White Sight: Fair and Balanced?
In the past week, it became horribly apparent how to given an example of white sight, when 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot by an 85-year-old white man through a glass door. Just because he had knocked at the wrong house. The shooter was white and Yarl is Black. No words were exchanged. The shooter saw his phantasm, the “dangerous” Black male, and opened fire. Unsurprisingly, it turned out he spends his days watching Fox News, currently home to white sight’s collective cultural unconscious.
As manifested in the newer version of that unconscious, the AI image generator Dall-E, the scene is one of looking from dark to light with the viewpoint placed slightly above and behind the stooped figure of the shooter. This paranoid representation expresses the intersection of anger and anxiety that comprises white masculinity as it silently looks at the world through its perspectival window—and fires.
(The return to the negative seemed necessary with all that’s happening: I hope I can get back to sousrealism’s alternatives next week).
Scapegoating
In this cultural unconscious, young Black men in particular serve as the “scapegoat” for angry, anxious, and afraid white men—without forgetting the many Brown, Indigenous and other people of color, and those of other gender identities also targeted. All it takes is the unexpected sight of a Black person and the little boy who once shouted “Look mama, a Negro!” in the 1950s—as Frantz Fanon described it—now opens fire as an elderly Fox News devotee.
The “scapegoat” is an anthropological term for the phantasms of the “cultural unconscious,” the assemblage of types and stereotypes from statues to cartoons and folklore, where whiteness, as it were, lives. As a form of the unconscious, the cultural unconscious never forgets. That is why stereotypes and racist figures suddenly seem to reappear, despite efforts to eliminate them. Repression fails, even repression that seems justified. There has to be a conscious struggle to abolish the complex that sustains it.
In different contexts, this modality of white sight has been called a hate complex, the scapegoat, or the folk devil. Revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon understood this literal prejudice (in the sense of pre-judging) to mean that those identifying as white end up “seeing only one type of Black man.” The armed, anxious, angry, afraid white man sees a monster, not a person. This way of seeing combines The Last of Us via Tucker Carlson and Twitter.
Fanon drew on psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, who argued in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust that the antisemite makes the Jew into a projection of the Devil, just as white people project onto Black people. By projecting all evil onto the Jew or the Black, white people can see themselves as entirely good. Fanon used the term Manichean to describe this way of seeing, referring to the ancient religion that understood the world as an active struggle between good and evil.
Fox News and the cultural unconscious
Today, the collective cultural unconscious on which white sight draws has a name: Fox News. By “Fox News,” I intend the entire apparatus of far-right suspicion from 8Chan to Trump and QAnon. Nonetheless, Fox News serves as the clearing house for all the chatter and as the arbiter of right-wing discourse.
Fox News’ viewing figures are not as one dimensional as you would expect. White, Black and “Hispanic” adults all use the channel in about the same percentages. Its audience is notably older and tends towards those with a high school education or less. For all its apparent influence, prime time audiences are only around 2.3 million—notably more than the other cable news channels but well below network TV news which still gets audiences between 5 and 8 million.
For all its small size, the dominant place of Fox News in the collective cultural unconscious of white sight has become very visible of late. Referring to “Justice” Alito’s furious dissent to the Supreme Court’s placing a stay on the banning of mifepristone—a drug used to prevent pregnancy—Michigan law professor Leah Litmann observed: ““It just generally reads like an old guy who watches a lot of Fox News and is ranting about how he had to pay for a blue check mark.” And decides what’s “legal” as a result.
Alito used his dissent to claim “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections.” Not only is this not a point of law, the requirement that all doubt be dispelled is impossible, given the prevailing paranoia.
Nor are universities exempt. At the University of Virginia, newly-appointed member of the Board of Trustees Bert Ellis patrols the grounds for signs of DEI, troubled by the rise in Black undergraduate enrollment to 7 percent in 2022 from 6.7 percent in 2020. UVa is a public university and the state is 20% Black. But for Ellis: “This is our only opportunity to change/reverse the path to Wokeness that has overtaken our entire university.”
No mention in the New York Times article on Ellis that all this takes place in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was murdered in the name of Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy. In the 2017 Vice documentary on Charlottesville, a local Black woman recalls how she always felt “watched” by the statue. Only she didn’t mean Lee, she meant the statue of Thomas Jefferson, slaveowner, always awake, always placing her under surveillance.
The layering of white sight’s cultural unconscious centers on the use of violence to assert white reality as actually existing. It extends from racializing segregation to policing bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. Its infrastructure connects news media and social media to its older forms like the state, the statue and the statute. This is not a conspiracy. It’s a network.
Firing Tucker
The firing of Tucker Carlson was headline news because of his central place in this cultural unconscious. Ironically, the Murdochs have tried to claim a “woke” reason for his firing, suggesting that it was caused by former Fox News producer Abby Goldberg’s harassment suit. Less mentioned in the news reporting—I’ve seen one sentence in the LA Times—is Goldberg’s allegation of antisemitism. No one should doubt her or be surprised. No more should we believe that Fox had a sudden conversion to anti-racism and anti-patriarchy.
Carlson was fired for challenging the Murdochs. In the discovery documents generated by the Dominion case, he called them incompetent, using all the usual sweary epithets. Commensurate with their attempt to promote Mussolini-wannabe Ron DeSantis over Trump, the Murdochs are now Frankenstein—they want to rein in the monster they created.
It’s not so simple. As anyone who watches horror films knows, the monster always comes back. The solution is often found in a seventeenth-century exorcist’s handbook or magickal almanac. Read as symbols of the cultural unconscious, these books stand for the discourse of white supremacy in the settler colony. Those tools will not unbuild the master’s house.
That demolition is not impossible. The removal of statues, the ongoing collapse of Twitter—even Carlson’s firing— do add up to a significant disruption in the infrastructures of white sight. The task ahead of us is to increase that tear in white reality.