Di-Angelo’s words provide a white context to Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Specifically the racialised context to the disconnection that can follow cross-racial exchanges. As a woman writer racialised as black, Eddo-Lodge refers to ‘the gulf of an emotional disconnect’ which translates to recognisable difficulties in being seen, heard and understood. She names what people racialised as black often experience when they attempt to articulate matters related to race. In the previous chapter, we proposed that whiteness may be reiterated through unprocessed traumatic responses, responses which might continue to be transmitted from generation to generation. In Chapter 4 we have seen that lynching was used as a method of social and economic control. We referenced the grotesque pictures of lynching scenes on postcards which depicted jovial and carefree white audiences posing next to black bodies, often hanging, in pieces, from trees. Reconciling the joyful mood of these audiences with the gruesome violent acts committed may seem impossible, even after the examination of sadism. Dissociation and splitting offer analytic tools to help do just that.

Splitting and dissociation

The defences of splitting and dissociation which keep white ignorance and white benevolence intact in fact strengthen the case for white trauma. But since maintaining the status quo requires some disconnection from the status quo, the distance created by splitting and dissociation illuminates the temporality of whiteness and its links with dominant ideologies and epistemic practices in the West.