Setting aside how problematic it is to reduce fatal white terror attacks to a joke, this strikes me as an odd way to model black solidarity. In one instance, he says he would prefer people to “don KKK hoods and burn a cross on my lawn” than listen to a well-respected black woman’s work on educating white people. He singles out anti-racism writers and activists by name, many of them black women, and derides, mocks and dismisses their work. My greatest discomfort is not with Andrews’s critique but with the way he communicates it. Racial intelligence – in which we all become better educated about how race works and continues to distribute power and resources – is not revolutionary in itself, but that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time. But I find it helpful to distinguish between revolution, which much of the work he attacks could not create, and racial intelligence, which it can. It’s also vital that we don’t become complacent with the corporatised, tokenistic approaches to training, workshopping, unconscious bias removal and so on, which all too often present themselves as the radical solutions they are not.Īndrews is a revolutionary, and anyone deeply versed in what black people have experienced should be too. Andrews is right that educating white people about race does not of itself dismantle oppressive systems of power. He argues that they advance an excessive focus on changing individual people’s attitudes, which is pointless. Andrews’s chapter The Anti-Racism Industrial Complex takes aim at various black writers, activists and intellectuals who aim to create white allies through anti-racism education. Ironically, the most original part of the book is also the one with which I take most issue. We have all been so conditioned by the erasure and demonisation of blackness that is hard-baked into our society – something Andrews is excellent at articulating – that we all need reminders, re-education, and reconditioning constantly. Repetition is not necessarily a bad thing. The rest of Andrews’s book offers an insightful but sometimes repetitive journey through various areas of racial oppression – in academia, in the media, in narratives of history, in tourism, public policy, museums, and political discourse. Is whiteness psychotic because it is crazy? Or is psychosis crazy because it’s invented by whiteness? Or have black people been told we are crazy because mental health care is weaponised by whiteness? Or are black people going crazy because of the racial oppression involved in whiteness? None of these questions helps reduce my discomfort that we are rolling back the work that has been done to destigmatise mental health, rejecting problematic ideas of “craziness” in the first place. We have all been conditioned by the erasure and demonisation of blackness that is hard-baked into our society Mental health treatment has been highly racialised, Andrews argues persuasively, forming an important component of racial oppression – an oppression so irrational that it’s akin to psychosis… the condition that Andrews tells us doesn’t exist. He then offers a compelling examination of the history of psychiatry, and its appalling treatment of black patients.
Perceptions of “delusion” and “irrational behaviour” are in the eye of the beholder, he says. Andrews goes on to argue that psychosis doesn’t actually exist. What follows is, for me, one of the most confusing parts of the book. Thus, Andrews argues, psychosis is an appropriate way of describing the collective, racial ideology of white societies. It’s certainly true that the history of white supremacy – and specifically the way in which white people have racialised, demonised and oppressed black people – offers an abundance of symptoms: hallucination, delusion and failure to adhere to reason. In fact “psychosis” isn’t so much employed as a metaphor here, but a diagnosis.
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