Against the rise of fascism, American literary modernists confronted the psychodynamics of conversion that underlie pernicious forms of conspiracism and racist public discourse. William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Jean Toomer’s unpublished writings on racial psychology, for example, reverse-engineer the psychodynamics of racism by putting readers in the uncomfortable position of seeing themselves from the point of view of the other (whether a literary text or another human being). Forcing a kind of double consciousness upon the reader, Faulkner and Toomer provoke disgust toward conspiracism’s self-appointed vigilantes. The paranoid public sphere is thus the diametrical opposite and sinister shadow of the pluralistic public sphere that James theorized. By fracturing and fragmenting the monolith of race, Faulkner and Toomer render epistemological doubt a powerful ally to critical thought.