Are White People Narcissists?
Narcissism. It’s all over. It’s pervading public discourse on every level. It’s tempting to write it off as “the other guy.” But I’m here to tell you that, if you’re white, narcissism may very well be the explanation for why we do what we do in regards to people of color.
Psychology Today has a seminal article on narcissism that shines a light on just what it’s all about.
How Does a Narcissist Think?
The article lists nine traits that narcissists exhibit, which I will break down below.
It’s fascinating stuff, if it weren’t so disturbing. As individuals, we may or not exhibit these traits. But if you think of all white people collectively and imagine us all as one giant organism, the organism that is “white people” very definitely over the centuries right up until today strongly embodies all these traits. It’s a sobering thought. Let’s take them one by one.
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.
I mean, how can we doubt this? White people as a group claim superiority all the time, by assigning ourselves status as the default group, by insisting on being the dominant culture, by making all history lessons, movies, TV show, about us, by ensuring that we fill CEO offices and political parties, by districting our neighborhoods and imposing segregation economically and socially when we can’t do it legally, without earning it at all. As a group, if white people were one person, that person would be seen as doing #1 all the time.
The most interesting thing to me about this trait is the part about being recognized as superior without the achievement to back it up. This kind of thinking can be harmful to others when the narcissist says, “Look at me, I am better than you! I am bigger, and more powerful, and I may use it against you.”
Is not white people doing this prevalent in the news every day?
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
White people are all about ourselves. Seriously. We couldn’t even let Black Lives Matter have any part of the limelight without interjecting All Lives Matter. We shed so many white tears when our preoccupation with ourselves is pointed out that it’s become a new euphemism. We whites, as the article says [with some paraphrasing], always “have to be on top, and win in all aspects. [We] value [people of color] in regards to how [they] can help [us] achieve this perfection, but if [they] rise above [us], watch out! [They] can’t outshine [us] or [we] will take [them] down notch by notch.”
Who hasn’t seen this in the news, in the media, so many times? We can shoot somebody to death, and rather than accept our part in the system that makes that happen, we spend our time bad-mouthing the victim to make it seem that being upset over the death is misplaced. “Oh, well, he had a criminal record.” We care more about our feelings than the rightful grief of parents, spouses, children.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
Look at our neighborhoods. It’s right there on the map. In my town, a phenomenal place that people spend thousands of dollars to come on vacation, there is practically a line down the middle separating the white half from where everyone else is. Up here we have wide lawns and no crime. Down there, they have population density and over-patrolling. We may not know why we’re doing it this way or how it happened, but it’s clear if you look for it. We are impelled to associate with our “own,” those we perceive as having the same status as we have.
Check out your own neighborhood. How many people of color are there?
4. Requires excessive admiration.
This one drives me up the wall. We want so much admiration, we’re willing to coopt the cultures of others for a laugh or as a fashion statement. Native American headdresses as Halloween costumes, Black music purloined by white performers for profit, yoga classes purely to look hot without any of the spiritual underpinning the practice is based on. We don’t want anyone to be better at anything than we are, to the point that we will water it down, whitewash it, and then arbitrarily declare that we’re the ones really doing it right. Like we’ve “saved” it somehow from the “heathens.”
The narcissism article says, “Everyone I have worked with in a clinical setting, who has either been raised by a narcissistic parent, or has been in a love relationship with a narcissist, says they are EXHAUSTED! Why? It's because the narcissist has an empty emotional vessel that needs to be refueled constantly with admiration and praise.”
This reflects what I often read from racial justice activists of color: the constant need to educate and reassure whites is exhausting. They say it all the time. We are exhausting to them because not only can we not admit our own faults, but we expect them to explain things to us over and over again as though we’re not even hearing them and then make us feel good about ourselves afterward.
More from the article: “If you are in a relationship with someone like this, you are constantly filling up their narcissistic supply needs. It not only gets old, but it is tiring. And…your needs don’t get met. The relationship is not reciprocal. Give and take? Uh…no.”
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
When I call the police, I expect them to take my issue seriously and to immediately respond. All my life, that’s how I’ve been treated by police. I would be shocked—shocked!—if one day a police officer ever dismissed me or, worse, actually touched me or restrained me for any reason. I cannot imagine being manhandled by law enforcement. I am certain to my bones that they are 100% on my side, and will protect my life and property to the extent their training and the law allows. I feel the same way about teachers, doctors, bankers—they’re all there to serve me and I expect to be treated accordingly. You should hear me on the phone with my wireless provider.
This is not, obviously, how it is for everyone. I, of course, never noticed this until it became so painfully obvious in the news. Do I feel entitled to this treatment? You bet I do. I may want it for everyone else as well, but if you told me that I’d have to give up some of what I’m getting—for example, if the police told me they couldn’t respond to my call because they were helping someone on the other side of town—I wonder how long it would take before my sense of entitlement would make me crack? How spoiled am I? Am I willing to share?
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
This is another one that it’s constructive to imagine collectively. You and I as individual people may not consciously exploit others (although, please see my prior post for another argument), but white people as a group throughout history have been nothing but exploitative. Crusades, colonization, slave trade, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, robber barons, banana republics, the Cold War, the Iraq War, climate change, etc. etc. etc. We are the single group that has done the most to ruin the communities of others, destroy the environment, deplete resources, steal the others’ labor—there’s just no comparison to our thoughtless, selfish attitude toward the world around us.
From the article: “Once again, to the narcissist, the other person does not matter. It is only about what the person can do to help the narcissist in whatever endeavor they are pursuing. The narcissist thinks nothing of taking advantage of others to meet their own goals. It is a given. And this is a warning to you.”
White people as a collective body don’t think other people matter. Is that who we really want to be?
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
If you answered, “Who cares?” to the question at the end of the last point, you are emblematic of this one.
White people as a group just plain don’t care. We shrug off the fates of others like, “Well, that’s just the way life is.” I’ve heard highly privileged, wealthy white people say, when confronted with how unfair our system is, “Life is unfair. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Too bad for them, am I right? They should have been born somewhere else with a different color skin or more affluent parents. It’s not our fault they weren’t. We shouldn’t have to do anything about it. It doesn’t affect us, so why should we care? If they only did this or that, they could get the same things we have. We did everything ourselves, so they should have to, too.
Problem is, that of course is all wrong. White people stole the opportunities from other people systematically for generations, and now we blame them for not achieving the American dream. We stole, and we don’t care. We want what we have, and we don’t want to share.
As a collective, we simply cannot feel the pain of other people—people we’ve enslaved, exploited, raped, murdered. It’s a psychosis on our part, really. The inability to put ourselves in the other’s shoes is a flaw that runs deep.
There is a scene in the mini-series Roots (both versions) where a young white plantation daughter and a slave black girl are playmates. The white girl teaches the black girl to read and claims her as a best friend. But later, when the black girl is caught doing something the white girl’s father doesn’t like, the white girl turns on her. “How could you do this to me?” the white girl cries. The father sells the black girl to someone else, who promptly rapes her. But the white girl made it all about her.
The narcissism article says,
The lack of empathy is really the cornerstone trait of narcissism. … The false acting of loving is possible but the narcissist cannot sustain it. Have you seen the person who seems to be empathetic and kind but as soon as things don’t go their way, they turn on you? Or the friend who cannot tune into your feelings but rather turns the conversation to themselves? … The most difficult thing about having a narcissistic [in your life] is realizing their inability to love. It is simply a crushing moment when this awareness hits.
Multiply that crushing moment by every person of color victimized by the white narcissistic system, and you might begin to glean how horrific our effect on humanity has been.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
This relates to #4 above. Because we whites, as a group, require excessive admiration, we are envious of anyone who does anything better than we do. So instead of honoring and caring for the football players who give us so much great sport, for example, we’re okay with them getting continual concussions and brain damage just for our entertainment. Instead of admiring and praising musicians who empower their listeners and make us see things in a new light, we slut-shame them or call them thugs. Instead of admiring a First Lady who is fit and healthy, we sneer because she showed her arms; instead of respecting arguably the smartest President we’ve ever had, we call him a monkey and obstruct everything he tried to do to better the lives of average Americans because it wasn’t all about us.
Check out this from the narcissism article:
Because the narcissist has to see themselves as larger than life, they assume others will be jealous of them. But, what we see more, is their own envy of others who may outshine them in any way. How do they deal with their envy of others? They make concerted efforts to take others down in constant criticism, critical judgment, name-calling, gossiping, while at the same time pumping themselves up.
9. Shows arrogance, haughty behaviors, or attitudes.
While it looks like narcissists’ have a high opinion of themselves, they really are self-loathing and have a need to take others down to feel better.
This is telling to me. We whites must know on some level how odious we’ve behaved throughout history. We must know that others have every right to despise and hate us. We must feel, somewhere deep down, that “murder will out,” as they say, and our sins will not be forever hidden. So do we do the hard work of admitting it and making a change? Nope. We assume instead the arrogant stance of claiming it as our divine right, our manifest destiny, our superiority. It’s a massive cover-up for self-hatred.
The thing is, I don’t hate myself personally. But being part of this collective narcissism I do hate. I want out.
The narcissism article closes with this, which I think by now you can read without my commentary as though it applies to white people as a group.
It is important to understand that narcissism is a spectrum disorder ranging from a few traits to the full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. Everybody can display some of these behaviors at certain times of distress in their lives. It is when these character traits are consistent over time and are impairing relationships and hurting others that they become dangerous. When winning at all cost and needing to be better than others is at the central theme of one’s character, danger is in the air.
Danger is in the air. White people, to others, our narcissism is endangering their very lives. It’s not right; it’s a sickness. I tell you, the more I learn about this, the more I want to rip the band-aid off and expose the filth for what it is.
I start with myself, admitting my own blindness and ignorance to how I’ve contributed to and benefited from this mass disparity of justice. Then I look for ways to mop clean up, if possible.
We need to go to the doctor and get whatever treatment is needed to turn this around. First step is admitting it, though. Narcissism has no treatment. The most you can expect is for the narcissist to begin to feel the inklings of accountability for the hurt they’ve caused.
Can you feel those inklings? Look at the white world around you. Start seeing it with clear eyes, start revealing it for what it is, and start calling it out. Maybe you can be part of changing the course of history. Because it has to change, folks. Otherwise, it might turn on us.
