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Abstract
Increasingly, as analysts and psychotherapists, we engage in racial encounters that challenge concepts of empathy, neutrality, and anonymity. This paper attempts to enter this dynamic space to uncover the utility of working within racial tensions for its inherent therapeutic value. Part of this challenge for the clinician, who often identifies and is identified as liberal, is to acknowledge the ubiquity of race as unconsciously structuralizing along with our defenses against this recognition. The intransigence of racism, as formed intrapsychically and discovered in our working functions as analysts and psychotherapists, when not actively challenged and reflected on will be explored. Attempts to explicate the indelible effects of race in the American clinician will be provided that goes beyond countertransference or enactments. Clinical examples and connections to modern cinema are utilized to provide a framework to advance our knowledge in working with racial material.
Notes
1 Multiple companies throughout the United States were intimately involved in the slave trade, including major insurance companies, textile mills, train lines and banks predominantly north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Thus, slavery was a major revenue source (reportedly 80% of the gross national product was linked to the forced work of enslaved people. As quoted by the New York Times, historians Sven Beckett and Seth Rockman: “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism.”), privileging Whites throughout the country (Desmond Citation2019).
2 The increase of racial incidents occurring while African Americans attempt to live their daily lives have been de-constructed into memes suggesting the innumerable daily insults that jeopardizes routine life, too frequently leading to severe injury (physical and psychological) and death: driving while Black…, shopping while Black…, learning while Black…, playing in the park while Black…, and commuting while Black…to name a few. We recall Sandra Bland in 2015, anticipating working for her alma mater Prairie View University in less than 3 three weeks, being pulled over by a Texas state trooper for not signaling a lane change. Three days later Bland is discovered dead in jail from an apparent “suicide.” These unprovoked incidents confirm the oft stated belief that Blacks are incapable of living in society as freely as Whites are.
3 Note the similarities and contrasts in the roles of the female protagonists, Joey Drayton (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) and Rose (Get Out) over the course of 50 years. Both claim that there is “no problem” in bringing their Black boyfriend/fiancé home to meet their parents, although we’re soon aware of the differences in intent. Joey Drayton is naively color blind and relatively ill defined compared to the three other leads (Spencer Tracey, Katherine Hepburn, and Sydney Poitier); while Rose Armitage is sharp-edged, no nonsense, totally in control, a dominant presence. After the trooper stop, when continuing the drive to her parents’ estate Rose states to Chris: “(I’m) not going to let anyone fuck with my man,” the aggressive possessiveness is clear. Compared to the sense of agency of the two male leads, Sydney Poitier appears more racially self-actualized than Daniel Kaluuya. This leads to the complicated question, too large for this writing, of the legacy of integration for the African American man in the late 1960’s compared to the millennial African American male of the 21st century.
4 Microaggression is a term used for brief commonly occurring verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicates hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups. Chester M. Pierce, a Professor of Education and a Psychiatrist at Harvard, coined the phrase in 1974 to describe the daily insults inflicted on African American peoples. August Wilson’s (Citation2007) ten generationally themed plays mark the decades following slavery for African American people: Gem of the Ocean (2003)—set in the 1900’s, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984)—set in the 1910’s, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984)—set in the 1920’s, The Piano Lesson (1990)—set in the 1930’s, Seven Guitars (1995)—set in the 1940’s, Fences (1987)—set in the 1950’s, Two Trains Running (1991)—set in the 1960’s, Jitney (1982)—set in the 1970’s, King Hedley II (1999)—set in the 1980’s, Radio Golf (2005)—set in the 1990’s. Each play is steeped with references to music, especially the blues, as a dynamic transgenerational container and bridge from Africa to the enslaved to modern society. Wilson’s psychic representation of the African in America both consoles and celebrates Blacks within their rich cultural identities. In a 2001 interview John Lahr writing for The New Yorker describing Wilson’s work: “. . . ‘finding a song’ is both the expression of spirit and the accomplishment of identity. Some of his characters have a song that they can’t broadcast; others have given up singing; some have been brutalized into near-muteness; and others have turned the absence of a destiny into tall talk—the rhetoric of deferred dreams.”
5 US Census bureau statistics found that in 2010: A record 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another. This compares to 8.4% of all current marriages regardless of when they occurred.
6 The notion of what is “appropriate” or allowed for African American hair has recently received attention with law suits against the use of natural hair as a means to discriminate; whether in the class room, at sporting events or with employment. Acknowledging the discriminatory intent by implying that only a Euro-centric standard is acceptable within society was recently challenged in New York City that banned discrimination based on hairstyle (“The decriminalization of Black Hair” by Ginia Bellafante, New York Times February 21, 2019).
7 Although George Zimmerman identifies as Hispanic, his mixed Peruvian, African and German ancestry, raises the question of internalized self-hatred as the racial-self projected outward toward Trayvon Martin; the hated Other loathed within the self.
8 In highlighting LaFarge’s work I am specifically referencing the developmental signifiers from parent to child, especially White parents, that structures the racial Other with numerous negative connotations that creates a racial mindset, regardless of actual experiences with the racial Other. This primitive fantasy of the racial other, accrued over time frequently without experience, can become the default image that the imaginer, Whites, have toward African Americans and other people of color.