Contempt is a perfect feeling. Rage and violence are imperfect because they are volatile. They demand an action or a response or some other act commensurate with their intensity. Contempt, on the other hand, is perfectly stable. It sees ‘through’ someone to a deeper motive or neurosis of which they themselves are often unaware. The subject of contempt becomes an object or character, over whom the contemptuous can claim a psychoanalytic upper hand. Contempt, in this sense, is akin to a kind of close reading. Actions and reactions ‘reveal’ something that the ‘other’ is trying to obscure. Contempt, like reading, assigns to these actions a coherent logic that is only as comforting as it is reductive.

The familiar terms for describing racial tension in the United States are “hatred” and “resentment”. Popular use of “racial hatred” predates that of “racial resentment” by almost a century. The latter emerged as a term in the late eighties but remained peripheral until the 2007 election cycle. Its usage tripled during Obama’s two terms in office and took a six-fold leap during Trump’s first term, overtaking “racial hatred” in 2019. “Racial contempt”, on the other hand, has remained a fringe term—a barely noticeable slope at the bottom of Ngram. Contempt is not about threat, or ugliness, or even ignorance. Schopenhauer writes that contempt is “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.” A “conviction of the worthlessness of another” is nothing new. Both hatred and resentment have worthlessness at their centre. The key here is “unsullied”. Contempt casts judgement without dirtying the contemptuous with the disgrace of others. 

*

Morrison sets The Bluest Eye in Lorain, Ohio—a town on the south shore of Lake Erie, now on the outskirts of Cleveland. The key characters are Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove, a pair of black girls growing up in the early forties. Claudia narrates much of the novel, recalling the life of Pecola, a foster child living with the MacTeers. Fragmentary vignettes of their lives refigure the violence-marred past that precipitates Pecola’s ultimate descent. Her mother, Pauline Breedlove, works for the Fishers, a middle-class white family, as domestic help. She cooks and cleans and bathes the Fishers’ children. One day, the genteel and proper Mrs. Fisher asks Pauline why she doesn’t leave her alcoholic and abusive husband, Cholly. The conflict that ensues is unlike others in the novel. Two women—one black, the other white, one middle-class, the other poor—stumble upon a distinctly modern feeling. Contempt.

A single uninterrupted paragraph, spanning several pages, opens and closes the grated window into Pauline’s interior account of Mrs. Fisher. The conjuring of this window is rather slight. The narrator never acknowledges Pauline’s intrusion into the story through either explicit quotation beforehand or verbal recentering afterward. Extricating Pauline’s monologue in this way would make her thoughts into ‘objects’ or ‘artefacts’—a past-tense account depending on Claudia’s recall. Morrison italicises this scene instead, allowing the first person to appear suddenly and invasively, occupying the entire page. Stable narration is, here, jeopardised. Maybe we are reading a transcription from a trial. Maybe we are eavesdropping on a family conversation. Or perhaps we have suddenly entered Pauline’s stream of consciousness. In any case, we lose Claudia’s mediation for the span of this story and receive, in its place, a kind of gauzy testimony. Without Claudia, Pauline’s mind churns just beneath the surface of the text, pressing palpably against its surface. It is these conditions that can elicit contempt in full clarity. Contempt is not a behaviour but, as Schopenhauer puts it, a conviction. Convictions do not take a physical form. They are difficult to observe and even harder to convey. They lurk in the depths of the mind and are, only by this form of ‘direct’ transmission, brought to the fore. 

Pauline’s epithet, “that woman”, detaches Mrs. Fisher not just from her actual name but also from her patronymic title. Instead, she is placed behind the demonstrative “that”—more concept than human. Concepts take on characteristics as necessary because they lack a life of their own. “That white woman”, that “ignorant” woman, that “simpleminded” woman is more a conveniently projected image than a fully rounded person. Adjectives bound to images have more to do with the peering subject than they do with the peered-at object. The viewer, Pauline, is a living mind. The object, Mrs. Fisher, is a flattened visage. A flattened visage might well have an immediate characteristic, like “white” or “woman”. But “ignorant” and “simpleminded” are subtler qualities and gesture toward a roundness that is conspicuously absent. These qualities are, to us, suspect because they require Pauline to see further into Mrs. Fisher than her interior monologue lets on. More likely, they are chosen impulsively by a living mind and cast defiantly onto a lifeless image.   

Verbs too fall victim to this suspicion. The auxiliary verbs “did” and “would” freely interchange in Pauline’s account of Mrs. Fisher, fusing hypothetical actions with historical ones. Things Mrs. Fisher “would” do are recounted no differently than things she “did” do. Behaviour is material and certain. Motives are, by contrast, ephemeral and speculative. Blurring the two wrests from Mrs. Fisher her physical agency. If actions, like qualities and speech, can be freely attributed, then Pauline controls not just the subjective elements of Mrs. Fisher’s portrayal but the objective ones too. Here, actions and thoughts, motives and anxieties sum to a kind of ghost—hovering in the liminal space between memory and imagination. 

The ghost of Mrs. Fisher cannot defy Pauline’s expectations because it is, in some part, a figment of the very same mind. This point is crucial. Real people surprise us, challenge us, subvert our expectations and destabilise our assumptions. Contempt cannot operate on real people. It operates, instead, on the idea or ghost of a person—a well-defined and fully predictable ‘character’ devoid of risk and threat. Contempt for a person reifies a stereotype: “a woman like that”.

Pauline fashions a distinctly racialised stereotype of Mrs. Fisher. Some codes are overt: she is “that white woman”, one of the “nasty white folks”. Others appear at the intersection of race and gender, or race and class. “Crying” at not being invited to her brother’s party cultivates a prissiness specific to white domesticity. “Crying” alone could, of course, be an uncoded act, but by comparing Mrs. Fisher to “a wet hen”, Morrison pairs paranatal mania with a pastoral backdrop. This combination maps Mrs. Fisher’s “fussing” and “carrying on” onto a particular suburban middle-class whiteness. It is the mechanics, rather than the morality, of such a mapping that is useful to us. Pauline’s account of race is enmeshed in a web of connotative implications rather than descriptive facts. It is, to use my earlier term, ghostly. 

*

Thus far, we have encountered two strategies necessary for evoking contempt: reducing a human into an idea and reducing an idea into a trope. These two strategies render the divide between Pauline and Mrs. Fisher not just personal, but categorial. Categories of identity appear fixed, and thus, the divide they cause feels permanent. It is the feeling of a permanent divide—so strong that communication appears either facile or futile—that lies at the root of racial contempt.  

Dialogue in Pauline’s recount slowly loses its delineation. Individual fragments of Mrs. Fisher’s direct speech are unceremoniously integrated into Pauline’s own thoughts. When Mrs. Fisher bemoans her own absence at the party, “What would you do if your own brother had a party and didn’t invite you” precedes a piece of reported speech, “I said [that] I’d …”, which is followed by a thought, “I was thinking …”. Movement from direct, to reported, to unenunciated speech during a single interaction allows Pauline’s imagination to subsume fully Mrs. Fisher’s voice. 

As their modes of dialogue grow more distant and disinterested, so too do the two characters. No material circumstances have changed: Mrs. Fisher has not said anything further, and Pauline has not volunteered anything herself. Sprouting in that conversational gap between two speakers is the seed of contempt—a feeling that the other woman is so foreign that dialogue is worthless and so shallow that the worthlessness can tolerate no doubt. This seed grows, relegating much of Mrs. Fisher’s speech to the reported mode. “She said she didn’t want me no more”, “she kept on telling me I owed her for … some bed she give me”, “she told me I shouldn’t let a man take advantage over me”. Grammatical features of vernacular English hover over Mrs. Fisher’s threats to fire Pauline over Cholly. We are not hearing Mrs. Fisher’s own voice, but rather Pauline’s ventriloquised image of her. 

As the conversation progresses, Pauline’s commentary becomes increasingly ironic and interior. Mrs. Fisher suggests that Pauline should collect “alimony” from Cholly after their separation, to which Pauline fashions not even a response. Instead, she asks the reader, “What was he [Cholly] gone give me alimony on?” We are invited to mock Mrs. Fisher’s naivety: a naivety conjured by Pauline’s silence—which is, after all, the cruellest of all chidings. Without words, we are opaque creatures. Contempt leaves thoughts unspoken not because they resist expression but rather because they seem blindingly obvious. The deceptive clarity of our ghosts renders the other party so alien, so distant, so resolutely other, that dialogue seems entirely futile.  In the end, we are left, like Mrs. Fisher, in the deafening silence of Pauline’s judgement—closer to snicker than outburst, closer to laughter than rage.

Contempt is, in this sense, a terminal emotion. Rage precedes regret, hatred precedes resentment, guilt precedes anxiety. Contempt has no successor. The “unsullied conviction” of one’s own austere “worth” resists both confrontation and forgiveness. It demands no physical response because both retribution and apology shorten the self-flattering distance between the contemptuous and the “ignorant”. Pauline’s final interrogative, “how could she understand?”, is hardly even a question. To answer would be to empathise with Mrs. Fisher, and empathy, too, threatens contempt. As self-preserving as it is comfortable, contempt becomes the entropic end-state of racial tension, keeping the ‘other’ at a distance close enough for derision but further than the bounds of sympathy.

*

American racial politics have moved, over the past century, from rage to resentment and from resentment to contempt. The former transition is the product of genteel white victimhood at the hands of housing reform, affirmative action, civil rights, and demographic shift. The latter is the result of a suffocating, pessimistic irony. Today, our disagreements are more distant. Conducted in a X-thread, or a comments section, using a cryptic vocabulary only comprehensible to allies, our ‘fights’ are more funny than they are intense. Since the end of Barack Obama’s second term in office, there has not been a presidential candidate that both parties have taken seriously. We belittle those with whom we disagree by creating endless memes, and short clips, and inside jokes not because we fear them but because we see through them. These feelings can hardly even be called disagreement—they are two sides talking past the illegible alterity of the other. Contempt is, after all, the only way both parties can feel the joy of winning. 

There is one final detail that, if left unaddressed, might both limit and distort this essay’s account of contempt—that is its direction. Morrison shows us a black woman’s contempt for a white woman. This, as much today as in 1970, chafes against our basest political intuitions. Surely the most prevalent form of contempt must be the inverse. After all, contempt demands some prerequisite cultural capital upon which jokes crack and communities form. By flipping the expected parity, Morrison shows something more subtle: contempt is both the means and the ends. Contempt is the product of power, but power is also the product of contempt. Unlike rage, or violence, or resentment, contempt rescues us from the weight of confrontation. The worker feels contempt for their manager, the prisoner feels contempt for their guard, the student feels contempt for their teacher not to display their power, but rather to reclaim, effortlessly, what engrained hierarchy destroys—the worth of the individual. To be ironic is to be more aware, more savvy, more intelligent than your interlocutor. Pauline’s contempt for Mrs. Fisher, thus, disrupts the presumed hierarchy of racial power, reclaiming for herself some of the dignity lost to Mrs. Fisher’s pejorative silence. 

Such reclaimings can, however, only delay the inevitable. The negotiation between a contemptuous black worker and a contemptible white employer is still the negotiation between a black worker and a white employer. It is Pauline, rather than Mrs. Fisher, who ends up, out in the cold, “holding [her] legs together … tight”. Contempt's power is subjective, and its victories illusory. It changes nothing about the material conditions of hierarchy; no money changes hands, no power is ceded, no rights are bestowed. It is precisely the immaterial quality of contempt that divorces it from reality. Both parties can ‘win’ only because neither party loses anything.

Fifty years after its publication, Morrison’s narrative feels painfully prescient. Her representation of interpersonal contempt prefigures its societal pervasion. The conclusion of her narrative is also the destination of ours: “she couldn’t understand”. Nor can we. Contempt has made winners of us all, promising to crown us with laurels in some later life. All the while, it cheats us of all that we hold dear. 

It’s not unlike the pokies.