to her and me. However, because I did not know his parents very well, I wondered what type of reception our daughter would receive in his home. Ironically, my concerns were reduced when I saw the toy that his mother allowed him to bring to school. There was this little boy, blue-eyes, blond hair and all, carrying a Black, bald, male Cabbage Patch doll to school. This was not his only toy, but the fact that this toy was included in the repertoire of this small child’s imagination astounded me. With this one, small act, this mother took a stand against racism, sexism, and heterosexism in a way that took courage for this region of the United States (Collins 2008: 288).
The author never tells us on what basis she chose to interpret her observation in this way. We can only assume that it seems obvious to her that a boy’s carrying “a Black, bald [whatever that has to do with anything], male Cabbage Patch doll to school” is a political statement by the boy’s mother. And what about Ms. Collins’s mention of “heterosexism”? She seems to assume that the fact that a boy plays with a male doll carries some homosexual subtext. And again, we seem to catch a glimpse of some deep-seated paranoia. The daughter had been invited to the little boy’s house, and he had been perfectly courteous with her, and yet the mother was apparently afraid that his family might be so racist as to treat a little girl poorly for being black. The blinkered nature of this “antiracist” worldview shines through in every sentence.
Then there are the methods which Ms. Collins proposes for dealing with that supposedly racist American society. She writes:
One Black woman student described how, when she is followed in a store, she fills her shopping cart to the brim with goods and then leaves it at the front, stopping by the service desk to complain about their surveillance policy (Collins 2008: 288).
Again, why assume any racial basis for the observation? Maybe the store’s security keeps an eye on random people. Considering how many black Americans there are, I imagine it would become quite tiring quite fast to tail every black person who entered a store. Then again, maybe the student in question looked suspicious or shifty— it would hardly be surprising if she was constantly on the lookout for evil white people. It seems rather unethical to make store employees’ days harder by giving them more work to do on such a flimsy basis. All in all, it appears surprising that such a book should have been a) published at all, b) published by Routledge, and c) assigned to university students (in a subject not even directly related to race relations in the USA) as mandatory reading. Yet can it astonish, in a climate where this is possible, that a psychologist expresses blatantly hateful sentiments about white people in public?
Again, the book and the ways of thinking revealed by Dr. Khilanani in the interview mirror each other. For example, she deems it evidence of racism that “when […] I […] got beat up[ by a patient’s relative], the way [Cornell University] responded was, “Well what do you think you did to elicit this?”
At the risk of getting personal, let me point out that this is the same person who said in her presentation: “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil” (emphasis added), and also the following:
I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.
Is it not reasonable to assume that the staff of Cornell University may have reacted as it did because it was aware of some of Dr. Khilanani’s character traits? Yet we see here the same failure as in the aforementioned student’s case to consider the possibility that the negative attention one may be receiving may be, if not accidental, then based on one’s own behaviour rather than on one’s ethnic background.
We have not even explored fully the prevalence of the errors of reasoning which we have seen in action. The media are also in the habit of baselessly assuming racism as a motivating factor in actions undertaken by white people. Ben Shapiro, among others, has pointed out the tendency of the American media to assume that crimes committed by white people, and especially police officers, against those of other racial groups were motivated by racism, and to treat interracial crimes not committed by whites as ordinary felonies.
And perhaps we should not be surprised that a worldview like Dr. Khilanani’s could take shape in a country whose former First Lady, Michelle Obama, presented a train of thought on her podcast which Michael Knowles summarised thus:
People that I would work with didn’t wanna socialise with me outside of work. It must be because they’re racist.
In conclusion, the presentation and the interview which followed it are symptomatic of a much broader failure of American popular discourse about race relations. It would likely do little good to focus on Dr. Khilanani and her mistakes. What is needed is the reinstitution of critical thinking as a constraint on the evolution of public opinion.
Reference
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2008. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.