Whiteness and the problem of Mutual Recognition

This is an excerpt from a paper I am working on. I am interested in sharing some views regarding mutual recognition and the constraints of using this framework when challenging or repairing systemic injustice. For more information about mutual recognition, read Jessica Benjamin’s 2004 paper, “Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness”. You can also read a talk of hers here.

I am interested in sharing some views regarding “mutual recognition” and the constraints of using this framework when confronting or repairing systemic injustice. Mutual recognition, conceptualized by Jessica Benjamin (2004), is “a relation in which each person experiences the other as a “like subject,” another mind who can be “felt with,” yet has a distinct, separate center of feeling and perception.” When the asymmetry is mutual or relatively equivalent, as it is in an at-will therapy session (the patient pays me and is thus my employer; I have some psychic and emotional influence on the patient; the patient has legal recourse on my behaviors; the patient may feel overly dependent on me; etc), mutual recognition may function as a powerful reparative process. In a setting in which both analyst and analysand can be understood to have agreed on and mutually “buy into” a process and a machination, praxis, or setting for that process, a playfulness in co-creating a “third” (Ogden, 1994a) emerges and offers a new field in and from which to support an ongoing narrative that benefits the patient. 

However, in an entrenched systemic asymmetry, where people have been relegated to position(s) in an ever-moving hierarchy, our efforts toward mutuality become subsumed by the dominating power structure. Those disenfranchised individuals and communities end up trying to navigate forces of power which refuse to relinquish their stronghold. In addition, those wielding power may at times not even recognize the deadliness of the asymmetry, or may justify it because it is “legal” (slavery, “stand your ground” laws) or “moral” (family values). 

When we consider power structures and “who’s in and who’s out,” we are also considering who has the power to define not only where these boundaries are in regards to one’s self, but for others as well. When social structures have been built to privilege categorization and taxonomy, and when defining the “other delineates an “in” and an “out” for some groups or individuals who then maintain personal and structural power over others, and when “knowing” is utilized to define oneself in opposition to an “other” rather than explore a deep ontological connection to one’s own experience, knowing reinforces and supports the creation of racism, sexism, classism, and various forms of social “othering”. This creates a sociopolitical, and interpersonal, structure with a reductionistic aim: knowing lends its authority to reinforcing external power over which the individual has little control. Thus, when categorization results in creating and reifying oppressive power structures, a desire for mastery over our environments and bodies can translate to a desire for mastery over, or subjugation of, other types of unknowns, including differences between cultures and communities. 

I posit that, because of the deeply entrenched systems of power that may be unrecognizable to its wielders, is not enough to suggest that whiteness and racist injustice can be repaired or even addressed via mutual recognition, which assumes that deadly power structures are not a salient feature in an “other”’s unique subjectivity.  Of the inability to apply psychoanalytic concepts of “thirdness” and “mutual recognition” to lived political experiences, Stephen Sheehi (2018) writes, “Transcending physical, juridical, and psychic space, ‘third space’  is a magically ‘co-constructed’  intersection of two parallel planes, two parallel regimes of the occupier/citizen and occupied/non-citizen that could never meet (by merit of being parallel). In this space, a magical undoing of the asymmetries of power unfolds.” Similarly, in the United States legal system, the presupposition of treating each individual who comes before the courts “equally” implies that all subjects have started out on equal footing; we know by now that not only does racial bias and racism preclude “innocent until proven guilty” as Black and Brown skin color provides guilt before evidence; additionally, our neoliberal hierarchy is a racialized one, and some individuals are executed extrajudicially and never make it before the court system at all.

Systems of power, such as whiteness, are intent on preserving themselves by any means necessary, and are easily invisibilized, hidden, and disavowed and projected onto the “other”. Taking up mutual recognition as a solution to this problem presupposes asymmetry and injustice to be a matter of misunderstanding, which borders on a colorblind, assimilationist (Kendi, 2016) perspective with deleterious effects, both in terms of requiring the “Other” in the power differential to hold as much responsibility as the “State” (which holds and perpetuates whiteness), but also in terms of how this type of perspective influences policy, systems, and unconscious assumptions and positionality within interpersonal relationships. This is not to say that, generally speaking, differences cannot co-exist; rather, the idea that mutual recognition is necessary for repair between people with different relationships to whiteness, racialized hierarchies, and violent systems of power allows the unspoken and insidious power dynamics of whiteness to remain invisible. This can end up re-enacting racist dynamics where the one experiencing racism is required to take on increased labor and risk, leaving whiteness as a system as well as the ones identified with whiteness (or any other kind of power hierarchy) intact, risk free, having to sacrifice perhaps ideology but not life and limb. 

Guilaine Kinouani states, “[Epistemic homelessness] is a sense of being displaced from one’s truth base, [which is] a mediating variable between epistemic confidence and ontological insecurity” (2017). Any cogent assessment of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, or the “New Jim Crow” (Alexander, CITE) in the United States will show that the asymmetry of whiteness is deadly, that it systematically displaces individuals from their own sense of truth and knowledge. When Kinouani asks, “Who holds the power,” is not enough to respond that structural power is shared mutually; for when it comes to encounters with power, what is mutual about being on the wrong side of the barrel of a police (or ex-police) gun? The focus on mutual recognition in this instance would imply that the person with the gun pointed at them has authorized the other person to hold that gun. Mutual recognition cannot even be truly studied for its effectiveness until those of us who are caught up in whiteness insist on interrogating structures of power delineated by force, and that those of us in a position to feel, for example, that the police are here to “protect and serve” us, work on recognizing our collusion with a system designed to manipulate and oppress, even when we can’t see it happening. In doing so, we may be able to limit harm and forge real relationships with each other, even in (and especially with) our differences, and deepen our understanding of the complexities of human experience.