A white New York City psychoanalyst is under fire after publishing a report decrying his skin color as a “malignant, parasitic like condition” without a “permanent cure.”
Dr. Donald Moss — a published author who teaches at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute — published “On Having Whiteness” last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
“Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility,” an abstract of the article on Sage Journals says.
“The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world.
“Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse,” states the paper, also published on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed site.
The “deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples,” the abstract says — and “once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.”
While “effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions,” there is “no guarantee against regression.”
“There is not yet a permanent cure,” the abstract says.
The article sparked outrage online, including among other academics in the same field.
“How do my colleagues consider this scholarship? Anyone actuality take this seriously?” tweeted Pennsylvania-based clinical psychologist Dr. Philip Pellegrino.
Many others even doubted it was a real study until they confirmed that it was officially published.
“I was skeptical so I looked it up, and yeah this is real and now I want to throw my Psychology degree in the garbage,” one person tweeted.
“This racist vomit should be called out for what it is,” someone else wrote, saying, “This is the lowest and most dangerous form of racism masquerading as academic discourse. Shameful.”
Moss, listed in the article as still being based in Manhattan, has previously spoken about the same subject at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies.
In his bio for the American Psychoanalytic Association, he said his work from the mid-1980s has been trying to “understand and dismantle structured forms of hatred … racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.”
Moss did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.
