"Strongly anti-black actions have also often entailed a visceral hate dimension, what Joel Kovel has called the “madness” of white racism. In his pathbreaking analysis of white fear, another important emotion we have already noted, Kovel has argued that whites typically reject blackness and black bodies because they project their own fears, often rooted in childhood, into the dark otherness of an objectified black person. In the childhood socialization process, most whites learn, consciously or unconsciously, to associate black people and blackness with dirt, danger, ignorance, or the unknown. For this reason, the black targets of white hostility and discrimination are not seen as “one of us.” The racialized others become a general “they” or “you people” to be marginalized, excluded, or otherwise discriminated against. Over time, white racist thought and action also involves a massive breakdown of positive emotions such as empathy, the human capacity to experience the feelings of members of an outgroup unlike your own."
Joe Feagin, The White Racial Frame (via wretchedoftheearth)
(via thatneedstogo)
