The Classic Series… Race and Society through the Lens of a Psychiatrist

Feb 02, 2020 Book Review…, News

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Book: THE ISIS PAPERS – THE KEYS TO THE COLORS
Author: Dr. Frances Cress Welsing
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

The late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing has her fair share of detractors. Over the years, she has been called a racial arsonist, a homophobe, an anachronism and a Black Nationalist. On the other hand, her supporters refer to her in hagiographic terms: an ancestor, a sage, a scholar, a visionary and an original.

Amid the back and forth, many forget that Welsing was a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, no less, and the foundation of her seminal work, ‘THE ISIS PAPERS’, rests psychodynamic psychology.
Welsing, through her clinical assessments and therapeutic work, discovered that many of her patients’ neuroses were caused by racism and oppression. A compendium of essays written over an eighteen-year period, THE ISIS PAPERS represents her most definitive work on race, culture and politics.
Her thesis on white supremacy is hardly capricious.
White supremacy, according to Welsing, is a systemized concept deeply rooted in the collective unconscious. Not unlike a Jungian Archetype, it has, and continues to shape culture and behaviour. It is an age-old social system evident in key areas of activity, namely, economics, education, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sex and war.
Tenaciously unbowed and soundly academic, Welsing pivots toward a head-on confrontation with established norms.
Welsing views a world of villainous oppression against people of colour. It is war that transcends naked violence, although that was used in the past to conquer defenceless cultures. Today, oppression and the annihilation of a people are far more subtle, far more psychologically sophisticated. Clueless of the real modus operandi of white supremacy, brown and black people are deftly programmed to destroy themselves through behaviours that run counter to their cultural, social and economic sustenance.
Of black male passivity, effeminization, bisexuality and homosexuality, Welsing writes,
“As Black psychiatrists and behavioral scientists, we need to understand the individual and social dynamics involved in these patterns of behaviour. We must be able to help our patients understand their conduct and change it if they so desire. We should be in a position to comment on the ultimate implications of these behaviours for their well-being and maximum development – not simply as individuals, but as a whole organism of people seeking healing.”
Black Manhood, in particular, is threatened, a purposeful effort by a racist social system, according to Dr. Welsing. This system, she posits, “has steadily removed strong Black male images, such as those presented by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., resulting in the fragmentation of the black family.
Expectedly, she dismisses multiculturalism as illusory, and nothing but a spurious political hygge that masks the real threat of black annihilation.
Arguably, her most provocative argument centres on sex and neurotic obsession. She assails Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, which she describes as obscure and useless. Freud, a Jew, deluded by his own need for acceptance by white German culture, failed to identify the phallus (penis envy) as the bulwark of white supremacy.
Ironically, whites, whom she considers genetically inferior (she theorizes on skin albinism and migration), have, since their first encounter with coloured and black peoples, consciously and unconsciously, sought genetic dominance due to fear of Black genetic power and the real likelihood of their own extinction.
She expounds, “The white male felt genetically weaker, not only in comparison to the Black male but also to the black female,” but “the black male is feared more because it is males who initiate the act of reproduction.”
This dynamic, she concludes, is never discussed openly in the white supremacy system/culture. However, black male envy, she notes, is unconsciously raised when whites “constantly concern themselves with the comparative size of the black phallus versus the size of the white phallus.”
It is the fear of the black genitalia that leaves imprinted on the psyche the neurotic imagery of the white male assuming the role of power by puffing on a long black cigar. “Indeed, the more important they wish others to believe they are, the longer the cigar.”
Welsing argues that the symbolism attached to white supremacy: guns, missiles and other weapons of war, have sexual overtones related to displacement (an unconscious defence mechanism, whereby the mind substitutes either a new object for goals felt in their original form to be unacceptable.)
Recognition of the social and psychological forces behind oppression is the first step toward empowerment, but concrete steps are needed to mend the black psyche.
Stopping the psychic hemorrhaging of the black family unit is only possible when “a balance is established between the adult male role of breadwinning and the female role of child socialization, with equal respect maintained for both roles.”
Further, the economic health of the family demands that black males assume constructive roles with comparative earning power with their white counterparts.
Of the family, Welsing elaborates, “Children are the only future of any people. If the children’s lives are squandered, and if the children of a people are not fully developed at whatever cost and sacrifice, the people will be consigned themselves to certain death. They will be destroyed from without or from within – by the attack of their own children against them. And both may destroy them. Black people now are being attacked in the streets (from within) by their own youths, as well as being attacked (from without) by our collective oppressor.”
‘THE ISIS PAPERS’ is groundbreaking and insightful, a tour de force in radical psychological thought. While Welsing’s contribution to black psychology remains outside mainstream academia, there is a growing realization of her relevance amid the (seemingly) incurable pathology of global racism.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
The Isis Papers – The Keys to The Colors
Publisher: African America Studies/Psychology Third World Press, Chicago
ISBN 0-88378-104-2
Available at Amazon
Ratings: Essential

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