“Show me evidence that racism still exists,” may be one demand to which Black people are subjected, as though centuries of abolitionist writings, personal accounts of violence, policy documents and Department of Justice investigations, the unending video stream of Black lives lost to police murder, and 19th century lynching postcards-still circulating-are insufficient. It seeks to maintain its own infallibility. White supremacy attempts to acculturate not only white people but people of all ethno-racial backgrounds into believing and upholding the social, political, and economic structures that comprise it. In “ White Ignorance,” Charles Mills describes how “the white delusion of racial superiority insulates itself against refutation” and so refuses to affirm ways of knowing (and being) that do not share assumptions that reinforce marginality. White supremacy is a part of these genealogies of gaslighting, and white ignorance is one means by which supremacism sustains itself.
The use of biology to rigidly define “normal” sex and gender within a binary regime that heavily regulates or altogether prevents gender non-conforming individuals from having agency over their gendered self-determination is another. White supremacy’s utilization of scientific logics to construct categories of difference and hierarchies of superiority/inferiority that justify violence against Black and other racialized bodies is one facet of these genealogies. In plainer terms, the genealogies of gaslighting are the historical-sociological formations of overlapping systems of domination that assert a particular set of identities as normal, and then subsequently make those identities into material realities. Together they illuminate how modes of kyriarchal oppression produce ignorance, which is not simply an absence of knowledge, but also a refusal to know. These genealogies trace the foundational assumptions of the logic that seeks to legitimize the violence to which marginalized communities are subjected. But gaslighting is also larger than the individuals involved in a given interpersonal interaction these interactions often mirror and invigorate wider forms of structural violence.ĭuring a recent graduate seminar at the University of Toronto, Michelle Murphy, a feminist historian of science, introduced the concept of genealogies of gaslighting. The target of gaslighting is ridiculed, shamed, and sometimes even brutalized into affirming a worldview that mirrors their abuser’s.
Gaslighting is most commonly associated with intimate partner/domestic abuse, with the gaslighter using alienation, isolation, and projection to convince their significant other that their understanding of the relationship and by extension the world are totally wrong. Discomfort, shame, and deeply unsettling self-evaluations may accompany such manipulation. Of us have encountered gaslighting: the tactic by which an individual, to gain power over an opponent, seeks to convince them that their failure to understand or agree is a product of their delusion.
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