Racial Justice in Psychoanalytic Communities: Translating Antiracist Dialogues into Racial Equity

ABSTRACT

This essay examines contemporary antiracist discourse in psychoanalytic communities, in particular its emphasis on challenging whiteness and implicit bias among analysts primarily through education, such as holding study groups and workshops on racism and changing curricula. The author explores the ways in which anti-black racism has been approached and challenged in these conversations and offers her own thoughts while keeping in mind the question: how can we challenge whiteness without using the tools of whiteness (e.g., coercion, disparaging vulnerability)? The author argues that while challenging white privilege through dialogues and education is necessary and useful, it is not sufficient to achieve cultural diversity and racial equity in psychoanalytic communities. An alternative vision for psychoanalytic racial justice is proposed. This vision, informed by works in moral and political philosophy, social psychology and anthropology, entails a two-pronged approach to racial justice based on both mutual recognition – through dialogue and education—and equitable distribution of resources. While the former approach highlights the role of the individual in challenging anti-black racism, the latter addresses its more insidious, systemic, structural nature. This paper explores how we might apply the concept of distribution to psychoanalytic communities.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Dobbin et al. (2015) found that targeted recruitment of minorities increased black men’s and black women’s share of management jobs by 9% each, while civil rights grievance procedures (employee complaints of sex or race discrimination) decreased managerial diversity.

² The persistent wealth gap between black and white Americans of comparable achievements and income is considered the cumulative outcome of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other racist public policies, which hampered black families’ ability to accumulate wealth resources across generations (Oliver & Shapiro, 2006).

³ Some philosophers have justifiably critiqued Rawls for not addressing racial and gender inequality more directly, though this is beyond my scope here. I mention him to acknowledge the important foundation of distributive justice that he established, which we can expand, as some of his critics (Mills, 2017) have done.

⁴ Levine (2022) illustrates a similar reckoning with shame, mutual vulnerability, and surrender in her encounters with patients of color.

⁵ Layton (2006) maintains that social hierarchies of class, gender, race and so on, “split and categorize human attributes and capacities” and that “normative unconscious processes” seek to maintain these splits in the mind and pull us to repeat relational patterns that uphold these inequitable, hierarchical, social norms (pp. 241–242).

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Notes on contributors

Noha Sadek

Noha Sadek, M.D., is a child psychiatrist and adult psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, faculty at Brown Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, and member of the Program Committee at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She’s also a member of APsaA and the IPA. She has presented and published essays about class-related shame across the socioeconomic divide and the psychodynamics of Islamophobia and its impact on both Islamic and American cultural identities. Her paper, The phenomenology and dynamics of wealth shame: between moral responsibility and moral masochism, was awarded JAPA’s New Author Prize in 2020.