The cognitive routines of whiteness: an overview of the emotional pathways leading to white emotional ankylosis


Julien Quesne, ESPUM - Université de Montréal

In this communication, I discuss some of the results stem from my thesis work on the analysis of the cognitive and emotional dimensions of white racism. This research attempted to document the existence and use of cognitive routines specific to the white condition in its relationship to racism in the modern Western context. This research was built on the basis of the following analytical and methodological path: 1) a content analysis of emotional representations on race in the American TV series Dear White People (Netflix, 2017-2021); 2) a decolonial phenomenographic analysis (Marton, 1981) of the results of the content analysis by conducting semi-directed cognitive interviews with eight white, heterosexual, French-speaking men, all defining themselves as politically progressive, and from two different national contexts (Quebec and France). One of the main aims of my research was to lay the foundations for a transdisciplinary postconstructivist approach that can capture the cognitive expressions of whiteness in its emotional and affective relations to the dehumanization of blackness (Ajari, 2022). I will chart the evolution of the theoretical path that enabled me to envision the creation of a postconstructivist approach to emotions epistemologically compatible with decolonial and Afropessimist (Wilderson, 1999) perspectives on race. Through the notion of postconstructivism, I intend - from an Ajarian understanding of blackness (Ajari, 2020) - to grasp emotions through the prism of race from their profound historicity. In other words, to start from colonial violence and dehumanization in order to understand what constitutes both the repertoires of emotion and the affectivity of the white condition in the light of the power it wields over the black condition. From the historical and ontological roots of violence against black populations has been forged what might be called a white affectivity and emotionality, structured around a jouissance centered on black suffering (through its ontological understanding degraded and abjected by whiteness) and white drives for self-preservation (Fanon, 2011; Whitney, 2018). I argue that neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barretts (2017) theory of constructed emotion provides a neurobiological understanding of the consequences of the colonial historicity of emotions in the West for the modern timeframe. Barrett takes a constructivist stance on emotions, based on the predictive brain theory (Barsalou, 1999), which suggests that our actions (of which emotions would be part of) are the object of predictions and not reactions. In the case of emotions, she adds that the latter are purely social and cultural phenomena, necessary for the interpretation of biological phenomena that are far more opaque to our consciousness: affects. In the dual process that leads to the inferiority complex of the Black by the White lies what Fanon calls an "epidermalization" (2011, p. 66) of this inferiority. In other words, the racist white gaze is the product of an affective internalization of black inferiority. This gives rise to a "white affective ankylosis" (p. 163), based on the idea that the black person exists only through his or her skin and through the spectacle of the violence that can be perpetrated on his or her flesh (Hartman, 1997). This idea of the absence of interiority thus presupposes, in racial colonialism, the absence of affective intentionality in the Black person. In this communication, I will discuss the results of my research and the existence of cognitive and emotional routines that illustrate more concretely the moral and political structuring of this white affective ankylosis.

This paper will be presented at the following session: