Black Boys in the Eye of the Storm

ABSTRACT

It is essential that the psychoanalytic community begin to observe and study racism’s effects, its transgenerational and structurally embedded manifestations, so that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can be more helpful to Black people, and especially to Black children and adolescents, whose developing psyches are, unfortunately, being shaped within a culture of ongoing, if unacknowledged, racism. Black children are caught in the crosshairs of society’s brutal stereotypes that exclude them from social, educational, and employment opportunities. Such exclusions are sometimes exacerbated by their own non-adaptive responses to the hostile culture in which they live, thus affirming deep-seated racialized beliefs and social structures. Greater psychoanalytic attention to theorizing and understanding cultural attitudes on race, to understanding the impact of racism on how we think about Black boyhood with a psychoanalytic interrogation of transgenerational trauma, could positively impact our understanding of how racism impacts the therapeutic process for us all as clinicians and as citizens. It is doubtful that we will ever make the therapeutic arena hospitable to Black boys or Black men without integrating in our theoretical formulations the insidious effect of structural racism in American society impacting clinicians in all areas of mental health care.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgenerational trauma
• Black boys
• racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In a recent meeting at New York University, a panel of four esteemed, well-meaning white colleagues who had been invited to a panel exploring racism in the psychoanalytic community failed to do so.

2. It is without question that the enslaved Black female was brutalized emotionally, physically, and sexually to such extent that their mothers feared and guarded against the encroaching which brought its own set of dangers, including being sold away. My focus on the male is in no way intended to diminish the severe hardships borne by enslaved females, both girls and women.

3. In addition to not finding Black students who opposed education, Paterson (2015) found black youth “tend to sound like so called red-blooded, patriotic Americans, who love the military, support the troops at war, and are completely saturated by America’s ethic of conspicuous consumption material values and dreams.”

4. Young (1994) likewise asserts that racism “is not amenable to excision, no matter how enlightened one’s subsequent beliefs and practices may be” (116).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirkland C. Vaughans

Kirkland C. Vaughans, Ph.D., is a Senior Adjunct Professor at the Derner School of Psychology: Adelphi University.