Becoming an anti-racist psychoanalytic community

I’ve been writing and speaking about anti-racism and whiteness for some time now, and it seems like more folks are listening and fired up about doing the work. I’m grateful for that.

I have been asked to write something for my Institute’s newsletter, and this is my first draft. I am placing it here because writing in public helps me think. I may have to remove it if it is published by my Institute, but for now, here is my first draft. It is essentially a statement and a call to action to psychoanalytic practitioners and communities to invest in anti-racist work, particularly non-BIPOC members of these communities.

(this is an updated version, edited on 6/8/2020, with footnotes added)

Any invitation to think about our work as therapists must begin with a reminder of the land we are on, and the deep history of how the United States was created as a nation. The framework of this country, built on a foundation of unceded lands and the unpaid work of enslaved and kidnapped people for the benefit of the wealthy, property-owning, “founding” few. Slavery, and thus whiteness, became codified in the United States in the 17th century, separating poor white European descendants from African diasporic and enslaved peoples. This encoded Black people into generationally-enslaved positions (becoming human “property”) and channeling white people into indentured servitude. Whites therefore could, in their lifetimes, work their way out of servitude and become property-owning individuals with civil and human rights (see John Casor, 1655) (1), whereas Black people legally remained property for another two hundred years. Whiteness as a “status” was thus created  in order to delineate the haves from the have-nots. In the case of the United States, it set the stage for future delineation between those who are, and are not, included in “all men are created equal,” an historic reverberation of the false claim that “all lives matter” in a system entrenched in anti-black racism and oppression.

Our psychoanalytic institutes, theory, praxis, and practitioners are not immune to these racist foundations. Psychoanalysis is not absolved of the after-effects of European imperialism and settler-colonial history within which our theories have been developed. We know our field is elitist, and in many cases racist; anyone following the hashtag #BlackintheIvory will hear personal stories about racism towards Black folks in the ivory towers of institutions. Psychoanalysis is not an exception. Guilaine Kinouani (2017) states, “Our capacity to have a ‘home’ is dependent on our capacity to know… our capacity to know is dependent on our capacity to have a home.” (2) For those of us who consider psychoanalysis our home, who is represented in these spaces? Can we really propose to know much about the complexity human experience if our psychoanalytic home is not truly welcoming to everyone, or set up for everyone? Taking a deep inventory of our psychoanalytic spaces, we may encounter what Catrice Jackson (2018) calls “missing faces.” (3) Our institutes and field are overwhelmingly white spaces, reflecting back a homogeneity that limits what we can profess to “know” about ourselves, our work, and our theories. 

But, “who is deemed to be the knower in [any given] situation?” Kinouani (2017) asks. In other words, who, and what, is easily considered “in” and “out” of this boundary of the analytic frame, of home, and of belonging? Who is allowed a home in the first place, and who is evicted or prohibited access? When we consider the Homesteading Act (4), segregation and Jim Crow laws, land occupations and settler-states, and redlining (5), this adds another distinctive edge our consideration of boundaries, frames, and borders.

Roxane Gay (2020) writes, “We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.” (6)  Racism and whiteness have played a part in my upbringing, and while racism has been a topic of conversation in my lifetime, whiteness —though centered in my life and in this country’s social hierarchies—  has not been collectively recognized as something to interrogate. This paradox unconsciously compels me, and my white communities, to continue to disavow, repress, and therefore repeat racist hierarchies and traumas.

The field of psychoanalysis is racist. We are embroiled in racism even in our radical roots simply because of the landscape in which our practitioners work. Ibram X. Kendi (2019) states, “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist,’ It is ‘antiracist.’” (7) Therefore, we must commit to becoming anti-racist in all our efforts.

I have several suggestions for our institutes and our field to take up interrogating whiteness with the aim of creating an anti-racist field. The first would be to make actionable commitments to interrogate our racism and whiteness inherent in the field and practices. The second would be to inquire into our syllabi and curriculum to ensure the material is taught through a critical lens. The third would be to focus on individual and institutional identifications with racism and whiteness, and how these may show up in psychoanalytic practice and institutional policy, including the system of complaints, fees, regulations, hierarchies, and “hoops”. Fourth, I encourage institutes to pay BIPOC consultants in moving forward on creating inclusive and supportive spaces that are set up intentionally for BIPOC, rather than for a tokenization or diversity optics. Fifth, each white-identifying member of any decision-making group should commit to doing their own personal anti-racist work, including paid work through Layla Saad, Rachel Cargle, Guilaine Kinouani, among other Black and Indigenous clinical mental health workers who have written syllabi and workbooks for this very purpose.

In “The End of Policing,” Alex Vitale (2017) writes, “We don’t have to put up with aggressive and invasive policing to keep us safe. There are alternatives. We can use the power of communities and government to make our cities safer without relying on police, courts, and prisons.” (8) We are a part of this alternative. We can invest in community care, including in our own psychoanalytic community. We can invest in mental health care instead of police. We can join Anti Police-Terror Project and many others who have been working on alternatives to policing for years. We can team up with city council members who are responsible for determining city budgets and get police out of schools, using the funding to replace them with school therapists. Our schools, health care, and other services have been being defunded for years, and it hasn’t helped. Vitale continues,  “People who are suffering need help, not coercive treatment regimes…Decades of… racial discrimination in housing and employment and growing income inequality have created pockets of intense poverty where jobs are scarce, public services inadequate, and crime and violence widespread. Any program for reducing crime and enhancing social wellbeing, much less achieving racial justice, must address these conditions.”

I believe we can do this— I believe we must do this, to focus our efforts on building an anti-racist community in the psychoanalytic field by attending to our own policies, ethics, racism, biases, and complicity in our practices, our theories, and our personal lives. Only when Black Lives Matter will all lives matter. As Gay (2020) writes, “Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy.” When we talk about COVID-19, the idealistic saying goes, “We’re all in this together.” Can we count on each other to be “all in this together” when it comes to dismantling racism?

I’m calling on my psychoanalytic colleagues to invest everything we’ve got to commit to developing anti-racist practice. This is an iterative experience, and we will never fully get it “right” and should let go of any expectations of “arriving” someplace beyond critique. We are always growing. This is what psychoanalysis does best. I believe in our ability to grow into interrogating our whiteness and dismantling white supremacy so that all of us can thrive.

1 See Biewin, Kumanyika, and Williams (2020) podcast “The Land That Never Has Been Yet” http://www.sceneonradio.org/the-land-that-never-has-been-yet/

2  Kinouani, Guilaine (2017). Epistemic Homelessness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKBLPbkB5I

3 Jackson, Catrice. (2018). White Spaces Missing Faces

4 See the Homestead Act of 1862. https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/upload/MW,pdf,Homestead%20Act,txt.pdf

5   “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood” (Madrigal, 2014) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/ 

6  Gay, Roxane. (2020) “Remember, No One Is Coming To Save Us” Retrieved June 7, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday/trump-george-floyd-coronavirus.html

7 Kendi, Ibram X. (2019) How to Be Anti-Racist

8 Vitale, Alex. (2017) The End of Policing.