Depigmentation: Notes on How Schopenhauer, D. H. Lawrence, and Frances Cress Welsing Constructed Whiteness

Schopenhauer, D. H. Lawrence, and Frances Cress Welsing 

 

Forced into a strange world, Caucasians are almost an abnormality; 

analogous to white mice, or at the very least grey horses. 

 

 

I. 

 

The tragic case of Jason Arday is unfortunate for many reasons - not least because it gives reactionary morons the opportunity to sneer at those with an interest in critical race theory and how whiteness as a conceptual identity is constructed and functions within modern society as a cultural and political norm. 

 

This is not an area of research with which I'm overly-familiar. But it does interest and, from what little I have read, it seems to me that there's a good deal of fascinating (and important) work being carried out. 

 

Indeed, if I were a postgrad student today looking for an idea to develop into a doctoral thesis, I would be tempted to examine how Schopenhauer's thinking on skin colour influenced later authors, including D. H. Lawrence, and how it relates also to pseudo-scientific theories to do with race, such as the one advanced by the American psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing in 1970. 

 

Without attempting to provide a detailed proposal for such a project, I'd like to briefly touch on one or two points here that might be central to the above ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Seeking to explain why it is that blonde-haired, white-skinned persons are physically drawn to dark-haired, brown-skinned people - a sweeping claim asserted without any empirical or statistical evidence to support it - Schopenhauer develops a speculative evolutionary theory rooted in his own philosophy of the will (i.e., the unconscious drive he posits as underpinning all reality). 

 

His argument is that sexual attraction is no more a free personal choice than anything else in this life and that it rests upon the instinctive desire not only to procreate, but to ensure that biological deviations from the original human type are balanced out in the offspring. As he believes whiteness to be an example of such a deviation - almost an abnormality - it is perfectly natural, therefore, that white people seek out partners of colour. 

 

Schopenhauer concludes his thinking on that exotic plant that is the white man by insisting that in no region of the world is the latter indigenous - "not even in the vicinity of the pole" - and that consequently "a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one" [1]. 

 

 

III.

  

One of the people most influenced by this line of thinking was the young D. H. Lawrence, who would go on to develop his own (idiosyncratic and slightly crackpot) racial philosophy in which whiteness is viewed not only as an unattractive skin tone, but a malevolent form of ideal being responsible for the destruction of the natural world and the triumph of money and machinery. 

 

According to his former girlfriend Jessie Chambers, Lawrence was obsessed with Schopenhauer's work in the period he was writing what would become his debut novel, The White Peacock (1911). She may have been the one to borrow a copy of the German philosopher's essays from the local library, but it was Lawrence who read and re-read the book and left annotations in the margins. 

 

And one day, as she recalled in her memoir published five years after Lawrence's death, whilst arguing with her and her brother on the subject, Lawrence declared that "white skin is not natural to man" and that therefore, for him, "a brown skin is the only beautiful one" [2]. 

 

As Laura Ryan says, for Lawrence "dark-skinned peoples were closer to the 'blood-consciousness' he prized, while whites, too much consumed by their minds and anaesthetised by the deadening mechanisation of the industrial world, were doomed" [3]. 

 

This is an idea that Lawrence holds on to in one form or another throughout his life and writing career; we find it in the early novel Women in Love (finished in 1916 but not published until 1920); we find it in the mid-period novel The Plumed Serpent (1926); and we find it in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

In the latter, for example, during an extraordinary rant about the women he has known, Mellors tells Connie that the only modern women who "'really 'come' naturally with a man'" are black women - although, as he then adds, black women don't ultimately appeal to him as they seem "'a bit like mud'" to his white sensibility [4]. 

 

This echoes what Lawence also told Jessie many years before - namely, that while he finds blackness beautiful, he doesn't automatically desire it; in other words, he could separate attraction and aesthetic appreciation [5]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

I'd like now to show how Schopenhauer's writings on human pigmentation connect to the idea of whiteness as a mutation or genetic deficiency in the work of Frances Cress Welsing ... 

 

If Lawrence's racial philosophy can be described as idiosyncratic and slightly crackpot, then Welsing's pseudo-scientific ideas to do with melanin set out in her 1970 essay 'The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism' [6], can fairly be characterised in far harsher terms. 

 

An expanded version of the above was later included in her controversial collection of essays, The Isis Papers (1991), where she asserts that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation and that racism, therefore, is a defensive reaction on behalf of defective albino mutants long-ago expelled from Africa to the biological superiority of people with high levels of melanin [7]. 

 

I kind of wish I was making this up - and some readers will think I am making this up. Unfortunately, that's not the case: these claims were not part of some outrageous satire, but made in all seriousness. Welsing also suggested that the human immunodeficiency virus was a form of biological warfare unleashed on the black majority by white people and that the latter were also responsible for drug use and homosexuality amongst African Americans. 

 

All of this feels quite a long way from Schopenhauer and yet, as we saw earlier, his philosophy does at times lend support to such thinking. Like Welsing, for example, Schopenhauer argues that black is the authentic colour of humanity and that whiteness is a biological deviation from such. 

 

However, Schopenhauer viewed this loss of colour purely as a physiological effect shaped by climate rather than a genetic deficiency and his scathing critique of whiteness as an identity tied to ethnonationalism [8] has more in common with later critical race theory than to Welsing's racial essentialism which (thankfully) plays no part in mainstream debate today [9]. 

 

Ultimately, Schopenhauer and contemporary theorists agree that building an identity around skin colour - black or white - is ultimately foolish and even Lawrence quickly realised after spending time in Harlem and reading black fiction that the negro is just another modern, urban American very little different from the white man and that even his most cherished illusions concerning "the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery" [10] are a lot of stuff and nonsense. 

 

 

V. 

In sum - and to return to where I began - I think the argument made by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and yes, Jason Arday, that racism is not a black issue but a white problem, is a strong one which deserves serious critical consideration. 

 

In other words, the gaze needs to be shifted from the victims of racism to the creators and beneficiaries of racial hierarchies. I know that many white people are made uncomfortable by terms such as white privilege and white bias and often don't wish to see how whiteness operates as an unspoken, invisible norm against which all other races are judged. But, frankly, that awkwardness can't be helped and shouldn't be apologised for. 

  

Notes 

 

[1] The crucial passage by Schopenhauer in which he considers human complexion, is located in the section of The World as Will and Representation titled 'The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes' (Vol. III, Book IV, Chapter XLIV). 

      Click on the link provided to read online courtesy of Project Gutenberg, who have based their EBook on the three-volume sixth edition of Schopenhauer's classic study trans. R. B. Haldane and John Kemp (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909). Schopenhauer's text originally appeared in German as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818-19). An expanded second volume was added in 1844.

 

[2] See Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 111. This memoir was originally published in 1935 by Jonathan Cape Ltd (London). 

 

[3] Laura E. Ryan: 'You are white - yet a part of me': D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (PhD thesis submitted to The University of Manchester, 2019), p. 39. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 204. 

      As Laura Ryan (2019, pp. 39-40) says, this exchange "illustrates Lawrence's othering of the black female as simultaneously representative of the 'real sex' both he and Mellors prize and a kind of degraded sexuality". In other words, in just one short statement Lawrence manages to both praise and denigrate "the presumed ultra-sensuality of black women", thereby betraying his ambivalence on the racial question (and romantic ideas of primitivism) more widely. 

 

[5] That seems (on the surface at least) a rather non-Lawrentian thing to do - something that enforces the mind/body split that he elsewhere seeks to overcome. 

 

 [6] This essay can be found in The Black Scholar, Vol. 5, Issue 8 (1974), pp. 32-40 (published online 14 April 2015). 

 

[7] Melanin is the natural bodily pigment that gives colour to skin, hair, and eyes.  

      I'm not a biological anthropologist, but I know a man who is and he tells me that lighter skin pigmentation is actually an advantageous evolutionary mutation allowing adequate synthesis of vitamin D by early human populations who had migrated out of Africa into regions with much less sunlight. 

 

[8] Schopenhauer famously hated tribalism and nationalism, even though he still maintained  Eurocentric, deeply racist beliefs that Africans were intellectually inferior that were very much in line with the pervasive biases of 19th-century European philosophy. 

 

[9] Just to be clear on this point: whilst the Cress Theory examines whiteness, it does so from a completely different perspective to contemporary CRT. The former relies on the belief that race dictates behaviour and is biologically determined. In contrast, the latter relies on the understanding that race is a fictional, legal, and political category - something socially determined but not essentially fixed - that was invented in the 17th and 18th centuries by the ruling class in order to justify slavery and colonialism.  

      Further, contemporary studies also focus on institutional advantages and systemic biases (i.e., questions to do with power) rather than the physical presence or absence of melanin. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, Flight, by Walter White, Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, and In Our Time, by Ernest Hemmingway', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 308.