Author’s Note
I have approached this essay with some care because words such as white supremacy and narcissism carry considerable historical, political, and psychological weight. My purpose is neither to diagnose white people collectively nor to suggest that racial hierarchy can be explained by psychology alone. History is considerably more complicated than that, and human beings considerably more varied.
Rather, I have sought to explore a narrower question: What happens when a social position inherited as normal begins to change, and equality is consequently experienced by some as loss? The emerging literature concerning group-status threat provides one avenue through which to consider that question, while my use of white narcissism is offered as an interpretive lens rather than a clinical diagnosis or substitute for the historically grounded concept of white supremacy.
The deeper concern of this essay extends beyond race. It concerns the extraordinary human capacity to create social arrangements, inhabit them for generations, and eventually mistake what we have made for what simply is. Race offers one of the most consequential examples of that process, but the underlying tendency is human. We construct worlds, construct identities within those worlds, and sometimes resist their reconstruction because changing the world around us can feel remarkably like changing ourselves.
Yet recognising that something was constructed need not diminish its importance. It may instead return responsibility to where it belongs. If human beings made a particular arrangement, human beings remain capable of examining it, refining it, and, where necessary, making something better.
Perhaps that is where possibility begins.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
Some books and interviews leave an indelible impression on one’s thinking and, in many cases, fundamentally one’s actions for the better. This essay discusses one such book and interview that remains among my favourite reads and experiences, in part, because I had the pleasure of meeting the author during my time in Atlanta. Sadly, I no longer have the original copy of the book in question as part of our library as it was sold upon learning of my admission to MIU’s Graduate Program in 2008 and the impending decamping of Atlanta for Iowa and onto my unfolding journey. I do, however, own a replacement copy and have enjoyed it over the years.
During a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose following the publication of Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Dr. Maya Angelou offered an observation that has remained with me. Speaking about race and the difficulties facing white Americans, she said, “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
The image is striking in its simplicity. One person stands while another kneels. Our attention naturally turns towards the person on the ground. We wonder what brought them there, what prevents them from standing, and what might be required to restore them to his full stature. Also, we wonder if their position is the result of force, law, custom, violence, deprivation or some other human intervention. Additionally, from our vantage point, we might even argue that justice would require removing whatever has compelled them to remain upon their knees.
But Dr. Angelou’s image becomes even more interesting when we shift our attention to the person who is already standing. What happens to them when the other person rises?
Nothing has happened to their actual height. They have not lost an inch. Their legs have not shortened. Their capacities have not diminished. They remain precisely as tall as they were before. Yet something has changed because their perception of their own height may never have been entirely about height. It may have depended upon comparison. If part of what made them feel tall was the presence of someone beneath them then the moment that person stands, equality may register not as another person’s elevation but as the one standing and their subsequent diminishment.
They have not been made smaller. It is only the distance between them that has changed.
I have wondered whether this deceptively simple image offers a useful way of thinking about one of the enduring difficulties surrounding race in America. What happens when equality feels like loss? What happens when a social arrangement that has elevated one population relative to another begins to change, and those who have inherited the advantages of that arrangement experience its dismantling as something being taken from them?
These questions lead beyond race alone and towards something I have increasingly come to think of as the human-derived world.
Think about this: human beings are born into a world we did not create. I call this the Phenomenal World. Mountains rise without our permission, oceans cover the planet, rivers flow whether we approve of their direction or not and both bodies of water are populated with flora and fauna that we neither seeded nor planted, gravity does not submit itself for a vote, and the planets do not alter their trajectories according to human preference. And, if we are honest, there are dimensions of the phenomenal world that confront us as realities to be discovered, understood, and navigated.
Yet much of the world through which we move every day is different. Nations, cultures, currencies, corporations, universities, property systems, political boundaries, neighbourhood classifications, and legal categories exist because human beings created them and subsequent generations continued to recognise them. They may become extraordinarily consequential—sometimes determining where a person may live, what school a child attends, whether a family can accumulate wealth, or whether someone enjoys the protections of citizenship—but their power should not obscure their origin. They were made, again, by humans.
Race occupies a particularly consequential position within this human-derived world. Human physical variation is real. The elaborate systems of meaning attached to that variation are human creations. Skin pigmentation exists in nature; a racial hierarchy assigning social worth, opportunity, intelligence, beauty, citizenship or moral value according to pigmentation does not descend from the laws governing the universe. Human beings created those meanings, institutionalised them, inherited them and, over generations, sometimes forgot that they had done so. That forgetting matters as enourmous consequences emerge—sometimes for the worst.
Once a human-derived arrangement has existed long enough, the arrangement can begin to resemble reality itself. Those born inside it may encounter its outcomes without encountering its construction. If one population disproportionately possesses land, wealth, education, political authority and institutional access while another population disproportionately does not, the resulting differences may eventually be interpreted as evidence about the populations themselves rather than evidence about the historical processes that produced their differing circumstances. As a result, for many the constructedbegins masquerading as the inevitable.
White supremacy provides one of the starkest American examples of this phenomenon. The term, coined in 1856 by John H. Van Evrie, can describe more than explicit declarations of racial hatred. Historically, racial hierarchy was embedded in law, citizenship, political participation, property relations, and public institutions. After emancipation, Reconstruction dramatically expanded Black citizenship and political participation. Black Americans voted, held public office, and built institutions while constitutional amendments redefined citizenship and federal protections. This is often referred to within the literature as “the first reconstruction.” Yet those developments generated organised resistance. The National Park Service records that the Ku Klux Klan and related organisations used intimidation, beatings, assassination, and attacks upon Black communities, as well as upon white teachers, ministers and others assisting formerly enslaved people.
People who had been legally and violently required to kneel had begun to stand. Sadly, as a result of seeking to stand, significant forces within the society attempted to force them to kneel down again.
It would be tempting to explain this entire history through prejudice alone, but doing so would leave much unexplained. Political power, labour arrangements, property ownership, economic interests, ideology, fear, and institutions mattered. None of these explanations needs to exclude the others. Human behaviour seldom submits itself to a single cause.
Yet psychology must belong somewhere within the story, because institutions do not perpetuate themselves independently of human minds. Human beings create, administer, and justify them. And in the process, vehemently resist their alteration and transmit their assumptions to subsequent generations. It is here that I have begun contemplating a term that has roots within mid-20th century Civil Rights discourse and is presently emerging within the scholarly literature and online discussions as white narcissism.
I do not here invoke the term as a psychiatric diagnosis of people of European ancestry. Nor do I suggest that people classified as white possess some inherent psychological characteristic unavailable to other human populations. Such a claim would reproduce precisely the racial essentialism being examined. Neither do I believe white narcissism to be a replacement for white supremacy. White supremacy names a historical and institutional racial hierarchy. White narcissism, as I am using the phrase here, would describe something narrower: a possible psychological orientation through which an investment in whiteness makes the centering, elevation or comparative advantage of whiteness feel not merely preferable, but proper. Under such an orientation, the social mirror matters enormously.
If generation after generation reflects back an image in which people who look like oneself disproportionately govern institutions, define legitimate knowledge, occupy positions of authority, determine cultural standards, and appear at the centre of the national story, that reflection may cease to register as advantage. It simply becomes normality. One does not necessarily wake each morning thinking oneself superior. One may simply inhabit a world organised around assumptions never required to announce themselves.
Then the mirror begins to change.
People once absent from particular universities enter them and succeed at the highest levels, receiving honours previously garnered almost exclusively by members of the dominant population. Those once confined to the margins of scholarship become producers of scholarship themselves, introducing questions, experiences and ways of knowing that the academy had previously ignored or relegated to its periphery. Historical narratives begin incorporating experiences once omitted. Institutions diversify, cultural assumptions are questioned, and those once treated primarily as objects within someone else’s history begin writing history themselves.
Nothing inherent in these developments requires the diminishment of white people. Yet they may require something psychologically difficult for someone accustomed to being reflected at the centre. They require decentring. And, for some, decentring can feel remarkably similar to displacement when being centred has never been recognised as a position in the first place.
Here, I am reminded of an experience during my undergraduate years.
During the autumn of 1997, I was enrolled in an anthropology course in which one section of our studies began exploring forms of knowledge that had historically occupied the margins of the academy. At some point, our discussion turned towards the famed crystal skulls and research that had reportedly been conducted on them at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. I had previously explored the subject with a fellow student, Nathan, while the two of us were preparing a paper for another course taught by Dr. Woodhouse.
I had not introduced this fact into the discussion. Indeed, I was simply sitting in class when a young white woman seated on the opposite side of the room, with whom I had never spoken, casually mentioned to the professor that I knew something about the subject because her boyfriend, Nathan, who was also white, and I had researched it together. The professor turned towards me and asked whether I would share with the class some of what Nathan and I had encountered in our research. I did.
Before long, however, another student interrupted the discussion to complain that he would prefer that we concentrate upon “what would be on the exam.” The professor responded that what I had shared was germane to the subject under discussion and, as I recall her saying, would “most certainly make an appearance on the exam.” Her response did little to satisfy him. He continued expressing irritation with what he regarded as unimportant departures from the material he believed we ought to be studying, until the professor eventually called for a break. I had said nothing to him.
As I began walking into the hallway, my friend Andrew, a white classmate who had been sitting behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and quietly observed that the student’s increasingly agitated commentary had been directed at me. I knew that already, but I had chosen not to respond.
He followed me into the hallway and eventually approached me directly. “Nobody cares what you have studied or worked with,” he said.
His statement clarified something for me.
I responded, as best I remember it nearly three decades later, that I understood that my presence in the classroom might not fit whatever expectations he had developed concerning Black men. I told him that I could appreciate how unsettling it might be, after years of absorbing messages about white superiority and Black inferiority, to arrive at university and encounter a Black man who did not conform to those expectations. But whatever difficulty that presented for him was not a responsibility I was prepared to assume. Perhaps, I suggested, it was something better worked through in therapy. And with that, I continued towards the restroom.
Behind me came the unmistakable sounds of students who had witnessed an exchange suddenly reach its conclusion: a few audible “Ooohs,” “Aaahs,” followed by laughter.
The episode might have disappeared into the vast archive of undergraduate memories were it not for what happened later. When dates and times were announced for our final presentations and my slot was publicised, we eventually reached the day on which I was scheduled to present. The student in question was absent.
Several students noticed and commented upon it. I noticed too, although by then I had little interest in pursuing the matter. I completed my presentation and ultimately received high marks for both the presentation and the course. I have occasionally thought about that encounter over the years, but I understand it somewhat differently now than I did then.
At the time, I interpreted the student’s hostility as a direct reaction to encountering a Black man whose demonstrated knowledge complicated assumptions he may have held about Black intellectual capacity. Perhaps I was correct. Then again, perhaps I was only partly correct. I cannot know definitively what was occurring inside another man’s mind, and the passage of nearly thirty years counsels against pretending that I can. However, what I can examine is the interaction itself.
I had not sought the professor’s attention. Another student had volunteered my previous work because it happened to be relevant to the subject under discussion. The professor then invited me to contribute. My contribution was subsequently validated by the person possessing institutional authority in the classroom, who not only described it as germane but incorporated it into what students were expected to know. As I understood it, nothing about that sequence had taken anything from the other student. Yet he experienced something about it strongly enough to interrupt the class, continue his objection after the professor had answered him, follow me into the hallway, and tell me that nobody cared what I had studied or with whom I had worked.
Why?
I cannot answer that question for him. But I can now place the question beside a body of social-psychological research that gives us a vocabulary I did not possess in that hallway in 1997.
I mention that the young woman, Nathan and Andrew were all white for a reason. Whatever was occurring in that classroom cannot reasonably be reduced to a story about how white students responded to the presence of a Black student. Three white students had already related to me without apparent difficulty: one had collaborated with me intellectually, another spontaneously recognised my knowledge before the class, and another quietly alerted me when he recognised that hostility was being directed towards me. The contrast matters. If something involving race and status was operating in the fourth student’s response, it was clearly not an inevitable consequence of his being white.
That distinction matters for what I am attempting to understand here. If whiteness alone cannot explain the differing responses of four white students encountering the same Black student in the same academic environment, then the more interesting question concerns one’s relationship to whiteness itself and to the expectations of status that may accompany it. It is precisely here that social psychology becomes useful.
Researchers studying what they call group-status threat have examined circumstances in which some white Americans perceive changes in racial demographics or relative social position as threats to the status of their group. The phenomenon is neither universal among white Americans nor reducible to race alone. Responses vary according to such factors as racial identification, political orientation, perceptions of competition and beliefs concerning the legitimacy of existing social hierarchies. Nor is the literature sufficiently settled to transform status threat into a universal explanation for racial behaviour; researchers themselves have noted considerable variation in how the concept is defined and measured.
What the research permits us to ask, however, is more interesting than what it permits us to declare.
What happens when someone we have unconsciously expected to occupy the margin suddenly occupies the centre—not by taking it from us, but because circumstances have naturally placed him there? What happens when the professor turns towards someone else an “other?” What happens when his knowledge becomes the knowledge upon which we will be examined? And what happens when the person we expected to remain kneeling simply stands? Perhaps nothing.
But if our own understanding of where we belong has somehow depended upon where we believe another person belongs, the changing reflection may reveal something we did not previously know about ourselves.
Still, the underlying phenomenon is worth contemplating. If an individual has come to understand his group’s relative position as normal, then a reduction in the distance separating his group from another may be experienced as decline even when his own absolute circumstances have not deteriorated.
Dr. Angelou’s two people return.
The person standing has not become shorter. The other person has simply risen.
This may help us understand why progress towards equality can sometimes generate perceptions of reverse discrimination or displacement. Some experimental research has found that, among white participants who regarded the existing racial status hierarchy as legitimate, making racial progress salient increased perceptions of anti-white bias, whereas participants who regarded the hierarchy as illegitimate did not show the same response. Subsequent preregistered attempts to replicate this particular interaction, however, produced substantially weaker results, counselling caution in treating the original finding as established. Other experimental research has found that making projected demographic change salient can increase perceived white status threat among some participants and affect racial attitudes, anticipated discrimination, and even racial categorisation. Taken together, these findings should not be transformed into a claim about what “white people” think. Rather, they suggest that perceived loss of relative status warrants consideration as one possible psychological variable operating among some people under some conditions.
That difference is essential because the question is not whether white Americans possess some unique human pathology. The more interesting possibility is that human beings generally possess psychological mechanisms capable of attaching identity to hierarchy. Race supplies one historically powerful American expression of that capacity.
The problem therefore may not ultimately be whiteness alone. It may be what human consciousness can do with any identity once that identity becomes dependent upon superiority.
If I require someone beneath me in order to understand myself as elevated, his liberation the presents me with a choice. I can either reconsider the arrangement that placed us at different heights, or I can interpret his ascent as an attack upon me. The former requires reflection. The latter requires only defence.
Perhaps this helps explain why human-derived arrangements can become so difficult to remake even when their origins are plainly human. We do not merely build systems around ourselves. Over time, we build identities within those systems. Perhaps to a point where changing the structure can feel like changing the self. And for some the changing of self may be a significant enough challenge to be destabilising. This is, I contend, one reason history matters.
Consider the twentieth-century transformation of American cities through interstate highway construction. Highways themselves are neither racist nor egalitarian. They are human tools. Where they are placed, whose property is taken, which neighbourhood is divided, and whose interests are prioritised are human decisions. The Federal Highway Administration’s own historical account acknowledges that officials in some cities viewed urban interstate construction as a means of removing poor African American neighbourhoods and describes the destruction or division of Black communities including Overtown in Miami and North Nashville. Concrete subsequently makes those decisions appear almost geological. A child born decades later sees an interstate and encounters it as part of the landscape. Unless someone teaches the history, there is nothing in the concrete itself revealing whose homes once stood beneath it. Here, we note the human-derived world has hardened into the physical world. And once it has hardened, inequality can reproduce itself without requiring each successive generation to consciously choose the original injustice.
This is precisely why the distinction between guilt and responsibility becomes important. A person need not have created a system to participate in it, benefit from it, question it, defend it or help reconstruct it. We inherit languages we did not invent, institutions we did not establish, and social categories whose origins preceded our births. We are born into the story mid-sentence. Therefore, the meaningful question is not whether we should feel personally guilty for having inherited them. The question becomes what we do once we can see them.
That brings us back to narcissism—not as diagnosis, but as metaphor.
Narcissus could not turn away from his reflection. Perhaps the racial analogue worth contemplating is not simply excessive admiration of whiteness, but an inability to tolerate a social mirror in which whiteness is no longer the organising centre. The distress arises not because the person has disappeared from the reflection but because other people now occupy the frame as fully realised subjects. And equality changes the composition of the picture.
The question becomes whether we can enlarge the picture without interpreting enlargement as erasure.
Dr. Angelou’s image provides the answer I find myself returning to. The story need not conclude by reversing the positions. Justice does not require that the person who once stood must now kneel while the person previously forced to kneel stands over him. Such a reversal would preserve the architecture of domination while merely exchanging its occupants. There is another possibility. Both can stand.
Seen this way, equality does not require anyone’s diminishment. What disappears is not human stature but artificial distance. To surrender an entitlement to stand above another person is not to kneel before him. It is simply to stand besidehim.
Perhaps this is why some of our most difficult social transformations ultimately require work at more than one level. Laws matter because human beings organise collective life through laws. Institutions matter because intentions without structures rarely survive. Material conditions matter because philosophical equality means little when opportunity remains systematically constrained. But consciousness matters as well, because human beings can reproduce old hierarchies through new structures if the underlying need for hierarchy remains unexamined. The work is therefore simultaneously outward and inward.
We must become capable of recognising which dimensions of the world were given to us by nature and which were handed to us by history. We must also become, and remain, sufficiently curious to examine how the latter came to be and sufficiently courageous enough to ask whether arrangements inherited from previous generations remain worthy of preservation. And perhaps most difficult of all, we must become unquestionably capable of noticing when something we experience as a threat to ourselves is actually a threat only to a position we had become accustomed to occupying. Because there is an enormous difference between losing one’s humanity and losing one’s superiority.
One is diminishment. The other may be liberation.
For the person who was forced to kneel, liberation means finally standing. And for the person whose apparent height depended upon someone else’s kneeling, liberation may require discovering that they never needed another human being beneath them in order to possess stature in the first place. Both discoveries require seeing beyond the world as we inherited it.
Because the human-derived world is not finished. It never has been. Every institution we inhabit, every social category we reproduce and every assumption we transmit becomes part of the material handed to those who come after us. We are simultaneously inheritors and builders, recipients of worlds fashioned by earlier minds and participants in fashioning the worlds that later minds will inherit.
The question, therefore, is not merely whether the world can be remade. Human history demonstrates repeatedly that it can. The more difficult question is whether we can recognise what within ourselves resists its remaking. And perhaps, once we have looked deeply enough within and honestly enough at what we have built without, another question becomes unavoidable:
Knowing that human beings made this world, what kind of world shall we make now?
As for me, I will always place my money on the option that leads us to a better world for the many. What would you do?
Suggested Practice
Sometime today, identify one arrangement in the human-derived world that you ordinarily encounter as simply “the way things are.” It might concern education, work, wealth, gender, race, status, age, family, leadership, beauty, nationality, or another dimension of social life.
Rather than immediately deciding whether the arrangement is good or bad, become curious about it. Ask yourself how it came to exist, who created or reinforced it, what assumptions sustain it, and whether you have ever mistaken its familiarity for inevitability.
Then turn the inquiry inward.
Consider whether there is any circumstance in which another person’s advancement, recognition, inclusion, or success produces—even momentarily—a feeling that something has been taken from you. Do not condemn the feeling and do not justify it. Simply observe it. Ask what, precisely, you believe you have lost.
Finally, return to Dr. Angelou’s image.
Imagine two people, one standing and one kneeling. Now allow the kneeling person to rise until both stand at their full height.
Notice carefully what has disappeared.
Not stature.
Only distance.
Then ask yourself:
Where in my own life might I help create a world in which more of us can stand without requiring anyone else to kneel?
—
About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.
He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.
Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.
He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.
To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.