Decolonise This XIV: Systemic Whiteness and Shame

‘How dare you tell me what to do!

I will do what I like and you don’t have the right to tell me anything!

I expect an apology from you immediately!

(I had stood up for a colleague who was being taken the piss out of by a group)

Shame is a tricky emotion; we all know this.  We avoid feeling shame most of the time as we do not want to be marked out as the other.  When we are trying to send out kids to the right school, we are avoiding shame; when we try to make sure we get the right job and standard of living, we are avoiding shame; when we want to be accepted by our peers by wearing the right thing, or listening to the right music, we are avoiding shame.

All of these examples though are though just some of the ways that our socially constructed superego moulds us so that we conform to a way of being which is alien to us.  By giving us rules to live by, such as in the bible, or laws to abide by, we are then often shamed publicly or within out own family or culture because we have not lived up to the edicts laid out before us. 

Yet, when it comes to shame, what happens when we are forced to experience it, when we fail to live up to the rules we have set before us.  This is where scapegoating comes in.  Using the term in a Jungian sense, scapegoating involves the taking of difficult experiences and feelings and pinning them onto an Other who we then cast out into a wilderness (Perera, 1986).  Like the Goth child who is marked out as the problem one within a family system, or the social group who is told they are more debauched than the rest of society and vilified and hated, scapegoating becomes the means by which a Subject Group takes what it does not like about itself and casts it into an Other.

I say into here as this is how projections work.  I have spoken about the work of von Franz previously in these blogs, as she recognised that whole groups can quite readily take what is not them and project these unwanted aspects onto another group, hating or even attempting to destroy them into the bargain (von Franz, 1980).  The other way this may occur though is through the projective identification of the Other group with the projection placed upon them.  A means of survival, this performative identity then becomes the means by which shame then sticks to the other, as they make themselves more shameful, wearing shame like an ill fitting cloak to show that they are less than and therefore less threatening than those who hate them (Ogden, 1979).

‘What is wrong with me telling you I want to spend more time with you (the reality was you got drunk and shouted at me in a restaurant for an hour, so much so I got up and left). For you to then leave your Hoover here is abusive.  Come and get your Hoover?‘ 

Shame and Whiteness

In systemically white societies though the lack of shame is a problem.  Tied to a sense of grandiose superiority, the idea that one is shameless is I would argue something which sits at the centre of so many of the issues that we have in the world today.  It is this avoidance of shame that is designed by our superegoically driven selves to make us ever more narcissistic in nature.  Its absence makes us ever more selfish, ever more demanding of getting our individualistic needs met, of seeing ourselves as superior to those who are around us.  It takes us out of community, out of connection with ourselves and others, be they partners, family, or the wider real world around us. 

A lack of shame also allows us to use the other, to abuse the other, to go to war with and defeat the other, to stereotype and vilify the other and to murder the other and believe we should be able to get away with it.   It takes us from a position where we see us as a part of a relational space to one where anything from the world around us to our partners, where they are all just there to be servants to our needs.  And where, for example in romantic relationships, when our partners seemingly fail to help us ‘get our needs met’ (an overused phrase in the world of therapy which I truly hate), then we shame them either into compliance breaking them in the process, or we leave them and find someone else to fulfil our narcissistic fantasy of what we want.

‘Well, whilst you were not there the issue of race came up.  You have no idea just how uncomfortable the group became.  You could literally feel the tension and discomfort in the room.’

Lessons from Shame

When we see what we have truly done to the world around us, then a part of us will have to engage with the shame we have distanced ourselves from for so long.  The shame of what humanity has done to induce Climate Change, the shame of what humanity has done or not when it comes to the many wars and genocides around the world, the shame of how abusers treat the abused, how haters treat the hated, how the left treats the right (and vice versa).  When we sit back, when we truly look at what we are doing to ourselves and each other, then there must be an internal reckoning.  And part of that reckoning must involve an internal exploration of our shame. 

So, my advice for those who identify as white is this: Lean into the shame.  Don’t hide from it.  Don’t hide from the other; face them and be with the shame you feel because you hurt someone.  Don’t hide from the shame, face it be with it and let it teach you what you need to know not only of yourself but of the other.  Don’t hide from the shame, face it. 

Shame humanises us all.  The person telling their story, in their need to return the shame they have been scapegoated into keeping a hold of, they return their humanity back to themselves.  What they also do at exactly the same time is they challenge the Subject to find their humility.  They challenge them to see that what they did was wrong, but was not disastrous, that how they acted was shameful but was not the end of their world.  Shame, being with it, sitting in it for the Subject means that they step out of their need for a narcissistic defence against feeling less than, and shows that they have respect for the Other.  For both parties though, shame allows us to feel our fallibility, to feel our humility.  Experiences of shame are what it is to be human.

‘Shame derives its power from being unspeakable…

If we speak shame it begins to wither.  Just the way exposure to light was deadly for gremlins language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.’

Brene Brown 

References

Ogden, T. H. (1979). On Projective Identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373.

Perera, S. B. (1986). The Scapegoat Complex: toward a mythology of shadow and guilt. Inner City Books.

von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology. Open Court Publications.