BEYOND GUILT AND RACISM DENIAL
Phillipe Copeland on optimism, infighting, and civic engagement
Illustration by Austin Hughes
TAP editor in chief Austin Ratner took an opportunity to chat with Phillipe Copeland, a professor of social work at Boston University, author of an article on racism denial, and educator who teaches practical competencies at dealing with racism and talking openly about it. When it comes to denial of racism, Dr. Copeland makes a distinction between strategic denial and psychological denial. With the former term, he describes conscious, calculated political efforts to dismiss the seriousness or even the existence of racism, and he suggests that that sort of denial must be called out for what it is and exposed. The latter term, psychological denial of racism, Dr. Copeland describes as an unconscious coping strategy employed by both White people and people of color to protect themselves from painful feelings in connection with racism—whether guilt or anger or other negative emotions. Most of the interview relates to the latter and includes a discussion of the recent outbreak of accusations of racism in the American Psychoanalytic Association. After talking to him, Ratner says, the insoluble seems soluble. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Austin Ratner: People talk about denial as if it’s only a form of cognitive bias. Which doesn’t, to me, capture one of the key aspects of it—that people are actually protecting themselves from discomfort, and that that actually has implications for how you talk to them about it.
Phillipe Copeland: One of the ways that we understand a defense mechanism is it’s a way to deal with the discomfort, the psychic discomfort, the psychic suffering that comes from the values which you have internalized and the failure of society to practice those things. And denial provides you a way to relieve that distress and to allow you to continue to make sense of things that make no sense, including the contradiction between how you see yourself and how you may actually be behaving. It has a lot of emotional value, and I want to make the point that this isn’t just true of the United States, this is true of most liberal democracies, sometimes in ways which are so horrific that they can’t be ignored. You can’t ignore it, so you gotta do something.
What some people do is they try to deny the significance of what they’re seeing. The contradiction is too painful to live with. And so you try to create a way to live without it or beyond it. And I refer to that as racism denial as a coping strategy. Strategic denial and psychological denial often go hand in hand. They reinforce each other, so people who are engaging in racism denial as a coping strategy are much more susceptible to manipulation by people who are doing it strategically. In some ways, those groups really need each other. So if I could say “Look, so and so, who I believe has authority, is also saying that my beliefs about racism are accurate and that what other people are saying is inaccurate,” it’s much easier for me to say, “Well, see, it’s not me, it’s you. There’s something wrong with you because from my perspective there’s available evidence to suggest that my views are correct, that my perceptions are correct. I’m not in denial, you’re in denial!” The strategic folks really need the coping mechanism people—and vice versa.
AR: And they’re enabling them.
PC: Absolutely. They’re enabling them. They’re manipulating them. They’re reinforcing their denial. Sometimes it’s strategic and sometimes it’s unconscious, and sometimes it’s a bit of both. And then you get the outcome, which is that the problem doesn’t get solved because it can’t really be seen. You make the problem harder to solve.
“If you have to choose between guilt and sociopathy, guilt is better, right? ... the problem is if you get stuck there.”
AR: As a White person my skin doesn’t provoke the same set of cultural and psychological reactions that a person of color’s skin does in many situations, and so I’m not under the same kind of pressure in relation to racism. It’s easy for me to be optimistic about this. It’s harder for a person of color. How are you able to be positive and effective in this way, and how do you deal with your own emotions?
PC: I don’t experience it as optimism. I experience it as pragmatism. That’s really my first principle: I do believe that this is a problem that can be solved, and that the means of solving the problem have practical identifiable elements. We can learn to live differently. We can learn, for example, to not rely on denial to deal with the pain of the contradictions of the societies that we live in, and in fact engage in active means of making things better. So rather than trying to feel better about racism, we actually make the world better, which is in fact a better way of dealing with the problem. I think at this point in our history, there are more people who want to live in a world without racism than people who want to live in a world with racism. I think it is possible to equip them with tools that will help them to create that kind of a world. And so part of it is to understand the nature of the problem clearly and to be able to recognize the obstacles that come up in the world and in ourselves to doing that work, and racism denial is one example. We can do this.
AR: Let me throw at you a case example drawn from recent events. The former president of the American Psychoanalytic Association recently resigned. [AR explains the polarizing fight that erupted after the president’s withdrawal of a speaking invitation for an APsA member who had been accused of anti-Semitism.] He ended up really getting into a fight with what he ended up describing as the “illiberal left” in the organization, and they called for his resignation and he resigned. It got more and more inflamed, and then certain people of color started to feel that their viewpoint was not represented in the power structure and several of them resigned from the organization.
PC: I think this is just happening in a lot of places. How do you hold space for the emotional content of this work, understanding that feelings and facts are not the same thing and that our emotional reactions by definition aren’t necessarily rational? It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, but you gotta figure out a way to deal with that that’s not just about trying to figure out who was right in a purely factual sense, right? You’re dealing with people who are from communities that have experienced significant harm, that have valid concerns. Having a valid concern doesn’t mean that it’s going to be expressed in a valid fashion—but that doesn’t matter because the concern itself needs to be addressed. I think it’s very difficult to do that, but I do think that naming that—naming the emotional element of it, acknowledging the emotional reality and experience of people—that doesn’t require you to agree with their perspective, but you have to sufficiently express empathy. You see them, you hear them, value them inherently, and none of that requires that anybody agrees with each other. But you gotta start there.
This is really hard because for some people, what they want you to do in those moments is to clearly take a side, to validate their own feelings of righteousness. If they experience you as failing to do that, then you’re wrong and then you become the problem. There are problems on multiple levels, part of which is the society in which we’re all living, which is incredibly oppressive and toxic. And then it shows up in organizations and interpersonal relationships in ways that we’re not responsible for. We didn’t create this context, but we got to figure out how to live effectively with it. It sounds like in this situation a variety of different people were trying to do what they believe to be the right thing and what they thought was best either for the organization or for the community of people that they are part of, and it doesn’t sound like anybody walked away happy with the outcome. And so that’s tough, you know, because ideally you get to a place where—again, not requiring a complete agreement—everybody involved in the interaction walks away feeling valued, respected, seen, heard, even if they don’t completely agree with the particular way that the problem was dealt with. And that’s really hard to do, but in my experience when you’re able to navigate and get to that place, it allows for the possibility for relationship to continue into the future. I think a lot of people have not yet developed the skill sets to deal with conflict related to these issues very well, and that’s not a character flaw—I really do think that it’s about learning. It’s about skills and it’s about competence, but it gets framed as a kind of personal deficit. It gets framed as you’re a bad person who’s doing hurtful things to other people.
Look, this isn’t just about whether this or that individual is a good person. There’s a much bigger political, cultural context here at play, and so what can we do with that dynamic that gets as many of us as possible to an outcome that as many of us as possible can feel good about moving forward? You know, in my work I say it’s a matter of both will and skill, and so it’s not just that people don’t care or they’re not trying to do the right thing or they’re deliberately trying to hurt people. I think a lot of people genuinely do not know how to handle these situations because they haven’t been given the opportunity to learn. Or to practice. Practice makes progress. And you can hear that as optimism, but I really do think a lot of that’s just very practical. We have lots of people who are reaching adulthood and assuming all kinds of positions of great responsibility, with high stakes, who have never learned how to deal with these problems effectively. And that’s a choice. That is a choice that our society has made, again, because some people don’t want people to learn—and in some cases, it’s really by omission.
We need to think about it the way that some people think about STEM education: it really is a problem to reach adulthood and not have developed these particular skill sets. You cannot be a functional participant in liberal democracy if you don’t know how to deal with these things. You can’t. It’s that fundamental. We have people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to issues of racism, and it’s literally killing people. Literally, lives are being lost because of that, and we don’t have to keep doing that. And so there has to be that sense of urgency.
AR: I have noticed a dynamic between White people and Black people sometimes where a Black person feels angry, understandably, and a White person feels the anger is coming at them. And that makes them feel defensive and perhaps guilty. Guilt is a huge motivator of denial because nobody wants to feel guilty. I wish there was a path forward through this locking of horns of rage and guilt.
PC: One way of thinking about that is I need to take action which is consistent with the person I want to be. That’s a really useful reaction. That’s really adaptive, really healthy, and something that’s worth cultivating. I say to students when they have that moment of feeling guilt, if you have to choose between guilt and sociopathy, guilt is better, right? Because if you’re feeling bad, it suggests that you care, right? That’s good. The problem is if you get stuck there. That’s when it becomes toxic and not particularly helpful because you feeling bad about yourself doesn’t help me get free. So again, pragmatically, it’s not a very useful place to stay, right? That’s when it becomes pathology. I think it tilts into a kind of a narcissism, and that’s where it’s unhealthy because it doesn’t actually motivate you to become a better person. It just gives you another reason to feel bad about yourself and move into self-hatred and all these other kinds of things that are really destructive.
“If you’re learning about racism and you’re feeling bad about it, do something about it, and do something about it in community, in relationship.”
when they have that moment of feeling guilt, if you have to choose between guilt and sociopathy, guilt is better, right? Because if you’re feeling bad, it suggests that you care, right? That’s good. The problem is if you get stuck there. That’s when it becomes toxic and not particularly helpful because you feeling bad about yourself doesn’t help me get free. So again, pragmatically, it’s not a very useful place to stay, right? That’s when it becomes pathology. I think it tilts into a kind of a narcissism, and that’s where it’s unhealthy because it doesn’t actually motivate you to become a better person. It just gives you another reason to feel bad about yourself and move into self-hatred and all these other kinds of things that are really destructive.
I say to students, emotions are energy, right? And energy can be transformed. It can be transferred. And so wherever you start, it’s what you do with it. So if you start with guilt and get stuck there, that’s a problem. But just the fact that you had that emotional reaction in and of itself is not bad. You gotta do something with it that’s transformative, that feeds you, that supports you, and that produces better outcomes for the people around you. It sounds really simple, but the fastest way to feel better is to do better. Absolutely. You know what I’m saying? If you’re learning about racism and you’re feeling bad about it, do something about it, and do something about it in community, in relationship.
You read the accounts of civil rights workers and things like that. Some of them are still with us, right. What they will say is that the experience of that struggle was transformative. They became new human beings. They are not who they were before they started, and some of these people in their eighties, like, their whole life trajectory changed completely. Because they said I’m going to go down to Mississippi, spending this summer helping people to register to vote, which is different than me sitting in Boston being like, “God, racism is awful and I’m awful, right? Because I’m racist, right?”
There’s this idea of social prescribing. There’s actual psychological benefit to trying to make the world a better place to live. Even from the perspective of the subconscious, doing the work is a great way of learning about yourself and becoming observant. It’s a great way of thinking about encouraging people into civic engagement, you know, and to make even just their own world—their own immediate neighborhood, their own immediate apartment building—better. ■
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023