Caricature of a Racist: What does ‘a racist’ really look like?

^{Featured photo credit: JJ Ying}

By: Rhea Gandhi

© This article was first published in Therapy Today, the journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

It is important to note that I wrote this article before the violent, xenophobic riots were sparked in England, amending the introduction afterwards. I say this to contextualise this anti-racist work as ongoing, and not just a topic raised when violent acts of racism are seen by the general public – in other words by people who don’t experience everyday racism.

As a brown woman these riots are not surprising – they are just making the implicit, explicit. As a woman of colour in the UK I have consistently had to assert my humanness and my right to exist. Every day, I know there may be a risk of being attacked or harmed. It can be subtle or violent, verbal or physical and,
especially, institutional. But this fear is not new, and it is not imagined.

This is not the first time I have had a discussion with my brown partner about whether he feels safe enough to have a beard – an aesthetic choice in his case – just in case he is attacked. The everyday conversations in our home as people of colour have not changed. The anxiety held in our bodies hasn’t shifted. The systems in the UK are built in a way that makes us need to ‘prove our innocence’ and ‘value’ at every level, for visas, jobs and even relationships. Little has changed in our reality – these riots have only made our truths more visible and racism less deniable.

Good versus bad

Not all forms of racism will make it to the news, and most of us won’t believe we contribute to this racist system. These riots further reinforce the split of the ‘racist’ being outside us, not within us – of ourselves being ‘good’ and ‘these rioters’ as being ‘bad’. But let’s explore this idea further.

We’ve made so many unconscious associations with the word ‘racist’. Here are some crowdsourced from my Instagram followers: A bad, hateful person. Slave owners. Archaic. Conservative. White. Frustrated. Evil. Problematic. Unempathetic. Unkind. Ignorant. Wilful. Cold. Unfair. Prejudiced. Intolerant. Indifferent. Oppressive. Dominant. Egotistical. Someone who actively treats others as less than or beneath them. Someone who believes they belong to a superior race.

But what does a ‘racist’ really look like? Time for real talk.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement brought conversations about race to the forefront. It made people reflect on their own beliefs and behaviours – or so we are told. In this article I speak directly to you, the reader, to ask you to listen not just cognitively but to observe your visceral response to my words. The lived reality of the post-BLM years is that most educated, aware people are afraid of being ‘called out’ as racist, of being cancelled, shamed on social media – but really of being caught. Revealed. Exposed.

The overwhelming fear of being called racist is also a fear of being associated with the fantasy of a person who is racist. When someone tunes into the racism we’ve been concealing from ourselves it is these associations, along with shame and guilt, that get activated. It is this portrait of an imaginal racist that distances us from the reality of lived racism and microaggressions in the way that they exist today. This caricature maintains a distance from the idea of racism as something that is outside ourselves instead of within us. It is flawed and outdated (for the most part) and does not reflect the way this plays out in the real world today – internally, relationally and institutionally. It is so much more nuanced and complex to unpack.

Internalised

It is this archetype that restricts us from seeing our own prejudices, acknowledging them, unpacking them and recognising the capacity within ourselves to be harmful – not just to others but also to ourselves as internalised racism.

Our racism is tightly bound to our chest by invisible ropes. These are deeply internalised ideas about the world we learned from our upbringing, society, the media and social groups. These ropes stretch and grow, take different shapes and forms, strengthening their hold on us over the years. But what happens when these ropes begin to unravel? We fall at the expense of others, and slowly come to realise that these ropes have been invisible only to us. We stay blissfully ignorant and benefit from denial. Our blindness has not been challenged by self-reflexivity. This blindness, however, is our responsibility as we mature and enter a relational world. Others have to bear the brunt of our blindness while we’re tripping over these ropes. But do we listen when the person who has tripped up on our prejudice or discrimination brings it to our notice? How do we respond to this?

The deeper psychological work around unpacking our racism is not always an individual journey but a relational one. When we are called out for a microaggression it can be an opportunity to connect, not disconnect, as it is often experienced. You are being invited into a conversation by someone implying, ‘Hey, I’m hurt by you. I might want to stay in a relationship with you. But in order to do so I need you to look at these aspects of yourself that hurt/harm me.’ Simple enough, right? But what happens in real life? What makes something so simple exceptionally heavy on our hearts?

Spiral

Our racism is in us – most often unshakable and hidden below splendid ideas of ourselves being good people, of being kind, generous, intelligent, empathetic or understanding. Our racism is buried deep underneath these layers of wonderful, and probably true, qualities we hold on to so preciously. And being called out as being racist doesn’t actually negate them – it calls attention to the ways in which we might not always be wonderful, equally, to everyone.

Yet we spiral. Our whole identity and sense of self feels under attack. Our actions being called out as racist have the capacity to annihilate our whole being. The threat of being exposed – most often to ourselves – tends to feel more real than the harm perpetuated. We are engulfed by the storm of vulnerability within, having to defend our goodness, and it has the capacity to consume us. We are preoccupied by our own dissonance and are unable to identify with or correct the harm we caused. This is not ‘doing the work’ around racial trauma and the role we play in it but plays into the narcissism of goodness and is not rooted in relationality.

The disconnection we experience by being called out – being invited to investigate our unconsciously defended, learned beliefs – is really a disconnection from ourselves, of wanting to push these associations of the caricature far, far away. It’s not being able to contain the guilt and shame while we see ourselves. Someone just untied those invisible ropes – they are no longer invisible or harmless. We can see them in their complexity and ugliness, and we don’t like to think that we have been bound or conditioned.

We become defensive, we attack, we cry. We feel silenced, and while that is projected on the messenger it is our own shame that is truly silencing. But our racism exists. We know deep inside that our racism has the potential to cause harm – in whatever degree – or our defensive reaction wouldn’t exist.

Colourism

The interesting part is that this doesn’t apply just to whiteness but also to communities of colour. We all grow up in a racialised world and absorb similar messages, and this reaction plays out intra-psychically too. For people of colour there are so many messages about our ethnicities and skin being ‘bad’ that we learn to devalue it very deeply. We degrade ourselves for our skin colour and features, and try to fix our feelings of inadequacy by bleaching our skin or modelling whiteness in whichever form is possible. But as we do this we miss how we have become the caricature ourselves.

As people of colour we assume that racism is something that happens to us, not within us. We don’t think it is the socialised voice in our head or the inadequacy that plagues our being. In our imagination this caricature is outside us and not embodied. But let’s think about this for a few minutes. How would we feel if white folks spoke to us the way we speak to ourselves? I physically cringe at the idea. And we do this inside us and to our own, unconsciously, all the time. We become this caricature but not in the way that we ever imagined. The terminology is ‘internalised racism’ or ‘colourism’ (not used interchangeably). It is tough to deeply explore these lived realities of the racist voices in our head every day, and the deep ways in which they impact our relationship with our skin and our features, always feeling not good enough or making our own community feel that way by holding ourselves to the ‘acceptable’ idealisations of whiteness.

In India, where I’m from, some of my loved ones refuse to dance in the sun or enjoy the saltiness of the ocean waves splash against their skin in the daytime for fear of becoming too ‘tanned’ or darker skinned and therefore ugly in their own eyes. They tell their children not to run free for the same fear. And race goes beyond skin of course. We cannot accept our blissful, full bodies as our own because we have internalised the colonial project’s version of what ‘ideal’ (white) bodies must look like. In India a woman’s body is never her own. It is owned by the other, it is encroached on by the patriarchy and colonialism every day, and it shows itself when people freely comment on its size, shape and shade. It is often the first thing people say to each other when they meet after a while, ‘Oh, you’ve put on so much weight’, or ‘Your daughter’s skin has become quite dark na?’ It is a culture of internalised colonisation, blatant and clear, but we are so immersed in it, we cannot see the ways in which we are harming ourselves and our loved ones so deeply.

We embody racism – all of us. We live in a racialised world but all of us contribute to this system, and dismantling is as much a personal responsibility as a community one. And so to this end, when I ask the question, ‘What does a racist really look like?’ the answer more realistically is ‘Like me’.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rhea Gandhi MBACP is a psychotherapist, group therapist, educator and PhD candidate in counselling studies at The University of Edinburgh. http://www.rgpsychotherapy.org