The origins of George Floyd

Wayne Kublalsingh -
Wayne Kublalsingh -

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

IT IS not possible for one to “root out” one’s racial bias from one’s unconscious. Even with the best of “training.” This is because the conscious or subconscious minds are unaware of the unconscious. By definition, the unconscious is unconscious; the human subject has no access to it. However, its hidden drives, manias and fears are the “gods” of our thoughts and actions.

Some psychologists claim to be able to access the unconscious. They employ the method of psychoanalysis. They may put you into a state of hypnosis. Relieved of the burden and obstacle of the conscious or subconscious minds, the unconscious gospels out its fears, hopes, desires, long-felt hurt, pains.

Good psychotherapists may trace current neurosis, paranoia, diseases of the mind to past events, particularly childhood events. Historical pain and traumas emerge under analysis and tell the truth about the causes of present pathologies.

There is also the idea of the collective unconscious. Sigmund Freud was sceptical of this idea, or did not further his studies in this area. But others did. Carl Jung, for example, developed the idea that whole communities, tribes, nations of people may feel alike. These powerful ancestral modes of feeling and being govern us all.

Just as schools of fish, millions and millions, move in unison and ballet-like in the ocean deep, so do we move, driven by our same manias, fears, neuroses. Subliminal links move nations, races, tribes to pivot hither or thither, without any obvious physical reference or contact.

Large segments of the American nation carry identical fears, mania, hurts, pains, doubts, suspicions, transmuted, like radiation, from generation to generation. Many waves of pilgrims who migrated from England, in the early 17th century, to the eastern seaboard of the Americas were Puritans. They were a persecuted people, or felt themselves persecuted.

Europe had been fighting religious wars throughout the Dark Ages, and well into the 17th century. Saracens versus Arabs. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The burning of witches and churches. Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots. Bloody O bloody!

Puritans are by definition exceptionalists. They are stringent, authoritarian, exacting and punishing. Their Bible is right, the shaman gods are wrong. They are civilised and deserving of the mercy of God, the others are savages and deserving of smallpox, cannonball fire, burning and looting and extermination. God makes exceptions for them, not the other.

The Native Amerindians were eased away from Puritan conscience and burden by enslavement, decimation or encampment exile. Africans have been kept in bondage by historical violence and promise. The civil war of the 1860s was not primarily a war to free slaves. It was a war to undo the economic agrarian South, in preference to the burgeoning industrial North.

To undo the Confederates you also had to undo his hold over his own slaves; sweep the African slave carpet from under his feet. The war became synonymous with freedom only as a political, economic and military strategy; almost as an afterthought. The war was never entered into for freeing Africans.

The promises made to the Africans in the US at the end of the civil war were whittled away, taken back, little by little. One hundred years after the war, in the 1960s, Africans were fighting tooth and nail for the self-same freedoms that they had been earlier promised.

The chief obstacle to the emancipation of the African in the US is violence, as enshrined in the institutions of power: prison, police, judiciary, work-floor; and the education, housing and health systems. In other words, there is an unofficial ghetto within the official institutional structure. This structure bears the imprint of Puritan fear, suspicion, doubt, exceptionalism, neurosis and paranoia.

To really see this imprint at work, one might look to the movies. The fear of indigenous Indian and African is imprinted in the filmstrips of movies coming out of Hollywood over the last six-score years. Howling savages. Thieving, lazy, over-proud, cunning and sneaking rights where they have none. Africans must know their station; servants, cooks, baby minders, big mamas, comics, bums, addicts, fancy talkers and weary chiefs, not fighting systems, but bogged down in police precincts.

No sooner than the senators of this nation train their guns on Mexico than the Mexican becomes a lout. A lazy, obnoxious, moustachioed punk. These caricatures emerge wherever the Puritan mind imagines an enemy: Martian, Russian, Chinaman, Japanese, Arab, North Korean, Cuban, North African, Venezuelan, Afghan, Palestinian, etc.

The US senator-cracy, a perpetually revolving door, buggered by fear, suspicions, neurosis, paranoia, and the ever-sweet feelings of superiority, induces chokehold after chokehold on the domestic or foreign enemy. Chokehold is the national ethic.

These deep modes of feeling and being – overpowering paranoid, neurotic, sadistic impulses – are transmuted through the collective unconscious. Martin Luther King’s cry to judge one another not by the colour of our skins, but by the content of our character, may not trump such irrepressible subterranean modes of feeling and being.

In Freudian psychology, there is one cardinal rule. The unconscious gets what it wants. The unconscious is eternally subversive. It is as real or hard as police knees and boots. If certain Puritan publics in the US don't get their war fix, their snort of blood, they get anxious, neurotic, trembly, like regular addicts do. Only the periodic snuffing of Third World or Black lives gives them succour, makes their day.

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"The origins of George Floyd"

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