A prominent psychoanalyst is currently on a speaking tour in which he argues that simply being white is a mental condition that one acquires by being born Caucasian. The presentation, entitled “On Having Whiteness,” is being given by Dr. Donald Moss and is targeted toward other psychoanalysts and social workers who can earn continuing education credits for attendance.
Moss, a private-practice psychoanalyst from New York, argues that whiteness “is parasitic in that it is contagious, passed on by other infected people,” and that “biologically ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility to ‘Whiteness.’”
Moss himself is a white man. No word on whether he suffers from the affliction himself.
Last year, “On Having Whiteness” was a plenary address for the South African Psychoanalytical Association and was also recently featured at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Moss is also scheduled to present his work in February at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York.
According to the description for the presentation, “Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.”
But never fear if you are currently afflicted with pale skin, “Doctor” Moss does have a treatment for the scourge of Whiteness: “Effective treatment requires a combination of psychological and social-historical interventions, which can reasonably aim only to reshape whiteness’ infiltrated appetites — to reduce their intensities, to redistribute their aims, and to occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation.”
So, if you suffer from “whiteness,” you can get better and, presumably be less white, but unfortunately, “There is not yet a permanent cure.”
Probably because he is a white man, Moss believes that his perverse presentation and its overt racism can be forgiven — but it cannot. As a physician — so called — Moss is speaking from a position of authority on a subject he clearly doesn’t understand. In calling “whiteness” an affliction, Moss is saying that an entire race suffers from a mental illness which it cannot control. Left “untreated” by his “psychological and social-historical interventions” (whatever they are), Moss apparently believes that Caucasians are incapable of rational, non-racist thoughts and actions.
Not surprisingly, Moss is also a founding member of a climate hysteric group known as the “Green Gang,” which is described as a “four-person collective” that focuses on “climate change and its denial.” Among his recent articles are the leftist diatribes “Our Crying Planet” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2016) and “Where are all the bodies — Defensive representational strategies in a time of cataclysmic climate change” (International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies June 2019).
Moss is the ultimate example of a self-loathing white person. Unfortunately, he has the doctorate and academic bona-fides to bring his bizarre race theories to the masses. And some universities are even giving educational credit for them.
Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is a good time to remember a quote from the deeply flawed, yet extremely eloquent civil rights leader’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Academics such as “Doctor” Moss would do well to take this portion of King’s dream to heart. To suggest that a lack of melanin in the skin is somehow “parasitic” is the rankest form of pseudo-intellectual sophistry. And it’s also extremely racist.
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James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax ancultural issues. He can be reached at jcmurphyAd [email protected].
