Whiteness—or white supremacy—is not biological. It is a function, an imaginary construct, an ego ideal dressed in the religious cult of scientism.1 Attachment Theory, developed by John Bowlby and extended by Mary Ainsworth, has evolved beyond its clinical origins. Today, it circulates as bite-sized content, weaponized through social media to diagnose exes, pathologize enemies, and soothe the existential dread of loneliness.2 What should be dismissed as less poetic and whimsical than astrology has instead crept into our operating system, reinforcing the fantasy of white normativity, reduced hierarchical thinking, and exclusionary ideals—all under the guise of scientific objectivity, ripe for algorithmic-corporate exploitation, aka neo-fascism.3
Where:
W(x) = White Imperialism as a function of cultural phenomena (x)
f(C) = The function applied to any cultural phenomenon (C)
C = Original cultural content
O = Erasure of Origins (historical, cultural, or contextual roots)
N(M) = Repackaging with a White Name (N) and applying a Markup (M) for commodification
The formula of White Imperialism is predictable: take an existing cultural phenomenon, repackage it, erase its origins, claim originality, insert a white name, sell it back to everyone—including those from whom it was taken—and charge a markup.4 Et voila, racial capitalism. For this to work, it requires the cornerstone fantasy of white universality. Attachment Theory is no different, claiming universality while deeply rooted in white fantasies of the nuclear family, autonomy, and emotional developmental standards. It idealizes the nuclear family structure, particularly the white, middle-class model of a mother-child dyad, as the bedrock of psychological health. This erases the diversity of kinship systems, caregiving practices, relational dynamics across cultures, and relationships with the land.5
Indigenous, communal, non-white modes of attachment—where caregiving is distributed, non-linear, and fluid—are pathologized or rendered invisible. This is the pattern of white supremacy’s erasure of epistemologies that exist outside the white fantasy, establishing white norms as the default and framing deviations as deficient or disordered. The violence here is subtle yet pervasive, embedded not in overt domination but in the superego injunction of “objectivity,” the clinical tone that masks ideological imposition. What is presented as universal truth is, in fact, the most successful export of white supremacy: the ability to name, define, and categorize the world according to its own image, erasing the histories, languages, and ways of being that do not conform to the benefits of corporatism.
Functions like Attachment Theory thrive within the modern “Startup” ecosystem.6 It medicalizes what is often a rational response to structural violence, casting marginalized communities' survival strategies as symptoms to be treated rather than adaptations to conditions imposed by colonialism, capitalism, and systemic oppression of imperialist militarism.7 The child who resists attachment is not broken; they are navigating a world that has broken their communities. The adult labeled “avoidant” may refuse to trust systems that have historically betrayed them.8
Where:
WF = White Family Model
DN = Developmental Norms based on white, middle-class ideals
Whiteness insists on universality because it cannot survive without it. It must be everywhere, in everything, invisible yet omnipresent, like air—unquestioned and unquestionable.9 Attachment Theory, dressed in the lab coat of empirical science, performs this function seamlessly.10 It pathologizes the non-white while pretending to be neutral, offering ‘diagnoses’ that are, at their core, (Protestant) moral judgments about who belongs and who does not, who is ‘healthy’ and who is ‘damaged.’11
But damage, as Toni Morrison reminds us, is not in the body; it is in the gaze that deems the body damaged.12 The pathology is not in the child who cannot attach; it is in the world that makes such attachment dangerous. The disorder is not in the community that resists assimilation; it is in the empire that demands it.
If you’re still thinking about the biologicality of whiteness, let’s examine the boomerang effect of imperialism, landing on those who once considered it part of its protective structure. Let us examine the so-called rednecks, the hicks, the flyover states, the East Germans, the Eastern Europeans, the Balkans, the unemployed, the hillbillies, the inbred, the Irish, the Italians, the illiterate, the working-class, the Republicans, the incels, the cis-white man, the gays, the dykes, the trans, even the Karens. These were all historically weaponized to uphold the dominance of the white ruling elite. They were the foot soldiers of the empire, enlisted to enforce racial hierarchies and to serve as buffers between the empire and the oppressed in its colonial missions. But the system that trained them to look down on others also ensured that they never looked up to see the masters that held their chains.
This is the finalizing trick of white supremacy: to promise the oppressed within its own ranks that their enemies are beside them, not above. The same structures that pathologize non-whites' identities under the promises of scientific objectivity also turn inward, pathologizing poverty, addiction, and psychic struggles that were designed with desirable outcomes for dominion.13 The attachment disorders diagnosed in these communities are not due to personal failings but are the psychic scars of a system that exploits and discards them after their utility has expired.14
Here, W(E)—white erasure—demonstrates that whiteness operates as a function applied to cultural content (f(C)). This function actively suppresses and erases the original culture, symbolized as (Ȼ). What remains after this erasure is not absence but a void repurposed: the cultural fragments are repackaged with a white-coded name or identity (N) and subjected to a markup (M), transforming erased histories into surplus enjoyment—the excess satisfaction derived not just from consumption but from the very act of erasure and appropriation itself.
This formula can be transposed to the Whitewashing Effect of Attachment Theory, represented as W(AT). Here, the function is applied to original kinship systems f(K) where the Erasure of Kinship Diversity (K) removes the richness of communal, Indigenous, and non-Western relational models. What replaces it is the White Family Model (WF), marketed as universal truth through the lens of Developmental Norms (DN), positioning Eurocentric ideals as the default standard for psychological health.
Whiteness is an Ouroboros,15 gnawing its own tail with the dull conviction it’s consuming something new. It’s a Möbius Strip,16 a twisted loop where you think you’re walking a straight line, only to find you’ve circled back, oppressing yourself in the very spot where you thought you’d left yourself behind—like ants marching with purpose, convinced of a two-dimensional journey, oblivious to additional dimensions folding beneath their feet. Whiteness is the objet petit a17—the leftover excess, the elusive object-cause of desire, never fully attainable yet driving the whole absurd parade into its own demise.
Who were John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth?
John Bowlby, the founder of Attachment Theory, was born in 1907, London, England, into upper-middle class, shaped by the British empire, control and hierarchy.18 His childhood was a template: distant parents, cold nannies, boarding schools designed to teach boys how to not feel.19 What he called separation anxiety was his own fear dressed up as science. Bowlby’s early experiences with emotional detachment, notably the rigid caregiving of British nannies and boarding school culture, informed his pathological fixation on separation anxiety and maternal deprivation.1 His personal anxieties about loss and disruption are a product of the British Empire's fear of colonial dissent and rebellion—the terror of losing control over “dependent” colonies.
Mary Ainsworth, born in 1913 in Glendale, Ohio, shaped by her upbringing in settler-colonial Canada, did not deviate from this imperial lineage. Her “Strange Situation” experiment, designed to assess infant responses to separation and reunion, functions as a controlled reenactment of colonial subjugation: impose artificial rupture, observe distress, and evaluate how well the subject adapts to imposed dependency. Ainsworth transformed the imperial destabilization tactic into an experimental paradigm, pathologizing any relational dynamic that resisted the normative white, middle-class nuclear family structure required for industrialization.20 The child’s distress was not interpreted as a rational response to systemic disruption but as evidence of developmental deficiency—a reverberation of how colonized populations were diagnosed as “underdeveloped” when they refused to conform to the colonial order.21
Both Bowlby and Ainsworth pathologized forms of relationality that did not conform to white, Anglo-industrialization nuclear family ideals. Their work universalized white colonial models of attachment, marginalizing communal caregiving systems common in non-imperialized societies. They failed to account for how systemic violence, colonial displacement, and racial hierarchies shape relational dynamics, reducing complex socio-political realities to individual psychological deficits.
This dynamic is inseparable from the biopolitical management that characterized imperial expansion. Just as the Opium Wars weaponized addiction as a means of economic and social extraction and exploitation, and just as European pathogens—germs, smallpox, measles—decimated Indigenous populations in the Americas, the psychological frameworks of Bowlby and Ainsworth act as ideological pathogens.22 They infect the discourse on human development with the assumption that deviation from white, streamlined for industrial prison complex norms, signals pathology. The success of these frameworks relies on the same sleight of hand as imperial conquest: present destruction as progress, domination as benevolence, and erasure as enlightenment.
The imperial psyche never fully recovered from its abuse of ideological and biological warfare—whether through disease, narcotics, or weaponized theory like racial science and eugenics. Attachment Theory is part of this continuum. Its universal claims mask the historical specificity of its origins: an Anglo-Empire grappling with the fragility of its dominance, desperate to naturalize its authority even as its foundations crumbled. Bowlby and Ainsworth’s legacy is not a neutral contribution to developmental psychology but a form of epistemological colonization, pathologizing the very forms of relationality that survived the violence their theories refuse to name.
Pathologizing the Other
Attachment Theory’s diagnostic categories—secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized—function as moral judgments disguised as psychological assessment. The ‘securely attached’ individual epitomizes the ideal subject: emotionally regulated, autonomous yet connected, and capable of healthy intimacy. This is the neoliberal humanist ideal of white fantasy: self-sufficient, rational, and stable. Deviation—through culture, oppression, or trauma—is framed as a deficiency, with survival strategies pathologized as disorders.
The disciplinary mechanism of white supremacist fantasy replicates itself through fractal recursion, repeating from the individual and all the way up to macro societal structures, embedding itself in the post-industrial life. The function serves not mental health but power, control, and the flow of life and death. “Normalcy” becomes a loaded signifier that carries these functions. This normalization operates through the introjection of the gaze, where the subject internalizes the external judgment of dominant systems. It is not the gaze from without that wounds, but the gaze turned inward, embedded in the psyche, policing from within. This creates a paranoid subject, the depressive subject, hyper-vigilant to perceived deviations from the norm, haunted by the fear of falling short, not just of personal expectations but of an invisible, ever-present authority. The self becomes both the watched and the watcher, sustaining the systems of control that appear external but function most effectively when internalized and distributed. As the addage explains, depression is violence turned inwards.
Secure Attachment (The Myth of the Ideal Citizen / The Non-Existent Hitlerian Aryan):
The fantasy of the well-adjusted, emotionally regulated, productive subject. Think of the so-called “model citizen” who conforms effortlessly to capitalist, neoliberal norms. But here’s the catch: this figure doesn’t exist. Like the Aryan ideal, it’s a projection, a standard designed to be unattainable, making everyone feel like they’re falling short. The “securely attached” person is a product, not a person—a polished performance of emotional stability in service of the status quo.Anxious Attachment (The Racialized Majority Masquerading as Minority):
Framed as marginal, this group is the global majority—racialized, colonized, and constantly seeking validation from systems that were never built to accept them. This isn’t a personal disorder; it’s the structural effect of living under dominance. The “anxious” subjects don’t suffer from neediness; they suffer from being gaslit by an empire that tells them they don’t belong in a world they outnumber.Avoidant Attachment (The Denial Class / Assimilated Anxious):
Often mistaken for resistance, but really a performance of indifference. This is the class that believes it has opted out, distanced itself from the system, but it’s just anxiety in disguise. Avoidant attachment is anxious attachment, wearing a mask, pretending not to care because caring feels dangerous. It’s not freedom from the system—it’s the system’s denial mechanism, internalized.Disorganized Attachment (The Unspoken Category / The Pathologized Other):
Rarely discussed because it doesn’t fit neatly into the binary logic of self-regulation vs. dysfunction. This is the category of systemic fragmentation—identities and relationships shattered by colonial trauma, racial violence, and historical dislocation. It’s the psychic debris of empire. Like the overdiagnosis of narcissism, disorganized attachment gets flattened into oversimplifications, its complexity erased because it disrupts the comforting narrative that pathology lives within individuals, not systems.
Consider how Attachment Theory is weaponized in child welfare systems, where Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families are disproportionately targeted for intervention. Their caregiving practices are judged against white middle-class norms, leading to family separations justified under the guise of promoting 'healthy attachment.' This repeats into colonial projects where Indigenous children were removed from their communities to be 'civilized,' enforcing a paternalistic belief in the superiority of white familial ideals.
The Logic of Genocide and Collective Guilt
This framework extends to the logic of genocide, where societies are labeled with a collective guilt that justifies invasion, occupation, and colonial expansion. The same psychological mechanisms used to pathologize individuals under Attachment Theory are scaled up to pathologize entire cultures, casting them as “disordered,” “backward,” or “traumatized” societies in need of corporate fascist intervention.
Susan Williams reveals in White Malice,23 how psychological manipulation was instrumentalized during the Cold War to justify covert operations, regime changes, and colonial control in Africa. The CIA's involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo and the destabilization of Kwame Nkrumah's government in Ghana were framed through paternalistic narratives that depicted African leaders as irrational, unstable, or susceptible to Communist influence—a form of collective pathologization. These interventions were rationalized as necessary for ‘stabilizing’ societies supposedly incapable of self-governance, repeating the colonial logic of the 'white savior' rescuing the 'disordered' Other.
Colonial powers have historically framed their expansionist projects as moral imperatives, cloaked in the language of 'civilizing missions,' 'humanitarian aid,' or 'democratization.' By constructing the colonized as inherently deficient—emotionally, intellectually, or morally—colonizers rationalize genocidal practices as necessary for societal “healing” or “rehabilitation.”24 The imposition of Western norms, institutions, and governance structures is thus framed as a benevolent corrective to the “pathologies” of the colonized.25
This collective pathologization is replicated within the dynamics of Attachment Theory. Just as the “disorganized” child is seen as needing intervention to conform to normative emotional standards, entire nations are subjected to violent interventions justified as efforts to 'stabilize,' 'develop,' or 'modernize. This logic underpins genocidal campaigns from the residential school systems in Canada and the U.S., designed to 'reform' Indigenous populations, to military invasions framed as liberatory in the Philippines (1898), China (1900), Honduras (1903), Dominican Republic (1916), Haiti (1915), Russia (1918), Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), Vietnam (1955), Laos (1964), Congo (1960), Indonesia (1965), Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1969), Chile (1973), Angola (1975), El Salvador (1980), Nicaragua (1981), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1995), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (2014), Yemen (2015), and the current genocide of Palestine (2023).26
In each case, the discourse of collective guilt operates to absolve the colonizer while projecting pathology onto the colonized. This process not only enables systemic violence but also perpetuates the ideological infrastructure that normalizes and justifies such violence under the guise of psychological and moral superiority.
In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,27 colonial violence in the Congo is masked under the veneer of "civilizing" missions. Conrad's portrayal of Kurtz illustrates the collapse of the supposed moral superiority of European colonizers, revealing instead the raw, exploitative, and nihilistic core of imperial ambition.28 The novella exposes how the pathologization of the 'Other' serves as a smokescreen for the savagery inherent in colonial domination. Kurtz, who begins with lofty ideals of enlightenment, descends into brutal tyranny, epitomizing how colonial narratives of benevolence are undermined by the violent realities they conceal.29
Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism,30 further elucidates this trajectory by connecting the imperial logic of colonial expansion to the mechanisms of totalitarian regimes. She argues that the dehumanization inherent in colonial practices laid the groundwork for the bureaucratic and systemic violence characteristic of totalitarian states. Arendt highlights how the reduction of entire populations to disposable entities, framed through racial and cultural hierarchies, normalized the genocidal impulses that later manifested in the Holocaust and other state-sponsored atrocities. The colonial apparatus of control, surveillance, and ideological manipulation thus becomes a prototype for totalitarian governance, where collective pathologization justifies mass violence under the guise of societal 'cleansing' or 'protection.'31
Together, Conrad and Arendt reveal the continuum between colonial and totalitarian violence, rooted in the psychological mechanisms of othering, pathologization, and moral rationalization. Their works underscore how narratives of superiority and inferiority, framed through the language of psychological deficiency and cultural backwardness, serve as enduring justifications for systemic oppression and genocide.
The Myth of Emotional Purity
Attachment Theory perpetuates the fantasy of emotional purity—the idea that secure attachment is a pristine state achievable through the right conditions, free from the 'contaminations' of trauma, systemic violence, or historical oppression. Herein lies white supremacy’s obsession with purity, order, and the erasure of historical entanglements. It individualizes suffering, reducing complex socio-political dynamics to personal deficits. The anxiety of a refugee child is framed as an attachment issue, not a symptom of displacement, war, or racism. The anger of a marginalized youth is pathologized as disorganized attachment, not recognized as a rational response to structural violence.32
This extends to Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, which, while influential in trauma studies, reinforces an individualistic, neurobiological model of healing.33 Van der Kolk locates trauma primarily within the body, emphasizing personal regulation and therapeutic intervention over collective, structural, and political dimensions of suffering.34 This framework has found a particular home among liberal whites, manifesting in what may be referred to as the “somatic turn”—a trend that functions less as genuine reckoning and more as a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance produced by complicity in empire.35 Rather than confronting the material realities of systemic violence, colonial histories, and racial capitalism, the Somatic Turn redirects attention inward, reducing historical atrocities to dysregulated nervous systems and orientalizing breathwork exercises. It offers the comfort of feeling “healed” without the discomfort of accountability, allowing the body to become both the site of trauma and its convenient escape hatch. In this way, the Somatic Turn serves as a therapeutic laundering of history, where the body is treated, but the structures of empire remain unscathed.
A Counter-Discourse to the Racist Discourse
Suppose the Discourse of the Racist relies on repression, exclusion, and the strategic management of historical contradictions. In that case, its opposite must not merely negate these operations but subvert them through radical inclusion, acknowledgment, and the deconstruction of dominant signifiers. This counter-discourse can be conceptualized as the Discourse of the Decolonial, grounded in recognizing historical truths, the multiplicity of subjectivities, and dismantling hierarchical power structures.
Where the Discourse of the Racist thrives on the jouissance36 of exclusion, the Discourse of the Decolonial fosters the joy of solidarity, relationality, and the transformative potential of collective resistance. It operates through:
Radical Opacity (Glissant):37 beyond the Lacanian Split Subject ($) as a refusal to conform to the demand for transparency imposed by colonial epistemologies. This means allowing identities, histories, and experiences to exist without the need for assimilation or translation into imperialist linguistics.
Reconciliatory Histories: Actively engaging with historical violence is not an isolated event but an ongoing process that requires reparative actions, acknowledgment, and continuous accountability and reconciliation.
Decentering the Master Signifier: Refusing to anchor discourse in singular, imperialist linguistics. Instead, knowledge is produced through polyvocality, where multiple, often contradictory truths coexist without needing hierarchical compartmentalization.
Ethics of Relationality: Centering ethics not on individual autonomy but on interdependence, mutual care, and the acknowledgment of interconnectedness across untranslatable differences.
In this discourse, the subject is not split ($)38 by repression but by a conscious engagement with contradictions, holding space for discomfort without the need for resolution through denial or disavowal. This is not the hysteric's endless questioning but a sustained, ethical commitment to the labor of unlearning, listening, and acting. Here, the subject encounters not just the barred self ($), but the opaque limit of understanding itself (Ø)—the point where knowledge does not simply fail but refuses to be transparent, where the subject confronts the incommensurable, the untranslatable, the irreducible remainder of history, violence, and difference.39 Ø40 marks the boundary where recognition collapses, where the desire to “make sense” is revealed as another form of mastery. To dwell in this opacity is not to seek clarity in mastery but to inhabit the shadow of what cannot be fully known, owned, or integrated. It is an ethical stance that resists the colonial impulse to categorize, consume, and control, instead embracing the radical incompleteness of self and the world.
Decolonial relationality acknowledges that love and attachment are shaped by history, power, and politics. It refuses the tidy binary of secure vs. insecure, recognizing that survival under systems of violence often requires strategies that do not fit into therapeutic check boxes. It centers on community, solidarity, and the messy, dynamic nature of human connection beyond the suffocating lens of weaponized diagnosis.
In dismantling Attachment Theory’s ideological hegemony, we make space for relational models that do not demand assimilation to whiteness.41 Once we create space to depathologize the struggle and defiance against oppression, it will give way to genuine revolution and collective solidarity rather than manufactured consent.42
Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument, "The New Centennial Review" 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
Wynter’s work dismantles the biological myth of whiteness and exposes how it functions as an ideological construct tied to colonialism and racial capitalism.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
Fanon's psychoanalytic critique of colonial trauma reveals how racial identity is shaped by imperialist fantasies, which maps onto the psychological structures of attachment theory.
Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Ferguson’s analysis of how institutions co-opt identity and difference supports the argument that psychological frameworks like attachment theory reinforce exclusionary norms under the guise of scientific neutrality.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
Robinson identifies racial capitalism as the driving force behind cultural appropriation, where whiteness commodifies and profits from that which it erases.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Simpson examines how Indigenous relational systems resist colonial categories, challenging Western nuclear family ideals.
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
Benjamin explores how algorithmic capitalism—like the self-help industry—weaponizes scientific language to reinforce racial hierarchy.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
Mbembe's work on necropolitics explains how imperialist structures frame resistance as disorder, just as psychological frameworks pathologize non-Western survival strategies.
Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland: Uptone Press, 2005).
DeGruy contextualizes generational trauma within systemic racism, critiquing how psychology misdiagnoses the effects of colonial and racial violence.
Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument, "The New Centennial Review" 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
Wynter critiques whiteness as a structure of universality, showing how it functions as an epistemic framework that erases other ways of being and knowing.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
Fanon details how colonialism imposes universality through psychological and scientific discourses to maintain white supremacy.
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
hooks critiques the Protestant ethic and its role in shaping moralistic frameworks that disguise themselves as neutral psychological assessments.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970).
Morrison’s work exposes how racialized subjects internalize dominant gazes, illustrating how damage is constructed through perception rather than inherent deficiency.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Gilmore connects the carceral system to economic and racialized disposability, illustrating how capitalism structures pathology through state intervention.
Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland: Uptone Press, 2005).
DeGruy contextualizes trauma as a historical and systemic phenomenon rather than an individual pathology, which applies to the essay’s argument about attachment theory and racialized psychological diagnoses.
The Ouroboros, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, represents a cycle of self-destruction and renewal. In the context of whiteness and imperial ideology, it signifies how white supremacy continuously reinvents itself—consuming past iterations of its own logic while presenting itself as something new. Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the “overrepresentation of Man” echoes this recursive process: whiteness must erase, appropriate, and redefine itself to maintain dominance, appearing to evolve while structurally remaining the same. See Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument, "The New Centennial Review" 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface with only one side and one edge, often used in mathematics and topology to illustrate paradoxical continuity. In the context of whiteness and imperial ideology, it represents how white supremacy functions as an endless feedback loop: appearing to move forward while ultimately returning to the same oppressive structures. This cyclical entrapment reflects how racial capitalism continuously reconfigures itself—offering the illusion of progress while ensuring structural power remains intact. For a discussion on recursive domination and coloniality, see Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument, "The New Centennial Review" 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
The objet petit a (object small a), a concept developed by Jacques Lacan, represents the unattainable object-cause of desire—the elusive thing that fuels desire precisely because it can never be fully grasped. Whiteness operates in a similar way: it is an abstract construct that positions itself as the ideal, yet it remains perpetually unstable, requiring constant reinforcement through exclusion, erasure, and violence. This paradox drives whiteness toward its own unraveling, as its desire for universalization leads to recursive self-destruction. For Lacan’s discussion of objet petit a, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). For a decolonial reading of Lacan, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
For an analysis of how British boarding schools shaped the imperial psyche, see Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England (London: Harvill Secker, 2021).
Richard Beard, Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England (London: Harvill Secker, 2021).
Beard critiques the role of elite British boarding schools in producing emotionally detached leaders, reinforcing the colonial mentality that shaped Bowlby’s upbringing.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Simpson critiques how colonial frameworks impose linear relationality and erode Indigenous systems of caregiving, directly challenging Ainsworth’s attachment model.
Derek Hook, Fanon, the Clinical, and the Colonial (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Hook applies Fanonian psychoanalysis to examine how colonial power structures shape psychological diagnoses, linking the “underdeveloped” colonial subject to attachment pathology.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
Foucault’s concept of biopolitical control helps frame attachment theory as a psychological tool for managing populations under imperial rule.
Susan Williams, White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa (New York: PublicAffairs, 2021).
Williams exposes how psychological manipulation and propaganda justified Cold War-era interventions in Africa.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1972).
Rodney critiques the colonial myth that European intervention was necessary to "develop" Africa.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
Arendt describes how colonial logic and racial hierarchies justified mass violence in imperial and totalitarian regimes.
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
Prashad analyzes how imperialist interventions, from the Philippines to Palestine, have used “modernization” as a pretext for domination.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).
Conrad critiques the European imperial project, exposing its violent contradictions and moral bankruptcy.
Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness" (London: Penguin Books, 1988).
Achebe dissects the racist underpinnings of Conrad’s novel, critiquing its portrayal of Africa and African people.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Brantlinger examines how Conrad's novel reveals the disillusionment with imperialist rhetoric.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).
Arendt explores how colonialism provided the ideological and bureaucratic framework for totalitarian violence.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
Mbembe expands on Arendt’s argument, discussing how colonialism established a political order where the state determines who may live and who must die.
Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland: Uptone Press, 2005).
DeGruy critiques how the effects of racialized trauma are pathologized rather than understood as systemic responses to oppression.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014).
Van der Kolk popularizes the neurobiological approach to trauma, though critiques highlight its lack of structural analysis.
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Davis critiques individualistic approaches to trauma and crime, advocating for collective accountability and abolitionist frameworks.
William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Mazzarella explores the commodification of emotional and somatic experiences under neoliberalism.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Lacan theorizes jouissance as an excessive, often painful, enjoyment derived from repetition and exclusion.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Glissant develops the concept of "opacity" as resistance to colonial epistemologies demanding legibility and control.
Jacques Lacan introduced the concept of the Split Subject ($) to describe the fundamental division at the core of human subjectivity.¹ Unlike the Cartesian notion of a unified, self-knowing "I," Lacan argues that the subject is structurally split between conscious self-representation (ego) and unconscious desire. This split emerges because language—the Symbolic order—introduces a fundamental alienation: as soon as the subject enters language, they are separated from a direct, unmediated experience of being.
The $ symbol marks this division, where the subject is perpetually lacking, caught between the demands of the Symbolic order (social structures, norms, language) and the enigmatic pull of unconscious desire (the Real). This division means that we never fully coincide with the identities we assume—our self-conception is always incomplete, haunted by unconscious drives and lost jouissance.
In decolonial and critical race frameworks, this concept is crucial. Colonialism, white supremacy, and imperial epistemologies impose rigid identities upon colonized subjects, demanding legibility within a system that is itself structured by exclusion and violence. The Split Subject ($) in coloniality thus represents not only the universal human condition but also a political condition—where the subject is torn between imposed racialized identities and the opacity of their own lived experience.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 690–694.
Lacan theorizes the subject as inherently split ($), structured by language and unconscious desire, rather than a coherent self.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Derrida theorizes the limits of meaning and the impossibility of absolute knowledge.
Ø marks the point where recognition fails, where the attempt to categorize, define, or “make sense” collapses—not as an absence, but as a refusal. If Lacan’s split subject ($) describes the alienation of being caught between language and unconscious desire, Ø radicalizes this by rejecting the idea that legibility or visibility leads to truth or resolution. It is where the colonial demand for transparency, knowledge, and mastery breaks down—not because of a lack, but because some things cannot and should not be forced into comprehension. Édouard Glissant calls this opacity, the right to remain unknowable, unassimilable, beyond the reach of the colonial gaze. In Western thought, to name something is to claim control over it—Ø resists this by allowing what cannot be owned to remain free. It is not about being hidden but about refusing to be consumed. To dwell in Ø is an act of defiance against systems that demand clarity, legibility, and domination—it embraces the radical incompleteness of self and the world.
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
Hartman foregrounds alternative models of relationality outside white normativity.
Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
Davis articulates the need for collective solidarity over manufactured liberal reformism.
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