Colonization and Racialization

Psychology has made much of racism as a defensive mechanism --a projection--of, for example, asserting superiority to manage anxiety about Difference. Kleinians would say that we see the other as only part object when operating from this paranoid schizoid position. So called race is not simply about difference; historically it is also about power (Foster 2014) and about “the colonial attitude of assumed Western superiority.”  [I recommend Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste , and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, to learn more about “the effects of colonization on the behavior, social systems, and subjectivity of both colonialists and colonized.”]  

It is important to remember that race and ethnicity represent amalgams of real social consequences as well as fantasy (Leary, 1995). Racism appears as internal - hatred of difference - but actually reflects internalization of external racialization rationalized and justified on biological, religious and psychological grounds (Davis 2007). Racism is a socially sanctioned form of hatred; death by cop a permissible persecution; projection not only exploits Difference, but creates it. (Evans,2004). 

Dorothy Holmes (2006) contends that “our culture's attitudes and practices regarding race and social class inevitably cause significant and lasting damage to the self for all who live in this culture.” Recall that Sullivan noted that self esteem does not come from the self but from accretion of myriad interactions with others. Society, with its socially sanctioned beliefs about race, with its policing -- whether by law enforcement, segregation, Jim Crow Laws, red-lining, voter suppression or multiple, daily microaggressions -- ‘colonizes’ the mind through the learning from a myriad of cultural cues that demonstrate that one is excluded and that one’s self is experienced as inferior, dangerous, etc. 

These negative attributions take their toll. Colonized in this way by Society’s projections, one begins to believe that one is inferior, and may, of course, lead to self loathing and dysphoria. The mind has been colonized not only by the projections from those who believe themselves to be white-- who see this injustice as normal and even natural-- but from experiences of being treated as inferior or dangerously other by institutions. This is one thing that is meant by the colonized, rather than a mentalized, mind.

Evans, P. (2004). Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and 

        Sociology Farhad Dalal Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge 2002 251 pp. £17.99. J. Child Psychother., 30(3):376-378.

Foster, A. (2014). Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking about Race, Culture and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond edited 

        by Frank Lowe. The Tavistock Clinic Series; series editor: Margot Waddell. Published by Karnac, London, 2014; 266 pp; 

        £26.99 paperback. Brit. J. Psychother., 30(4):547-550. 

Frosh, S. (2004). Aboriginal Populations in The Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. By Celia Brickman. New York: 

       Columbia University PressPsychoanalytic Review, 91(3):457-460

Holmes, D.E. (2006). The Wrecking Effects of Race and Social Class on Self and Success. Psychoanal Q., 75(1):215-235.

Leary, K. (1995). “Interpreting in the Dark” Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Psychoanal. Psychol., 12(1): 

       127-140.