A recent article in an academic medical journal made the absurd declaration that being White is a “malignant” and “parasitic-like condition,” with no “permanent cure,” as reported by Fox News.
The racist and pseudo-scientific claim was made in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA). The article, titled “On Having Whiteness,” was written by Dr. Donald Moss, a faculty member of both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, who is himself a White man.
Among his baseless claims are the notions that White people suffer from an “entitled dominion” that allows the disease’s “host” to demonstrate “force without restriction” and “violence without mercy,” as well as an increased desire to “terrorize” others.
Describing Whiteness as “parasitic,” and a condition to which “White people have a particular susceptibility,” Moss also claims that the “condition” leads to “White pathology,” which makes “hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.” The only way to “cure” this condition, Moss claims, is “a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions,” which “can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites, to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims towards the work of reparation.”
However, Moss adds, “there is not yet a permanent cure” to Whiteness, and “no guarantee against regression” even after his recommended “treatments.”
The article was published on May 27th, and Moss has apparently given lectures on the very same subject as far back as 2019. As the JAPA is a peer-reviewed journal, the article’s publication led to widespread backlash on social media, with many questioning how Moss’s thesis could even remotely be considered to be based in fact or science.