Denying Racism is a Form of Gaslighting

By: Dr. Denise Renye

George Floyd was murdered at the hands of a police officer, which is only the latest in a string of such racially motivated, aggressive acts. We’re seeing international protests and citywide curfews across the U.S. People are taking to the streets but also to social media to voice their opinions. And not all of those opinions are in support of Black Lives Matter.

Some white people are saying, “I’m not racist, you’re racist for calling me racist!” Or they are defending police officer Derek Chauvin’s (and the other three officers who stood by while the murder occurred) actions that literally suffocated George Floyd to death. Their defense could stem from the belief some white people have that the police are protectors. This is not the case for black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC). Assistant professor of justice studies and sociology at Norwich University, Connie Hassett-Walker, said policing has its origins in slave patrols. Squadrons of white volunteers were empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery.

“They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people, and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules,” she said.

Centralized municipal police departments began forming in the early 19th century and were overwhelmingly white, male, and focused on responding to disorder rather than crime.

“[O]fficers were expected to control a ‘dangerous underclass’ that included African Americans, immigrants, and the poor,” she added.

The history of the police also plays into the narrative we’re witnessing right now – a desire to maintain order and concern for property more than black and brown lives. We see this not only in curfews and the response from police departments to use tear gas and rubber bullets on activists, but also in the language used to describe protesters: They’re “troublemakers,” “thugs,” “terrorists,” or worse. All of these responses are a form of gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a concept popularized by the theatrical play “Gas Light” in 1938, which also spawned several films. It describes the “psychological manipulation of another individual, when you make that individual doubt their own truth and mental health,” according to the Swedish website Näthatshjälpen. (For more information about gaslighting, including warning signs, check out this Psychology Today article.)

Addressing “All lives matter”

Another form of gaslighting? Chiming in “All lives matter” in response to the current protests. Yes, they do, but the purpose of Black Lives Matter is to emphasize the lack of action and attention brought to the systematic racism and violence black people face. Ibram X. Kendi speaks to this in the book How to Be an Antiracist: “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”

When people say, “All lives matter,” it’s a form of gaslighting that diverts attention away from the necessary focus on black lives and unjust systems, but under the guise of forced positivity.

“In no way is the [Black Lives Matter] movement meant to take away from the importance of human life of any other race, sexuality, ethnicity, age, or gender,” wrote Tayler Washington. She also said:

“‘All lives matter’ is always used at the wrong time. We don’t want you to say ‘All lives matter’ as we cry over the bodies of our black family members, friends, and community because they were ‘at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ We are left in the hands of an institution that stems from a constitution that counted us as three-fifths of a person and continues to treat us as so….

“By coming back at someone saying ‘Black lives matter’ with ‘All lives matter,’ you’re silencing black people. This is not to exclude the importance of other lives, but to focus on the prevalence of black lives being taken by people who are supposed to protect them. If you hear someone say this in response to Black Lives Matter, remind them that the All Lives Matter movement is not as harmless as they may think. It has been used as a tool to invalidate what the black community has experienced and the fears and problems we have.” 

By mocking and belittling a person of color, making excuses for or silently observing racist behavior, and/or denying an experience, it all creates an environment where the person doubts their own reality and what they know to be true. It’s a domination technique to keep a privileged person in power. In fact, researchers in Canada found gaslighting is “part of a systemic, historical process of racism that has been used by the police and government organizations to both illegally target people of color and deny complicity in racial profiling.”

We see this not only with the police and government organizations, but also the president of the United States. Trump’s creation of Obamagate and his avoidance to explain what exactly Obama did wrong is a racist form of gaslighting. To blame a man of color to create a delusional diversion from the mishandling of public health and well-being of the American people is a form of racist gaslighting. He has tried to deflect his own mistakes by scapegoating a man of color. Another place where BIPOC are scapegoated and gaslit? The use of marijuana.

Marijuana as a racial justice issue

A dynamic we’re seeing now is that numerous BIPOC are imprisoned for minimal amounts of weed despite the same usage rate as white people. Did you know black people are 3.6 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, despite similar usage rates, according to the ACLU? This is due to racial profiling and bias in marijuana enforcement and remains true for states that have legalized weed or decriminalized it.

In Colorado, the Drug Policy Alliance found the number of black juveniles arrested on marijuana charges grew after legalization. In 2016, a Colorado Department of Public Safety analysis found black people living there remained three times more likely than white people to be arrested for selling or possessing marijuana. In Washington state, an ACLU analysis found in 2014, the first year marijuana became available in legal retail stores, a black adult remained three times more likely to face low-level marijuana charges than a white adult.

That criminal conviction makes it harder to secure and maintain employment, housing, or receive government assistance for the rest of a person’s life, according to Charlotte Resing at the ACLU. Furthermore, as we know from various news reports, including one from NBC news, a handful of venture capitalists (primarily white men) are engaging in licensed cannabis sales in systems that exclude minority ownership.

When recreational marijuana became legal in California in 2018, cities set up “equity programs” aimed at opening the weed business to more people but their effectiveness ran into other rules that made cost of entry exceptionally high, according to journalist Janell Ross.

Maryland ran into similar issues with its state-sanctioned medical marijuana industry – advocates said it would create jobs, new businesses, and trade in places like Baltimore that have high drug use and drug wars. 

“The state’s law called on regulators to actively seek racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity in the ranks of those licensed to work in the state’s medical marijuana trade,” Ross wrote. “But after the state set up the process to vie for its first 15 grower licenses, none went to a black applicant.”

Black and brown people continue to be punished for things that white people also do, like smoking weed, with a much steeper price to pay in terms of jail time and impacts on their lives. However, even when there’s a potential for them to thrive in a business such as the cannabis industry, they are pushed out of the market when it’s discovered by white people that lots of money can be made. We see that not only with the number of grower licenses awarded to white people, but also how some white people have changed their tune about weed: John Boehner, Republican party former speaker of the house, was once “unalterably opposed” to marijuana, but now he wants it to be legal.

When these negative experiences are denied or swept under the rug, it amounts to gaslighting. I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention another recent example of gaslighting and control: When Amy Cooper feigned hysteria while calling the cops on birdwatcher Christian Cooper (no relation) in NYC’s “The Ramble” in Central Park.

White women’s tears as a manipulation tactic

Instead of Ms. Cooper admitting her mistake -- not having her dog on a leash in a leashed area of Central Park -- she deflected the mistake she made and turned it into a privileged white woman’s show with her tears. (For more on this topic, I highly recommend reading Mamta Motwani Accapadi’s “When White Women Cry: How White Women's Tears Oppress Women of Color” or this news article by Amelia Zohore. Additional resources can be found in the references section of this blog.) Ms. Cooper used her emotions (tears) to avoid responsibility and also participate in gaslighting.

Crying is loud and attention getting (“look at me!”) and in Ms. Cooper’s case, she used them as a weapon against Mr. Cooper (“He did this to me!”). She successfully redirected attention to him. She may have fantasized that she wouldn’t ever need to take responsibility for doing something wrong, but she was fired from her job and her dog was taken away. Will she need to formally apologize? Will she need to attend antiracism classes? What accountability will she have?

Psychologically pondering, Ms. Cooper could have been experiencing an “abreaction,” which is a psychoanalytic term meaning the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it. She could have been reliving a trauma that she survived. She also could have been expressing introjected traumatic fear and rage passed down the European women lineage. She might have been accessing inherited family trauma, the guilt that white women stood by their white husbands who abused and neglected black people. We don’t know for sure, but I want to mention it as a possibility, in no way an excuse.

What we do know is people in power want to stay in power and gaslighting is only one way they accomplish that. However, it’s also true that people who are gaslighting may be doing so out of ignorance and unconscious behaviors. Unconscious processes can be at play here – meaning a part of the self that is not accessible outright but rather through experiences of certain types of depth and understanding. If healthy explorations of these unconscious processes are not sought out and utilized, deadly and manipulative acts, such as Ms. Cooper’s and the police officers in the cases of murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin will prevail. Some examples of exploration processes include but are certainly not limited to: psychoanalysis, certain forms of psychotherapy, dreamwork, yoga therapy, psychedelic integration, spontaneous body movement, tribal chanting, and drumming. People who don’t get in touch with their unconscious parts will be ruled by them, as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud informed us.

“So many have bought into the narrative they peddle without doing any actual research of their own to see if their opinion is justified,” said writer Kevin Moye.

That’s primarily why education is so emphasized in antiracism movements. With even the slightest bit of research, a person learns racism is baked into the bones of not only the United States, but countries all over the world. In fact, on June 2 people in Paris also protested in response to not only George Floyd’s murder, but a case of police brutality on their own soil: that of 24-year-old Frenchman of Malian origin Adama Traore.

Joshua Waters, an indigenous man in Australia wrote, “These white ‘innocents’ – as James Baldwin called them – are planting seeds of uncertainty in their victims, striving for power, and reveling in their domination and control over others. Sometimes this occurs in the subtlest ways. Sometimes we don’t know it’s happening at all.”

Waters goes on to write that gaslighting is a tool of the oppressor that is – and has been for more than 250 years – weaponized against people of color to keep them in a “perpetual state of disarray, disenfranchisement, and disengagement.”

Again, it’s about power and we’re seeing that in the extreme right now. I want to quote Rebecca Solnit here because she says it brilliantly:

“I grew up with the old axiom ‘my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins,’ which is about balancing personal freedom with the rights of others and one’s own obligation to watch out for those rights. The maliciously gendered rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, the incels and pick-up artist subcultures, Trumpism, and a lot else have proposed, in recent years, that actually their right to swing their arms doesn’t end, and my nose and your nose are not their problem or are just in the way and need to move ….

“In the USA, unlimited armswinging peaks at an intersection between whiteness and maleness, with plenty of white women on board who seem to believe that a white lady’s job is to protect white men’s armswinging (often with a selfless disregard for their own noses) ….

“The logic behind all this stuff is that the isolated individual – ideally white, ideally male; they are the fists; the rest are inconvenient noses – must rule supreme.”

Gaslighting is a way of making other people “inconvenient noses” so that armswinging can continue unabated. It happens when white people use the word “riots” to talk about protests. It happens when those “riots” are condemned and people clamor on about being “peaceful” and invariably mention the nonviolent tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Dr. King himself points to riots stemming from gaslighting when he said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

The quote is taken from a speech at Stanford University in 1967. Here is the full context of his quote:

“Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.” 

Gaslighting is never OK and we have an opportunity to all work toward understanding, empathy, and listening inclusively; especially as people in positions of power and privilege. I’m actively trying in that regard and I have to say I’ve seen in myself, and as a therapist, that people do change. It is possible to hear the stories of BIPOC with empathy, yes, but also with action. Listen more, talk less. For more resources – history, action ideas, etc. – check out the #blacklivesmatter library resource list: http://bit.ly/BLMresources.

Please find a free anti-racism guided meditation for white people here.

References

#blacklivesmatter library resource list. Black Lives Matter. June 4, 2020. http://bit.ly/BLMresources 

Accapadi, Mamta Motwani. “When White Women Cry: How White Women's Tears Oppress Women of Color.” The College Student Affairs Journal. Spring 2007;26(2):208-215. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ899418.pdf

ACLU. “Extreme Racial Disparities Persist in Marijuana Arrests.” Accessed June 4, 2020. https://graphics.aclu.org/marijuana-arrest-report/  

ACLU Washington. “Court Filings for Adult Marijuana Possession Plummet.” March 19, 2014. https://aclu-wa.org/news/court-filings-adult-marijuana-possession-plummet

Breslow, Jason. “John Boehner Was Once 'Unalterably Opposed' To Marijuana. He Now Wants It To Be Legal.” NPR. March 16, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/16/704086782/john-boehner-was-once-unalterably-opposed-to-marijuana-he-now-wants-it-to-be-leg

Colorado Department of Public Safety. “Marijuana Legalization in Colorado: Early Findings.” March 2016. http://cdpsdocs.state.co.us/ors/docs/reports/2016-SB13-283-Rpt.pdf

Corbet, Sylvie; Garriga, Nicolas. “Thousands Defy Ban in Paris to Protest as George Floyd Outrage Goes Global.” Time.com. June 2, 2020. https://time.com/5846981/paris-protests-george-floyd-global/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Hamad, Ruby. “Crying shame: The power of white women's tears.” The Sydney Morning Herald. September 1, 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/crying-shame-the-power-of-white-women-s-tears-20190820-p52iy7.html

Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. London, One World Publishing, 2019.

King, Dr. Martin Luther. “MLK: The Other America.” Stanford University, 1967. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOWDtDUKz-U&feature=youtu.be

Moye, Kevin. “Racism Denial: A Lesson in Gaslighting.” Nubian Message. September 13, 2018. https://www.thenubianmessage.com/2018/09/13/racism-denial-a-lesson-in-gaslighting/

Näthatshjälpen by Make Equal. “Gaslighting, when you are not heard or listened to” factsheet. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://nathatshjalpen.se/en/a/gaslighting-heard-listened/

Resing, Charlotte. “Marijuana Legalization is a Racial Justice Issue.” ACLU. April 20, 2019. https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/drug-law-reform/marijuana-legalization-racial-justice-issue

Ross, Janell. “Legal marijuana made big promises on racial equity – and fell short.” NBC News. December 31, 2018. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/legal-marijuana-made-big-promises-racial-equity-fell-short-n952376

Sarkis, Stephanie A. “11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting.” Psychology Today. January 22, 2017. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/11-warning-signs-gaslighting

Solnit, Rebecca. “Masculinity as Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.” Lithub.com. May 29, 2020. https://lithub.com/masculinity-as-radical-selfishness-rebecca-solnit-on-the-maskless-men-of-the-pandemic/?fbclid=IwAR1MOTJlbZRr_kan_exMOGf1r_pQ2a6A887i38SxqUsH_JP1-oR1rantGtM

Spanierman, Lisa B.; Beard, Jacquelyn C.; Todd, Nathan R. “White men’s fears, white women’s tears: Examining gender differences in racial affect types.” Sex Roles: A journal of Research. 2012;67(3-4):174-186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-012-0162-2

Tobias, Heston; Joseph, Ameil. “Sustaining Systemic Racism Through Psychological Gaslighting: Denials of Racial Profiling and Justifications of Carding by Police Utilizing Local News Media.” March 4, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368718760969

Washington, Tayler. “The Issue with Saying ‘All Lives Matter.’” The Hawk Newspaper. June 1, 2020. https://www.sjuhawknews.com/the-issue-with-saying-all-lives-matter/

Waters, Joshua for IndigenousX. “It’s time to put an end to the gaslighting that occurs every day in Australia.” The Guardian. March 12, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2020/mar/12/its-time-to-put-an-end-to-the-gaslighting-that-occurs-every-day-in-australia

Way, Art. “Two Most Talked about Marijuana Legalization Issues in Colorado: The Hype and the Reality.” Drug Policy Alliance. February 8, 2018. https://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/two-most-talked-about-marijuana-legalization-issues-colorado-hype-and-reality

Zohore, Amelia. “Zohore: White Woman Tears.” The Cornell Daily Sun. October 7, 2019. https://cornellsun.com/2019/10/07/zohore-white-woman-tears/