Race, Constructed and perspectival

It has been generally accepted in psychoanalytic circles that Race, like gender, is a socially constructed concept. It has been used politically to justify exclusion, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and worst: slavery. Race is used to legitimize the existing hierarchy of wealth, power and domination. (Evans, 2004) Race is an ideology. Evans writes “It is easier to exploit, torture and even exterminate people … [when] they are ‘othered’ [and] rendered less than fully human.”

Race has no genetic basis, and yet we live in a racialized society that is considered in terms of white and non-white, whereas, in the consulting room, remember these terms and meanings are to be negotiated between therapist and patient. Those who think of themselves as white also possess these categories. But race and ethnicity are not the sole domain of people of color. It is perspectival: It is not only the other who is other. 

The assumed dominant culture, ‘whiteness’ , is the assumed universalized subject (Kaplan, 1993), the default position; Whiteness goes without saying, and you may have noticed that therapists, when presenting cases, often only state race when it is other than the Euro-normative white subject. Whiteness assumes a homogeneity within race, marks clear delineations between races, and obscures and oppresses any contradictory subjects’ positions. (Layton, 1998).  The Euro-American culture is assumed normative, and stature and standard by which all others are contrasted. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks, among other things, recognition, and seeks redress of this black/white binary. 

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.

Kaplan, E.A. (1993). The Couch Affair: Gender and Race in Hollywood Transference. Am. Imago, 50(4):481-514.

Layton, L. (1998). Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse: S. S. Friedman. Signs. XXI, 1995. Pp. 1-49Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 67(2):348