This White ‘I’: The Reciprocal Shame of Oppressor and Oppressed

Hurst, Andrea

doi:10.4314/sajpem.v30i4.72110

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Vice's argument received respectful scholarly consideration and criticism. It has also been said, though, that her project of shame, silence and withdrawal, while aimed at disentangling oneself from Whitely habits, may potentially be perceived as “solitary, non‐relational, and perhaps whitely” (Bailey, , p. 477), indeed, a “whites only” affair (Hurst, , p. 488). Certainly, what Vice has suggested can be problematised as a kind of re‐enactment of the past she wants to get untangled from, a regression to apartheid segregation, and also, as Alison Bailey suggests, to a narcissistic autoerotic position, even if for the sake of better future relations.…”

Section: The Obsessional Preoccupations Of Post‐apartheid Whitenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

Truscott

2013

Social & Personality Psych

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper considers post-apartheid South African Whiteness from a psychoanalytic perspective. A point of focus is Samantha Vice's controversial and much debated recent article on the ethical quandaries of post-apartheid White privilege, "How Do I Live in this Strange Place?", which is read alongside J.M. Coetzee's essay, "The Mind of Apartheid", written in the early 1990s on the brink of South Africa's transition. Coetzee used a Freudian framework of obsessional neurosis to highlight what he saw as the libidinal economy of apartheid, suggesting that apartheid policies were not only or even primarily aimed at consolidating White material privilege; they were, rather, in Coetzee's view, a set of measures designed to preserve the purity of the White social body from contamination. What the juxtaposition of Coetzee and Vice suggests is that, while the stain of South African Whiteness has shifted or been displaced, post-apartheid White antiracism, exemplified in the critical discourse Vice elaborates, remains as obsessional, as concerned with keeping the White social body clean, pure, as apartheid thinking. The paper then concludes by considering the usefulness, but also, crucially, the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical frame for interrogating the continuities between apartheid and the new South Africa.

show abstract

Section: The Obsessional Preoccupations Of Post‐apartheid Whitenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

Truscott

2013

Social & Personality Psych

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The invisibility of richness: A critique of Vice’s ‘strange place’

Villet¹

2012

South African Journal of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

On learning how to live in this strange place

Buckland

2018

South African Journal of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In "How do I live in this strange place?", Samantha Vice contends that white South Africans ought to feel shame for their unjustly acquired privilege and their morally compromised selves, and recommends that they engage with humility and political silence in projects of personal transformation though private, critical self-examination. On one view, philosophy is in part concerned with practical inquiry into how one might lead a good life, and for many, at least, this necessitates some form of moral learning. Ideally, the philosophers concerned with this question could give practical, action-guiding advice on how one might undertake this moral learning, advice well-supported by evidence and with reasonably good prospects for success. I argue that philosophically "therapeutic" projects of the kind advocated by Vice necessarily involve forms of moral learning, and that a range of empirical research in cognitive, moral, and educational psychology thus bear on their methods and prospects. These considerations undermine the outlook of therapeutic projects that rely principally on solitary methods of critical reflection and introspection. I challenge philosophers to develop more practical, actionable, evidence-based counsel on how to engage in moral learning of the type that Vice and her critics recommend, and I articulate several candidate proposals inspired by research from the educational, learning sciences and debiasing literatures.

show abstract

This White ‘I’: The Reciprocal Shame of Oppressor and Oppressed

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

The invisibility of richness: A critique of Vice’s ‘strange place’

On learning how to live in this strange place

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About