The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society on November 7, 2020 offered a panel on race where four panelists reviewed contemporary books. The panel: Decolonize Your Mind: Antiracist Literature, featured Aisha Abbasi, MD; Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD; Linda Berkowitz, LMHC; and Carolyn Smith, LMHC. Aisha Abbasi reviewed Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.
PBS Newshour, on Aug 5, 2020, spoke with Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times, and author of Caste, the Origins of our Discontents. Wilkerson sees us [U.S.] on the “cusp of an awakening, an awakening to a part of, much of, American history that many people may not have known. The goal of this work [Black Lives Matter] is to allow us to see again the structure that we have inherited, to be able to push forward,” -[doesn’t that also sound like the work of psychoanalysis?] - Wilkerson continues: “but most importantly, to recognize that we all have a stake in it and to recognize that it will take each and every one of us to make it the strongest house possible.”
Caste, a hierarchy, is an infrastructure. Hidden like bones, it is larger than race, the foundation, the framework for how people interact with one another. Wilkerson: “I think of caste as the bones and race as the skin...Race has been used as the cue, as the signal, as the indicator of where an individual sits in a pre-existing hierarchy ...”
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