Social Antibodies: Paranoid Impulses in Nativist Educational Reform

Abstract

In this essay we borrow from psychoanalysis to address the social paranoia aimed towards immigrants in the United States. Specifically, we examine paranoia as a collective embodied subjectivity, socially constructed, and connected to the experience of living in a country established by conquest and capitalist expansionism. Our analysis is informed by the definition of paranoia proposed by John Cromby and Dave Harper. We combine this analysis with historian Richard Hofstadter's remarks on the culture of paranoia in the American political psyche. Hofstadter referred to this as the 'paranoid style,' that is, the 'heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy' evidenced in the Cold War politics of the USA. Taken together, our understanding of paranoia as collectively embodied, relational, material, and social allows us to see what has continuously taken place in anti-immigrant politics as the long-term byproduct of colonial domination, slavery, and capitalist exploitation. We extend Hofstadter's notion of 'paranoid style' to understand the ongoing social paranoia towards immigrant-other not as a conspiratorial instance among many in the political sphere, but as central to the economic, racial, gendered, sexual, and anthropocentric relations that frame our society. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)