philoSOPHIA

Revealing Whiteness was written before Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, before his famous oratory on the complexities of race in America, and before the "beer summit" held among Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and arresting police Sergeant James Crowley. As such, it is a decidedly prescient book. Obama's campaign and subsequent election to the presidency has sparked ongoing debate between those who continue to see evidence of racism in American society and others who believe that race can, should be, and indeed already has been transcended. In her book, Shannon Sullivan does not only take the side of the former, she ventures to explain how it is that a racist society can appear to itself to be nonracist, thus answering in advance the charge that a country with an African American president cannot possibly be one that privileges white people. By identifying a variety of racist attitudes and behaviors as unconscious habits, Sullivan provides an explanation for the stubborn perpetuation of these practices, exposing to an ostensibly egalitarian society the patterns of white privilege that undermine racial justice. Combining elements of pragmatism and psychoanalysis, Sullivan provides a convincing theoretical model of how white-privileging habits become ingrained in both individuals and broader cultures alike. Though her means of combining [End Page 266] pragmatic and psychoanalytic theories of selfhood raises questions about the intended audience for the book, and while I would have appreciated a few more recent examples of how unconsciously racist habits oppress people of color, I find Sullivan's transactional model of habituation compelling and her careful and thorough account of white-privileging habits, particularly those related to space, both convincing and informative.

Sullivan's "pragmatized psychoanalysis" (44) which she credits, in part, to W. E. B. Du Bois, is an attempt to buttress pragmatic notions of the self as a system of habits with the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious as a repository of repressed material. Though pragmatism provides a useful model of how the human organism develops, reinforces, and undermines its own habits of thought and behavior in transaction with the surrounding environment, this by itself cannot address the fact that some of our habits are not merely automatic and nonconscious but unconscious as well, that is, they actively resist being brought to the level of awareness. Psychoanalysis, therefore, can contribute the missing piece of the puzzle, an explanation for how beliefs and behaviors can both become habitual without one's awareness and, once suitably ensconced, operate so as to stay below the level of conscious attention.

Sullivan provides an interesting account of nonconscious habituation by drawing on the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's theory of seduction and enigmatic signifiers, but she gives far less attention to an explanation of repression in a pragmatized context beyond noting the fact that most white people today would feel guilty about being racist and would therefore repress any racist elements of their beliefs and practices. This surprised me, given her introductory claims about her project, and led me to wonder about her intended audience for, specifically, the early chapters of the book. Here, Sullivan appears to be more intent on showing psychoanalysts the benefit of her own pragmatic theory of the self than explaining to pragmatists how psychoanalysis can improve their own model to accommodate the realities of repression. She (rightly, to my mind) takes Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche to task for flaws in their theories, but she does not devote much attention to demonstrating how unconscious habits resist being made conscious. Furthermore, the detail she devotes to articulating and then challenging the traditional psychoanalytic models detracts from her overall—and perhaps more significant—project of demonstrating how unconscious habits of white privilege function to oppress people of color. Most important, however, is a concern that goes beyond audience or focus. One of the reasons that a construct such as the unconscious does not appear in John Dewey's theory of human nature is that he believed the individual was ultimately best...