White Racism: A Psychohistory

by Joel Kovel

Book Overview

In an unusual, novel approach to critical race theory, Joel Kovel manages to tackle a subject that stumped so many theorists in the 1960s and 1970s: unconscious bias. White Racism: A Psychohistory presents a psychohistorical matrix of racism in an analysis of unconscious bias.
Kovel's psychoanalytic approach to race is haunting in its approach to Western culture. With psychoanalytic calculation, White Racism probes the deep psychological...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231057970
• ISBN13: 9780231057974
• Release Date: April 1984
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 301 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Required Reading - White Racism: A Psychohistory - and Not for the Faint of Heart

This is a profound and disturbing book, relying on Freud's theory to describe and explain a civilization built on a fixation that expresses itself in racism as much as in the tendency to build skyscrapers and limitless finance markets, while devaluing all that is human, spontaneous, sensual, or emotional. Kovel takes us through the beginnings of racism as it has underlain European history, through antisemitism and up through the Old South with its straightforward bigotry, and then on to our present world of a rationalized society that, seemingly without human intention, systematically discards and marginalizes people of color. Kovel shows that Puritanism is alive and well in many forms taken for granted in Western society today, whether credit card numbers, skyscrapers, bleach, or nuclear weapons. This book requires guts and heart to read in its entirety, and might leave one either depressed or determined to nurture all that is sensual, humane, and alive in our world. White Racism: A Psychohistory is indispensible to anyone truly interested in understanding the psychological underpinnings of Western culture, and appears to have been the beginning of Kovel's courageous and lifelong mission to understand other Western - and in one case, uniquely American - cultural phenomena that have rooted themselves in twin commitments to the eradication of life and the acquisition of property.