In an invigorating book, “Race on the Couch” the psychoanalyst and university professor Thamy Ayouch dissects the deleterious effects of social relations induced by the question of race. It is explained in 3 questions.
Outremer La 1ʳᵉ: race does not exist neither from a biological point of view nor from a cultural point of view. But for you, it exists as a social relationship. How do you define this relationship?
Thamy Ayouch : In the tradition of social relations, race belongs neither to a person nor to a group of people. It is not a set of criteria that would be possessed by someone or a group of people. Race is neither biological nor cultural, but relational: it is a relationship of hierarchy with positions of dominated and dominant. It is very important to emphasize this dimension, because it is the relationship that creates the categories. The categories are not there before the relationship.
The tradition of materialist feminism from the 1970s says that the categories of men/women do not pre-exist the system of patriarchy. In the same way, the categories of racialized body/white body do not pre-exist a system, the racist system, which sets up these hierarchies and these inequalities with very specific material aims. This is what creates racialized bodies (racialized or white). I insist, it is not difference that creates racism. It is racism which sets up differences which will hierarchize subjects.
Is this what leads today to what you describe as systemic racism?
Thamy Ayouch : I’m talking about institutional racism, and systemic and structural racism, made invisible. Racism is not just the intentional act of an individual, a group, or a political party. Institutional racism is the idea that we are not all in the same boat in our relationships with institutions, in access to education, employment, housing, health, material and symbolic valuations. And this is part of something structural. Certain groups of the population, due to their ethno-racial, religious and cultural difference, will, in a transgenerational manner, be subject to provisions which, without directly targeting them, affect their lives and their access to material and symbolic prerogatives. Systemic racism is a process that most often occurs without the knowledge of individuals: it does not mean the intentional persecution of racialized people, victims, by white, malicious people. This is the impersonal way that race undermines equality of opportunity.
Is this how we call into question the Frenchness of descendants of immigrants or Ultramarines?
Thamy Ayouch : Pap N’diaye’s analyzes recall how black French people are visible in their difference in racialized bodies, and for this reason suspected in their Frenchness, but also invisible by this myth of the universal: France refuses racial statistics. She refuses to take color into consideration on the pretext that it would be racist. This is pernicious reasoning. Stopping talking about race does not abolish racism. This is magical thinking. This is once again a privileged point of view, which silences the point of view of racialized people. There is of course a tradition of fighting racism in France, but today it consists of speaking for others. “Don’t touch my friend”, we rightly claim: but when the friend hears speaking, we tell him/her: “you are not speaking from a universalist position, but an identitarian, communitarian one”.
Outremer The 1st: Frantz Fanon refuted the notion of a collective unconscious that white people have over black people. He replaces it with the notion of representations. Why is the distinction important?
Thamy Ayouch : It’s important because it puts things in history. Talking about the collective unconscious is a very metaphysical vision of things. As if there existed a collective psyche that would be the same everywhere, where black would necessarily be synonymous with devaluation, bad, demonized; and white purity. However, this is part of the history of slavery and colonization. This is why I talk about collective representations which are transmitted from generation to generation. And psychoanalytically, it is important too. Talking about representations reminds us that these are hegemonic social codes, historically situated, and therefore susceptible to change, which serve to constitute the unconscious of each subject.
