Other Lullabies: Attacks on Blackness, Confusion of Tongues, and the Loss of Play

ABSTRACT

Through a close reading of an anonymous lullaby from Latin America, the paper argues how colonial legacies and systemic racism, in the context of the structure of whiteness and the Covid pandemic, have had a nefarious impact on the material, symbolic, and psychic life of poor and working-class children and adolescents of color. The paper places a focus on Black kids. Left outside the symbolic, material, and legal order, these individuals suffer systemic attacks against their body and mind. This fact, in tandem with the devastating realities of the pandemic, have produced what the author calls an experience of “the end of the world.” Three main consequences of all these configurations are discussed: (1) failed identifications with whiteness; (2) loss of play; and (3) “confusion of tongues.” The need for new social lullabies, ones that invigorate our social capacity to dream the (colonial) state of affairs as being otherwise and that create communal solidarity, is proposed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A beautiful and haunting rendition of this lullaby sung by Argentine protest folk singer Mercedes Sosa can be found at Duerme Negrito (2008, May): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKgEBBUI6U4

2. I discuss this more in depth in Padrón, C. “Six Inconclusive Notes on the Whiteness of the ‘Good White’”. Division Review, #22, 2020, pp. 30–32.

3. These uses of identification can be extended to the experience of some immigrant children of color. In this case, racial trauma is intersected with the immigration experience of the child and their parents. This causes multiple conflicts that might lead to what, in a version of this paper read at the 41^st Annual Spring Meeting of Division 39 on April 2/2022, I called psychic limbo states at the core of the child’s identity formation. We are talking about a double identification with what are felt as two aggressors: whiteness (in being stigmatized as the other), and the culture of their country of origin (in so far as there is also the desire to become Americanized and not be seen as belonging to their country of origin). Limbo psychic states that are felt as inner fragmentation, the self being neither from here nor there, a non-place that is a form of inner suspended animation, the child carrying the trauma of both their parents and the racist society we live in.

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Notes on contributors

Carlos Padrón

Carlos Padrón, MA, MPhil, LP, is a licensed psychoanalyst with a background in philosophy and literary studies. He has been a faculty member at the Contemporary Freudian Society and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. Padrón was also a faculty member at IPTAR where he co-taught a class on clinical aspects of diversity. He teaches the Seminar on Psychodynamic Theory (Masters in Social Work) at the Silberman School of Social Work. Padrón participated in the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio a film on working psychoanalytically with poor and working class Latinx patients in the U.S., and has given talks and published on clinical issues related to diversity, and on community psychoanalysis. Lately he published an essay in the edited volume Psychoanalysis in the Barrios (Routledge, 2019) entitled ”The Political Potentiality of the Psychoanalytic Process”, and the text ”Pandemic Diary: 19 Fragments” for a special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology titled ”Notes from a Pandemic: A Year of COVID-19.” He was invited to give an Austen Riggs Grand Rounds Presentation entitled ”Reimagining Community in the Psychoanalytic Field”. Padrón has worked psychoanalytically in different settings and is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program where he supervises PhD students in psychology. He is the co-founder of the New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis. IG: @carlospadron_psychoanalysis.