Racial Insult and Repair

Abstract

How does the experience of racial insult as actualized in everyday automatic stereotypes affect the experience of being desired and desirable? Using a psychoanalytic frame informed by research in the social sciences, this paper examines the way in which racial stereotypes infuse cultural, social, and psychic experience. Love is an “open system” inclined to an appreciation of particularity. Race in our contemporary world is usually constructed as a “closed system.” The implications of love and race as open and closed are considered in the context of a clinical vignette.