Click Here to Read: From Beirut to Brooklyn: Eliyah Hawila fooled everyone, including his would-be bride and Brooklyn’s tightknit Syrian Jewish community, into believing he was a Jew. Now that the secret is out, the question is: Who is he, really? by Armin Rosen on the Tablet website on
November 29, 2021.
Beirut lebanon Image: DAVID HOLT from London, England Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The Contemporary Freudian Society Diversity Committee Presents Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks at 70 Sunday, January 23rd, 2022
Online via Zoom 10am-2:15pm EST (with lunch break)
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is a seminal theoretical text read across disciplines. Fanon utilizes psychoanalytic thinking to understand the oppression of Black people, performances of whiteness, and to put forward a vision for a humanist and anti-colonial culture. Our event is a celebration of Fanon’s work and this important text as it approaches its 70th anniversary. As the psychoanalytic community grapples with racism in our world, clinical work, and in the field’s history, a concentrated, communal, and conversational revisiting of Black Skin, White Masks is timely and imperative.
Philosopher and Fanon scholar Lewis Gordon, PhD will give a keynote presentation outlining some of the tenets of Fanon’s thinking and work and how Continue reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks at 70 at CFS
Click Here to Read: Exile, Prejudice, Victory: A Jewish Thanksgiving Story From the New World: How a man named Asser Levy turned New Amsterdam into a new Jewish home BY Steve Brodner on the Tablet website on November 26, 2013.
Map of the early Jewish Congregations in the 13 British Colonies in North America. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
How can universal theories of human nature be based in white racism, or even more ridiculously, white supremacism? Given that Freud declared that all human beings by nature are prejudiced, including being racists regardless of one’s skin color—yes, non-whites are racist too—that is, no one gets a free pass on being racist on some level, he probably would not be surprised that whitey becomes the emotional whipping post in contemporary culture as an act of displacement.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud underscores the universality of racism:
“Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the gallic people for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured” (p. 101). Continue reading Critique of psychoanalytical institutes by Jon Mills
Click Here to Read: Was Kant the First “Woke” Philosopher? Kant set us on the path to today’s “woke” ideas by arguing that perceptions are more powerful than reality by Robert Tracinski on the Discourse website on November 18, 2021.
Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
