[the "its all about me" Narcissistic white folks edition!] 'Most White People Love to Hate Blacks. Its a Hatred that makes them feel good, righteous and justified.'

The following is an excerpt from "Black on Black Violence. The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of White Domination" by Amos Wilson. [MORE]

Ego Defense Mechanisms

Denial and distortion are the classical categorical means, commonly referred to as ego defense mechanisms, by which an ego complex avoids unpleasant confrontations with reality, itself, and its own pathological history and current functioning. Through denial and distortion of reality and its concomitant self-deception, the collective White American ego complex rationalizes and repressively ignores its origination and sustenance by means of its enslavement, rape, robbery, and murder of captive peoples; its ruthless, unconsciona­ble, wasteful and toxic exploitation of the land, labor, and resources of other peoples; its unwarranted wars against other nations and cultures, its exploitative instigation of wars among them; its duplicitous diplomacy and propaganda, treachery and deceit, warmongering and incitations to riot; its colonizing, neo-colonizing, terrorizing, starvation, benign and malicious neglect, usurious taxation of captive populations; its segregations, discriminations, dehumanizations, psycho-manipulations of other peoples and nations in flagrant violation of its own vaunted moral preachments; its closing of its ears to the cries of its victims; the sclerotic hardening of its psychic arteries.

By means of defensive denial and distortion, self-deception and reversal of reality, the collective Eurocentric ego complex seeks to resolve its self-created conflicts and contradictions, to avoid feelings of guilt, shame and anxiety, to neutralize negative self-perceptions, and to protect its material advantages. To these ends its victims must be blamed for their own victimization. Their suffering must be seen as reflections of their own inherent deficiencies, of their servile manifest destiny, and of their being short-changed by God and Fate.

Societal amnesia, a society's repression of the memory of the traumatic experiences which created its structure and character, is markedly typical of the collective White American ego complex. The domination of African Americans is made all the more effective and comforting to the collective White American ego if its historical and current dominative processes are kept from its own conscious­ness and the consciousness of the subordinate African American community. Historically embarrassing behavior, lowly and criminal origins, revelations of social iniquities and their current progeny, hidden from consciousness, permit the myth of the inherent moral, social, cultural, intellectual superiority of the White American complex to persist unchallenged, and enhances the efficiency of its exploitation of Africans at home and abroad.

Ego defense mechanisms are essentially contradictions, whether by denial, or distortion, of reality. But in the context of vast power differentials such as between parent and child, or more relevantly, between White America and Black America, these mechanisms additionally become instruments of creation. The collective personality of the African American community is to a significant extent a product of the processes of White American collective ego defensive efforts. The collective African American personality thus partially represents the incarnation of a host of collective White American ego contradictions, which are manifested as African American intra-communal, inter-personal, intra-personal conflicts and maladaptive social relations. It is out of the conflicts between conscious goals, apparently benign behavior and unconscious perfidious drives and needs, in the collective White psyche which when denied and distorted in order to defend its collective self-image, that the Black victim is born to be blamed, punished and to self-destruct. Black-on-Black crime and violence are only two of the means by which Black self-destruction becomes a form of Black American genocide by proxy.

Projection

The personal ego, in order to protect itself against what it may perceive as overwhelming shame, guilt, and anxiety, from loss of face and material advantage as the result of confronting the reality of its history and inauthenticity of its current existence, may engage in various forms of self-deception, referred to a; defense  mechanisms.  These mechanisms  of egoistical self-protection and need-gratification can be divided into two broad categories: (1) denial; and (2) distortion. The first involves the exclusion from consciousness of painful and self-condemnatory memories, impulses, conflicts and contradictions, and certain perceptions of current reality. The second involves the self-serving mispercep-tion and misinterpretation of personal and interper­sonal historical relations, personal thoughts and feelings, current and ongoing interpersonal relations and other aspects of reality. These broad categories of defense, which include some fourteen or more subcategories, are principally utilized by the personal ego in order to minimize, if not neutralize, the importance and impact of painful perceptions, as well as to avoid taking responsi­bility for correcting its psychopathology.

One of the most important means by which the personal ego defends itself against anxiety, very painful, unflattering though authentic self-perceptions, and protectively retains and perhaps enhances its hard-won privileges and prerogatives (secondary gains), is through activation of a subcategory of defensive denial referred to as projection. The standard textbook definition of ego defensive projection refers to it as the means by which the ego disavows or refuses to recognize its own discreditable traits and self-incriminating motives by attributing those traits and motives to others. The unwarranted attribution of its own negative characteristics and intentions to another not only serves to protect the ego's flattering self-perception, but also justifies its often negative attitudes toward, and hostile relations with, others. In this instance, perpetrator becomes victim or intended victim, and victim becomes perpetrator. A reverse psychology is achieved. The projecting ego's false self-concept and misbegotten preroga­tives are conserved. Projection provides a means by which the ego can simultaneously express and disclaim its self-incriminating impulses.

Textbooks aside, we must recognize that defensive projection is a way of life, a way of being and moving in the world. Projection does not only require an attributing to, or projecting of the ego's self-incriminating characteristics on the other, but a transformation of internal, potentially disorganizing contradictions into externalized attributive images and tensions; images and tensions which serve to structurally maintain the functionally dynamic organization of the ego. To project threat is to see it reflected in the face of the projective target or person. This self-instigated reflection creates a reactive psychological experience in the projecting ego. The ego projects threats and is threatened by its own reflected projection. Yet it denies or is unaware of its projective participation and creation of the threat it perceives, and believes it to be radiating independently from the other.

Through projection, the White American community transfers or exports its external contradictions — the conflicts, self-incriminations and tensions they engender — from itself to the African American community. By this means it rids itself of certain discomforts and discontents by forcing them on the Black community and perceiving them as originating in that community. By so doing it can better deny those characteristics in itself.

The same characteristics which when they are endemic to the White community and are perceived as threatening to its equilibrium, integrity and functionality, are externalized onto the Black community through projection. Consequently, the threats that come from inside the White community are perceived as coming from the outside Black community and are therefore perceived as generated by the latter. Thus the White community makes it appear that it is threatened by a menacing Black community; an evil, criminal, Black community which jeopardizes its existence: not the evil criminal inclinations it contains within its own bosom. By compulsively defending itself against the projected "threat" the Black community represents, the White community defends itself against its own self-generated, but self-denied, threats. The White community thereby becomes blind to its own negative characteristics and the positive characteristics of its scapegoat, the Black community.

Through projection the White community seeks to transform its evil, criminal, genocidal characteristics and intentions into good, law-abiding characteristics and intentions. Thus its evil becomes good. Once it projectively criminalizes the Black community it feels free to treat it criminally. Thus, to defend its own positive self-perception against knowledge  of its owncriminality, the White community must falsely accuse the Black community of criminality. For the sake of its own positive self-perception, the White community needs to perceive the Black community as criminal, whether or not such is the case.

When the projecting party or projectionist has superior influential advantages, as in the case of the White community relative to the Black community, projection becomes introjection, an act of creation, of transforming and conditioning reality. Introjection refers to the process by which the individual incorpo­rates  and accepts the prohibitions, values, attitudes,  and commands of others as his own even when their acceptance and incorporation may work against his objective interests. In addition to its usual meaning, introjection as used herein refers to the process by which a more powerful party through various means, "forces" a weaker party to accept or behave in accordance with his projected values, attitudes and such. When the projectionist is the more powerful, the chief reinforcer and punisher, his projection becomes not only an instrument of ego-defensive self-deception, but also an instrument for provoking self-deception in the other, the target of his projections. The distorted reality and falsified consciousness of the projective target, through introjection, becomes the reality distortion and falsification of the consciousness of the projecting party.

The projective relations between the relatively powerful White community and relatively powerless Black community constitute an authentic process of transformational social interaction. The dominant White community, by controlling the rhythm of Black community life, controls to a significant extent the setting and experience of Black people, their self-perception and perception of reality. The dominant White community, by means of projec­tion, acts in ways that organize the motivational systems of the Black community so that those systems are a functional reflection of the White community's psychopolitical needs. Introjective projection onto the African community occurs when that commu­nity accepts and internalizes the stereotypical characterization of itself as projected by another.

Introjective projection is accomplished when through its manipulative use of reward and punishment, control of informa­tion, definition of reality, etc., the White community inculcates in the collective personality of that community, a complementary and supportive set of values, norms, and patterns of behavior. Through the projective activities of the White community the collective character of the Black community is effectively deformed, defiled, and motivated to concretely demonstrate the characteristics stereotypically ascribed to it. By these and other means, the pathology in the White community becomes infec­tiously represented in the Black community.

The White American and the worldwide European ruling classes in general, refuse to accept and repent of their historical and contemporary theft of the lands, resources, and taking of the lives of their own and other peoples; their enslavement, serfdom and peonage of their own and African peoples; their colonization and rapacious exploitation of virtually all non-White peoples: their eradication of whole ethnocultural groups; their mass murder of millions of persons; their scandalization and assassination of the character of African peoples; their destruction of many of the Earth's streams, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans (ecocide); the raping and wasting of its natural treasures; their loosening of incurable diseases on vulnerable populations; their development and use of weapons of mass destruction; their assassination of national leaders, overthrow of duly elected governments and other intrigues against legitimate organizations; their warmongering and dissemination of murderous arms among nations for profit and political advantage; their addicting of whole populations to self-destructive habits, appetites and drugs; their falsification of the consciousness of the Earth's peoples, and numerous other heinous crimes against Man and Nature.

Because of their need to deny their long criminal history and contemporaneous criminality, their refusal to recognize that they pose the gravest danger to every type of life on Earth, and their need to divert theirs and the world's attention away from the facts listed above, the White American and European communities must compulsively project the alleged criminal activities in the Black community as representing the greatest danger to American society and European civilization. This White American and European projective twist of reality is designed to have the world forget that when this world is cataclysmically destroyed, it will not be caused by drug dealers, petty thieves, muggers, Black-on-Black criminals, but will be executed by White, patriotic, highly educated and civilized scientists, law-abiding citizen soldiers, as well as cultured, well-mannered and well-behaved diplomats.

Projection is a way of seeing, of attending to the world, a way of apprehending and interpreting the world, of positioning oneself in relationship to others and the world. It is a way of being in the world which precludes seeing oneself, the other, and the world honestly and comprehensively. It precludes one from seeing himself for who he really is and from dealing honestly and justly with himself and others. Projection involves the creation of a "necessary fiction," a functional myth. It involves self-deception, distortion and denial of reality in service of supporting and maintaining ego identity, dominance and control of the self and of the environment.

Projection is the ultimate form of put-down. Through projection the projecting party demotes and degrades his projective target as he enhances his own self-perception and self-image. This maneuver permits the projecting party to think well of himself in spite of his unflattering character and morally reprehensible social behavior which maybe self-destructive, as well as destruc­tive of others. For the projecting party, reprehensible social behavior belongs always to the other. The threat always comes from the projectively degraded other. This leaves the projecting party with a puritanical sense of ethical superiority and innocence.

The Projecting Narcissist

When used to degrade the other and elevate himself, projection becomes an adjunct to the narcissistic strivings and pretensions of the projecting party. Narcissistic strivings may also be seen as the sources for projective activities. Through projectively degrading the other, the projective narcissist devalues the standards, opinions, and personal worth of others as he overvalues his own standards, opinions, and personal worth. The narcissist feels affection only for himself, and he expects the other to hold him in the same unearned high regard and self-esteem in which he holds himself. He expects others to cater to his every whim. Others are perceived by the projecting narcissist as having been specifically created to be his servants and are therefore perceived to have no higher purpose than to oblige his comfort and welfare. They are perceived by him to be the instruments of his pleasures or displeasures. His interests take precedence over those of the projectively degraded others and his mere desire for something serves as the justification for his taking unauthorized possession of it. His right to take what he desires from others without their consent, and his expectation that he deserves special consider­ation from others are presumed by the projecting narcissistic party to be inalienable — to be God-given. Self-assured, self-centered, self-satisfied; proud of his often overblown achieve­ments; preoccupied by unrelenting drives to achieve unassailable intelligence and competence, power and prestige; to maintain favorably wide differences in status and material wealth, physical beauty and apparent moral superiority; the projecting narcissist insists on his right to exploit the projectively degraded others. He may not hesitate to use cunning, and if necessary, ruthless force, to overcome anyone who dares stand between him and what he desires.

Oblivious to the fact that his behavior is unwarranted and irrational, the projecting narcissist experiences nothing but contempt and revulsion for those who fail to "respect" him or his wishes, and who may dare dispute his presumed privileges. The world revolves around the projecting narcissist and he only has affection for those who, knowing their "place," appear to be honored by his exploitative relationship to them and who seem to glory in the attention he deigns to pay them. His "love,"paternal protection and fidelity are extended only to those projectively degraded others who are obeisant, solicitous, subservient and self-effacing. The independence, equal or superior intelligence, competence and power of others are taken as personal affronts and as threatening to his security, self-confidence, self-image and social standing as well as his control of events, and are therefore the targets of the projecting narcissist's preemptive attacks.

For the projecting narcissist, interpersonal relationships are hierarchical. One is either superior or inferior; dominated or subordinated. He suspends the Golden Rule — and exempts himself from sharing with others as equals. He takes himself to be "above" the laws, conventions, ethics, mutual responsibilities which modulate,  regulate  and  make possible harmonious reciprocal relations between persons. He may even consider himself "above" Nature and its laws as well. Nature is an instrumentality of his will and not an entity with which a relationship of reciprocity and balance must be maintained. In fact, the projecting narcissist thrives on social and natural imbalance, especially when such imbalance is perceived as supportive of his status and power advantages. He perceives such imbalance as crucial to his self-esteem and sense of security. When he perceives himself as having the advantage, he exhibits an arrogant, snobbish disdain for, and indifference to, maintaining propriety of mutually beneficial social relations.

For the projecting narcissist there are few or no permanent and deep loyalties to social and cultural values, ethical principles, individuals and/or groups. His only substantive and abiding interest is in the fulfillment of his personal interests and desires. His flagrant disregard for the humanity and human rights of his projective target is rarely attended by conscious feelings of remorse or guilt.

Under more maliciously psychopathological circumstances, the projecting narcissist peremptorily behaves in ways to defensively ward off the fancied hostility and contempt, humiliat­ing intentions and behavior of others. The defensive reactions of others to his often unprovoked and unwarranted attacks are utilized by the projecting narcissist to rationalize and justify his initial and subsequent negative behavior towards them. Because he has "painted" his projective target with his own stereotypical image, read his own repressed motivations into the activities of the other, and if powerful enough, introjected or injected his values and behavioral orientations into the personality of his projective target, the projecting narcissist believes himself to be omniscient. He fancies himself as knowing the character and intentions of his projective target better then the latter knows himself. Therefore he needs no tangible evidence or proof of his projective target's guilt or hostile intentions. He can safely ignore evidence and telling arguments against his suspicions or stereotypical perceptions of others. If his projective target is actually not guilty of the crime or conspiracy of which he is accused by the projecting narcissist, he is still considered to be guilty of some yet-to be-discovered crime (the "fact" that his crime is undetected is considered indicative of just how slick the culprit is) and is therefore still deserving of punishment. If the narcis­sist's projective target has not yet committed a crime or contem­plated its commission, the projecting narcissist assumes that he is surely going to do so in the future. Therefore, preventive detention or some cautionary punishment is still in order. For the projecting narcissist the projective target is born of sin, born in sin, and born to sin. He is guilty of being alive!

To reiterate, projection reflects a psychological need of the projectionist to ignore, deny, or rationalize certain of his own socially and/or personally undesirable personality/behavioral characteristics, motivations and intentions by thus attributing them to others. He may further assert that these defensively attributed characteristics, behavioral and motivational orienta­tions, are not only endemically possessed by his projective target, but are utilized by the latter to mount hostile attacks against him. This assertion may be used by the projectionist to rationalize preemptive, ostensibly defensive, preventative, or retaliatory attacks against his projective target. Through this psychological maneuver, the attention of the projectionist and others are directed away from his faults and sly machinations and onto the alleged character, the hostile intentions and injurious behavior of the projective target.

Often the additional focus and much of the psychological resources and potential of the projective target himself may be diverted away from understanding the game to which he is subjected by his engaging in often vain attempts to defend himself against the projectionist's negative attributions. Under certain circumstances — these defensive attempts combined with powerful manipulations on the part of the projectionist — the projective target may come to actually acquire some characteris­tics the projectionist first falsely attributed to him. The projective target's attempts to compensatorily disprove the projectionist's stereotypical perception of him are often flattering to the projec­tionist's ego. They indicate the target's need for the projectionist's approval and attests to the projectionist's superiority. The projective target's need for the projectionist's approval, to buy his respect, is often used by the projectionist to his psychological and material advantage. Therefore, the more the projective target attempts to cornpensatorily gain the approval of the projectionist, the more he contributes to the power and status of the latter. The introjection of the projectionist's stereotypical expectations by the projective target, flatters the projectionist's sense of omnipo­tence, supports his denial of certain negative aspects of his own personality, embellishes his self-image, gives reason for his defensive dominance and disdain of the projective target. Thus, the projectionist profits from the projective target's reactionary responses to his stereotypical impositions, be they socially acceptable or reprehensible. The projective target is damned either way by the projectionist. The projectionist instigates, maintains, and is flattered by his target's neediness yet dispar­ages him for his dependency and weakness. The projecting narcissist loves to hate his projective target. It is a hatred that makes him feel good, righteous and justified.

Narcissistic Racism

When the projecting narcissist of one race makes his projective target the member of another race, the essence of racism is achieved. Projection, when combined with racial narcissism where a wide power differential in racial power exists, can be the source of a broad spectrum of psychological disturbances in the personal and social relations of the projective target. Malevolent narcissis­tic projection is the means by which the psychopathology of the racist projectionist is transferred in an unconsciously collusive and complementary way to his projective target.

It is through the use of malevolent narcissistic projection and other adjunctive psychological, "other-offensive" and self-defensive mechanisms, conjoined with supporting attitudes and behaviors, that the psychopathology of White American racism is transferred to the Black American community. Once transferred, it takes possession of the collective African American psyche and by distorting its self-perception, self-knowledge and reality-percep­tion, transforms it into a psychological supporting actor whose role is to aid the White American community in maintaining its oppression. Thus it acquires its capacity for self-destruction. The relationship between the White American and the African American community is that of folie 'a deux, — a shared psychosis; a form of psychopathological "contagion" in which the Black American community inversely, and against its own interests, internalizes and incorporates into its own collective personality structure the racist delusions and other psychotic patterns of the White American community.

The "Law-abiding" White Community

As implied by the previous discussion, the White American community projectively degrades the African American commu­nity in order to support its pretentiously positive and narcissistic self-image, as well as to maintain its material and psychological advantages. As is the case with the projecting narcissist, the White American community devalues the worth and humanity of the Black American community as it overvalues its own worth and humanity. Through religious propaganda, falsification of history, the misreading and misinterpretation of its economic, cultural, technological, and military achievements, the White community has suffused its collective psyche and personality with narcissistic delusions of grandeur. Believing its own religious and racist propaganda, the White community perceives itself to be a chosen people: a people whose Manifest Destiny is to rule over other peoples. It perceives itself as on the top of a cosmically designed racial color pyramid apexed by blond Aryan races, and founded on the wooly-haired black African races. In the American societal context, the White American community imported Africans to serve as its bonded servants and continues to see the African American community as playing an updated version of Black servitude. The latter community is perceived as a lower form of humanity to which the ethical, moral, legal, personal considerations, and rules of etiquette (which expectedly inhere among members of the White community) need not apply.

The White community's narcissistic projection permits it to deny that its relationship to, and treatment of, the African American community is racist and criminal, and that its criminal treatment of the Black community is to a significant extent responsible for the alleged criminality and other forms of maladaptive behavior extant in that community. Furthermore, the narcissistic self-perception of the White American community and its obsessive negative stereotyping of the African American community, permits it to be relatively "law-abiding," considerate, civil, ethical and mutually self-respecting within its own commu­nal boundaries while not exercising the same relative to the African American community. Believing the African American community to be deserving of its contempt, believing that its exploitation of that community is not criminal but an exercise of its God-given prerogatives, the White American community perceives no contradiction in engaging in, and condoning the kind of behavior within the African American community which it condemns as criminal, and which is punitively prohibited within its own provinces. Being a law onto itself and perceiving itself and its kind as penultimately humane and civilized, the White American community narcissistically expects and demands that those it degrades, disrespects, exploits, and grievously injures in innumerable ways, treat it with respect and even affection. It chooses to define its character in terms of infra-communal relations and not in terms of its regrettable extra-communal relations, especially with the Black community. Law-abiding and honorable in its own eyes, it permits itself to perceive itself as undeservedly victimized when reactionarily assaulted or offended by its victims. Honor, in the White community, is an "honor among thieves." [MORE]