“If [you] were faced with a student who wanted to be an engineer, but never gave them a math class, they’d...never become an engineer...If we want students to be anti-racist, but we never teach anti-racism, it won’t happen”
This is a quote from writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo. I think of how the institution of psychotherapy and counselling - doesn’t offer or a rigorous anti-racist clinical education let alone an education in our schooling years.
Most therapeutic institutions offer training with a focus on ‘diversity’ which is really quite inadequate when it comes to working with the psychodynamics of white supremacy and the impact of racism on black, brown people of colour. Was ‘white supremacy and its impact on your curriculum? It wasn’t on mine and I have been catching up ever since. Most of us have been trained in the unmarked as white instiiotn of counselling and spcyhotherapy.
“Whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly
to those it definitely excludes and to those to whom it does violence.
Those who are securely housed within its borders usually do not examine it."
(Ruth Frankenberg, 1994, pp. 228-229)
White psychotherapy and counselling practice and training has not tended to do a thorough examination of whiteness, particularly the whiteness that is implicit to our training and practice.
Frankenburg speaks to the lack of examination generally and in this instance I want to address the lack of examination of whiteness in psychotherapy and counselling training programmes as a disservice to practitioners, clients and the field in general.
white therapeutic thought and listening
In his book Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy set out to “complicate the white self”. For the purpose of this article this is what I am investing in, this complication of the white self of the white therapist. I am addressing white practitioners because we rarely directly confront whiteness together nor are we generally prepared for such dialogues. There wasn’t much space made in our trainings to explore the nature of whiteness as described by people of colour. We frequently go silent alongside our clients and colleagues of colour when it comes to talking of race, racism and whiteness. Whilst we are bonded by whiteness as a practice of privilege, it isn’t a bond that we are explicitly in dialogue about although we are aware of it; therefore we are unpracticed and avoidant at talking about, examining and deconstructing that bond to become, as Robin DiAngelo puts it, “less white”, an ongoing practice with no end point. When we do get to talk about it, then all of the defences that make up whiteness and its inherent strategies of denial often emerge. DiAngelo, describes these as…….
I draw from the work of Toni Morrison along with many other writers and thinkers of colour (James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Reni Eddo Lodge, George Yancy, Claudia Rankine, Akala, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Isha McKenzie Mavinga, Sara Ahmed, Ta-Nehisi Coates) have written about whiteness for decades. This archive of work offers a thorough account of whiteness as it manifests and operates. Turning towards that archive to inform our work of “being less white” has hardly got going, let alone is it anywhere near reaching its full potential.
Robin DiAngelo speaks to the specific defensive psychological practices of whiteness, the reactions inherent to whiteness and how white people deny the realities of racism and whiteness itself. Much of this practice of white fragility stems from being raised in a culture that doesn’t want to deal with the realties of racism and therefore keeps the histories of colonialism, slavery and racism off of the school curriculums where they rightly belong if something is going to significantly shift. Whilst we are poorly educated about the nature of racism, its history and the problematics of the whole notion of whiteness - then white people from a position of lack of education will continue to offer opinions and defences in response to a reality that we have studied very little of.
“While antiracist whites take time to get their shit together, a luxury that is a species of privilege, Black bodies and bodies of color continue to suffer, their bodies cry out for the political and existential urgency for the immediate undoing of the oppressive operations of whiteness……As antiracist whites continue to make mistakes and continue to falter in the face of institutional interpellation and habituated racist reflexes, tomorrow, a Black body will be murdered as it innocently reaches for its wallet. The sheer weight of this reality mocks the patience of theory”.
George Yancy
White Fragility and Complicating the White Therapist
In the paper For Whites Only gestaltist Lynne Jacobs offers “largely a stream-of consciousness reflection on being a racially conscious white therapist in racially divided America”. This paper presented me with a model of how to reflect on racism, white privilege, therapeutic practice and teaching as a white practitioner. I have also been absorbed by the writings of African American philosopher George Yancy and his reflections on whiteness. He speaks to the necessity and urgency of the work that needs to take place in our deeply troubled world, of the problem of racism that has been centuries in the making. This article speaks to my response to that urgency within our profession and practice, a joining with others who are calling for greater attention to the project of what Yancy calls ‘complicating whiteness’ so that the daily realties of racism are more adequately responded to, an offering to white practitioners that will assist us, as Yancy invokes “to get their shit together” so that we move beyond “the patience of theory” and into action within and beyond our consulting rooms, informed by a body of work and experience that I will be referring to throughout this article. Why? Because racism harms and kills and the right is emboldened right now to advance the project of white supremacy. Why? Because of what Fred Moten, an African American philosopher, has to say: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly…”
I was born into a culture and atmosphere infused with racism and white privilege that presented itself as the norm. I absorbed this unknowingly, it wasn’t my fault, it was and is an inheritance that I have ended up tending to because whilst absorbing it I was also in trouble with it.
Dialogues about racism and whiteness began in my early years (1970s) as a white child of Irish descent raised in and around Birmingham. I picked up on the legacy of the colonial history of Ireland. At some point I began to over hear the anti black and brown racism of my elder Irish and English family members. I couldn’t join in, I didn’t like it. It reminded me of the bullying of the playground, the classroom and of the stories of Irish diminishment I had heard of along the way.
Eventually I found other voices local to home. I went to the library in search of other minds and found them in ink and on cassette. I was born in Handsworth, home to the poet Benjamin Zephaniah and reggae band Steel Pulse. Their 1973 album Handsworth Revolution spoke of the ku klux klan and Babylon Falling. In 1997 Alex Haley’s tale of transatlantic slavery, Roots was shown on British TV. I recall being sat there each week in the company of my mother, brother and sister captured by each episode. It remains with me that we hid our tears from one another as we watched. I was shaped by my familial and cultural history, by bullying and anti-gay violence, by racism and counter racism narratives, by music and the written word - by the minds of others expressed in a variety of forms. Anti racist education and activism in and out of the consulting room is a multi disciplinary practice.
James Baldwin was my first encounter with a piercingly truthful and potent description of whiteness. I had picked up his novel about white gay lovers, Giovanni’s Room, as part of my coming out journey at 19. I then moved on to his non-fiction The Fire Next Time, his plea to end the racialised nightmare that was and is the not so United States of America. Baldwin’s truth telling had me. I wanted the company of truth tellers like him. SInce then I have studied Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, …………………………… all of whom have informed and infused my clinical thinking and practice. Not all of them are therapeutic practitioners, in fact few are and this speaks to the necessity of a trans-disciplinary praxis.
I left Birmingham for London where I worked in a local authority where I became immersed in local authority provision and politics as a gay youth worker for the Greater London Council and a play worker with young people. I joined the union, amidst an array of self organised groups that insisted the dialogues around race, gender, sexuality and disability into union and local authority provision. It was an exciting time for a while as we attended training ran by therapists that addressed men and women as working colleagues, then racism at work. I was curious about how they thought and worked with us. This looked like something worth investigating, I needed to understand something more about resistance to change and I could see that political arguing wasn’t amassing a movement towards change. I did see that these therapists had ways of speaking with people that got beyond the rigid defences of patriarchy and whiteness - sometimes.
At 24 I went into therapy and by my late twenties I was training as a body psychotherapist. I was beginning to get how trauma, homo love hatred, patriarchy and racism were embodied and would require particular kinds of relational environments to unravel from.
Gestaltist Lynne Jacobs speaks to the need to know ones personal story in relation to how we came to race, racism, whiteness and the project of unravelling from all that we have internalised. I think this is a valuable exercise for us all as practitioners, to examine our personal histories. What I have realised is that I have needed the arenas of political activism and discourse, of critical theory, of psychological and spiritual teachings alongside psychotherapy to tend to my own woundedness and capacity to think beyond the confines of the unthinking of racism and whiteness.
KNow YOur White Fragility
DiAngelo defines white fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.” She goes on to state: “These reactions do indeed function as resistance, but it may be useful to also conceptualise them as the result of the reduced psychosocial stamina that racial insulation inculcates. I call this lack of racial stamina “White Fragility.”
To become resilient requires study and practice and once a practice always a practice. Waking up is an every day practice.
As white therapeutic practitioners this is helpful news for us. What I have found in the workshops I run with therapists around white fragility is that these descriptions provide a language to identify and articulate experience that had previously been defended against and acted out. Once participants are clear that it’s not their fault that racism and white supremacy got in to their psyches, agency and energy returns to relate to these structures of mind rather than being spent on the psychological manoeuvres DiAngelo describes. An inability to formulate internalised racism because it has gone unmarked
When the defensive manoeuvres get to rest, all that resides beneath the reactivity of whiteness is revealed for attention and tending: deficiencies, projections, splitting, entitlement, shame, guilt, privilege, shameful convictions about the other, envy, lack, superiority and ultimately, borrowing and extending Winnicott’s notion of the false self, the false self of whiteness is revealed.
The fragility inherent to the white false self is riddled with defences that are deployed to shore up whiteness as the central location of reality, as weapons that are deployed and result in the loss of life for people of colour, injustice, exclusion, micro and macro-aggressions. In our consulting rooms we are at risk of colluding with the racism of our white clients and harming our black clients through actions of white fragility. I have come to the conclusion that to say ‘I am not racist’ is like saying that there is no plastic in my body in an environment so saturated with plastic that there is no escape from the inevitability of its presence. Since there is no escape, there is only surrender to this reality and the development of another set of practices that contradict the active agents of white fragility that DiAngelo identifies. Rather than bat back accusations of racism, we have the option of taking them in, rather than turning away we can turn towards, rather than leave, we stay; rather than fall into a hole of guilt we work through the guilt back to action, rather than say ‘no, not me’, we say ‘it’s in me, that was racist’. Yet many of us are not practiced in these kind of reflections and dialogues. Whiteness by its very nature denial and all that comes from whiteness is a denial of the realties of racism and particularly of black and brown subjectivities in the face of racism.
A story: I expressed to a client that an incident that they had accounted was not only an expression of their entitlement and narcissistic rage, that in this instance it was blatantly racist. Because of an objective lack in her capacity to mentalist whilst white and raicist because her education in the nature and realises of racism was lacking as was her ability to reflect on it she of course demonstrate much of what DiAngelo descirbes.
I observe as a disembodied expression, squirming and attempting to get away from a physical sense, whiteness is embodied pre-verbally hence defences against it manifest as bodily movements - a disorganised whiteness - whiteness is a disorganised embodiment. a disorganised attachmetn.
Complicating the White Self
“Whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly
to those it definitely excludes and to those to whom it does violence.
Those who are securely housed within its borders usually do not examine it."
(Ruth Frankenberg, 1994, pp. 228-229)
In his book Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy invites us to examine whiteness as he sets out to “complicate the white self”.
For the purpose of this article this is what I am investing in, this complication of the white self of the white therapist. I am addressing white practitioners because we rarely directly confront whiteness together. Nor is there much space made in our trainings to the nature of whiteness as described by people of colour. We frequently go silent alongside our clients and colleagues of colour when it comes to talking of race, racism and whiteness. Whilst we are bonded by whiteness as a practice of privilege, it isn’t a bond that we are explicitly in dialogue about although we are aware of it; therefore we are unpracticed and avoidant at talking about, examining and deconstructing that bond to become, as Robin DiAngelo puts it, “less white”, an ongoing practice with no end point.
Toni Morrison along with many other writers and thinkers of colour (James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Reni Eddo Lodge, George Yancy, Claudia Rankine, Akala, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Isha McKenzie Mavinga, Sara Ahmed, Ta-Nehisi Coates) have written about whiteness for decades. This archive of work offers a thorough account of whiteness as it manifests and operates. Turning towards that archive to inform our work of “being less white” has hardly got going, let alone is it anywhere near reaching its full potential.
Whiteness on the Couch
It is our denial and aversion to the reality of whiteness as a defensive distortion within the psyche that continues to limit our clinical practice, training institutions and beyond. It is also the privileges and comfort bestowed upon us that keeps us from investing in ‘being less white’. How have we managed as a profession to not put whiteness on the couch for a thorough enough analysis? Many of us have experienced diversity modules of a sort, yet I wonder how many of us had the problem of whiteness reflected and returned to us to figure out, alongside trainers who had already done and could model that work. Have you been in a training institution that has explored whiteness as a problematic dimension for the whole organisation? It is quite the task because ultimately it questions the whole of what we live and work within - capitalism which has been greatly resourced out of slavery and racism.
What don’t we want to look at? I am not surprised that we don’t want to look, it is excruciating but necessary work. I have spent many dark nights of the soul working this material through my own psyche.
Guilaine Kinouani recently wrote an article on her Race Reflections blog called Neuroses of Whiteness, White Envy and Racial Violence. I could feel how I didn’t want to look into this corner of my psyche. Disclosing envy to ourselves let alone others risks shame. I knew that if I didn’t really relate this article to my own personal experience I would be doing a white by pass and deny myself something that gets reclaimed when I do this kind of work. I sat and considered my list of envies. It doesn’t help to sit in judgment before them. This requires compassionate company and reflective thinking. I don’t feel to share my list here, yet I will share the invitation to read the article and make your own inquiry, list any envies then notice the impact it has on you as you sit with them. We have the potential to discover what was given up to the construction of whiteness. The next exercise is to list your hates so that you see, feel and begin to reclaim what has been projected onto people of colour. Not easy work, but much easier than being a person of colour on the planet.
We might not want to do this work because it means digging into out psyches to seek and expose what was inevitably planted there. To pick our way through hates and envies and everything between.
Kinouani’s paper is vital for understanding the dynamics of envy across racial lines and essential for practitioners to be exposed to, how does white fragility hinder this kind of deep exploration in the training environment? If we don’t do this kind of work, something will remain in the shadow and it will leak and continue to be acted out. Some of this work we can do alone at home to start with.
Robin DiAngelo offers some answers as to why many of us struggle to engage with looking at whiteness. We are met with a description of the multi-faceted defensive operation of whiteness that refuses the realities of racism and the inner/external lives of black and brown people in an attempt to shore up a fragile white psyche. This psyche that cannot tolerate, look at or recognise the external realties of racism and the intra-psychic constructions of whiteness with its inherent instability. She describes how we don’t want to look at the realities of white privilege and black suffering as a threat to our white benefits package, nor consider that the white identity we might cling to or deny as a complication that we are overly attached to and in reality doesn’t actually exist. MORRISON QUOTE There is much in therapeutic theory and practice that is necessary for navigating some of the abject internal states that dis-identifying with whiteness can take us to. When we look at developmental theory we rarely look at it holistically, how we all internalise standards of white supremacy and the inherent conflicts in the psyche that evokes. The white gaze for instnace, the very fact that we are taught about an unmarked white ego and white therapeutic practice and theory. If the starting point of any training is that we are working with developmental trauma and its impact, then we need to include on the curriculum how the family environment transmits and carries the trauma of racism and the position of white supremacy.
Racism needs to be more fully embraced on the trauma curricula in the field too.
Get Beyond Diversity
Diversity without the disruption of the staffing of teaching faculties, management teams alongside changes to the curricula is far from satisfying ethically and clinically. The psychodynamics of racism and whiteness from a broader range of perspectives and traditions is what we should be attending to in our training and teaching experiences more thoroughly, whilst developing our capacities to sit within the awkward and uncomfortable conversations that might ready us for similar conversations and experiences with all of our clients. I am concerned that diversity has become a safe word, a means of distancing the training agencies from really doing something to de-colonise and extend the curricula and make appropriate reparations and provision.
DiAngelo speaks to how white people need to develop more resilience to the discourses of racism and whiteness and I think this can continue to develop within our profession if we create curricula and more forums for this work. Outside of the training institutions the work of the Black and Asian Therapists Network (BAATN) and the Psychotherapists & Counsellors for Social Responsibility (PCSR) with its forum on examining whiteness have been addressing some of the gaps whilst the required disruption to whiteness in the training institutions is yet to take place, as far as I know. We appear to have settled for increasingly limited ‘diversity trainings’ which seem more about optics than substance, as pointed to in Kyra’s article about white supremacy’s assimilation of diversity.
“Diversity is the practice of mixing together different bodies within a common organization, and is a prime resource to be capitalized upon by businesses and organizations that are white owned and/or operated. Diversity still benefits those in power by taking advantage of the various experiences and vantage points of different racial/gender/sexual backgrounds. Rather than respecting difference and redistributing power based on it, diversity only “celebrates” difference in order to exploit multiculturalism for its economic value”.
To re-distribute the power in our training institutions, what would that look like? I think it’s time to continue the project that others have been engaged in for a long time now of insisting that the training agencies and regulatory bodies examine the problematics of whiteness within the profession, with a view to ensuring that all future students are more adequately trained to respond to the trauma of racism and the nature of white fragility. We need no longer ask politely for diversity to be put on the agenda. “What are we actively doing about racism and institutionalised white fragility within training organisations, within the BACP and UKCP?” is the question I would like to see actively answered. And to take Kyra’s earlier point about diversity on board, invite the organisations to be honest and transparent so that we start from where we are rather than in a spin of good white (institutional) performativity. I would prefer to read a statement of ‘how we have been failing and what we are going to do about it’. There you go, there’s an ongoing invitation to myself and to the field as a whole to be getting on with.
The White Depressive Position
I want to borrow Melanie Klein’s notion of the depressive position and remix it a little to think about the depressive white position which, I believe, would require us to let go of established splitting mechanisms: white = good/supreme/human versus black = bad/lesser/inhuman. Some difficult inquiries would be required: what is my investment in the status quo? how do I turn a blind eye or turn away? what are the images of blackness/poc I carry? what privileges afforded to me by racist structures am I attached to? What are the benefits of being white?
If you struggle to answer the question about privilege, then a spoken word piece by Kyla Jenée Lacey called "White Privilege” might help get you started (see link https://youtu.be/Qkz5UmXugzk).
To keep asking and answering this question until we have dug deep and run out of answers will reveal the benefits package and its costs, including the painful recognition of othering fellow human beings and the inner alienation and outer harm caused.
We can’t do this work of digging deep into the roots of whiteness and question the non identity of whiteness in a state of defensive shame and guilt and an inability for formulate and work thorugh these impressions. Audre Lorde was explicit about this in her writing and - quite appropriately - did not have time nor patience for white guilt. Instead, she points to what we can gather from such self-reflection: action and the seeking of knowledge and more intimate and enriching connection with the people we have othered.
“I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness”.
Our training insitituions and ourselves individually perpetuate thus changeesness in auclture that perpetuates it.
The training institutions do not train white therapists to be anti-racist therapists not address racism effectively as trauma not whiteness as something that needs looking at from the very beginning of our training. We are taught about a white ego and offered white therapies without the explicit statement that this is so. Whiteness generally goes unmarked and creates discomfort when amkred.
Freud’s ego was white. Jung’s ego was white. He constructed the black ego as ‘primitive’.
Regulating Whiteness & Disorganised White Embodiment
“Don’t you understand that the people who do those things, who practise racism are bereft, that there is something distorted about the psyche? It’s a huge waste and it’s a corruption and a distortion. It’s like it’s a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is, it feels crazy, it is crazy.” Toni Morrison (1993)
Morison said this yet howomce it is not on our curriculum and a place from which we wrok?
As a body psychotherapist I have come to think of whiteness as being a deeply embodied structure that is not an essential something, but precisely the distortion and psychic corruption that Toni Morrison refers to. If we think about it within the realms of attachment theory, then we can hold whiteness as a disorganised embodiment then return to DiAngelo’s description of the defensive mechanisms of white fragility as attempts to shore up the disorganised, disembodied white self. This is chronic within the dominant culture and we see this in the ongoing white practice of ‘I wasn’t racist and it wasn’t my intention and my words have been misconstrued and I am a good white and I have a black friend/partner and can’t be racist’ etc. This insistent denial of racism in the face of the realities of racism is highly problematic generally and within our field. It is a violence to people of colour and causes harm that occurs at interpersonal levels as well as within the structures and systems we live, study and practice within. Self identifying as not racist is a narcissistic manoeuvre. we need to understand the key terms and dynamics of racism before we get into more nuanced dialogues and clinical reflections.
One of the implications for white practitioners is that we might not be able to be the bad white object for our clients of colour (receive the anger, rage and hurt) that we might be de-stabilised when race is present and resort to white self-regulation practices to shore ourselves up. We are also at risk of sitting defensively with the realties of our socially constructed white selves in our dialogues with our clients, particularly with our clients of colour. We might be practiced at being bad parental objects for our clients, but are we practiced enough at being bad racialised objects?
A black male client was clearly experiencing racism in his work environment. We had been working together for several years and racism had been openly explored and discussed. On this particular occasion I sensed his caution as he talked of a series of incidents that had affected him. When I asked about this he told me how he didn’t want to offend me with how he felt towards the racist white colleagues. I wondered about his concern in offending me as a cover for fear of what I might do or say in reaction to his hate, anger and hurt. He was keeping me good by keeping his experience to himself, or keeping himself safe from yet another white man. In turn, I was bad because he wasn’t free to be himself with me. So I stepped into the place of bad white object, joining his colleagues and I asked him: “if you could really speak freely, what would you tell us white men about ourselves”. He found his patois and let rip a tirade of rage and hurt. One of those precious moments of our work together.
Look! A Good White
“Doing theory in the service of undoing whiteness comes with its own snares and seductions, its own comfort zones, and re-inscription of distances. Whites who deploy theory in the service of fighting against white racism must caution against the seduction of white narcissism, the re-centering of whiteness, even if it is the object of critical reflection, and, hence, the process of sequestration from the real world of weeping, suffering, and traumatized Black bodies impacted by the operations of white power”.
George Clancy p.229
“I want to be a good white! An anti-racist white, to be seen and experienced as such by black friends, colleagues, clients and others. I am going to be a good white and a good white therapist, who meets his clients of colour well and deconstructs the whiteness of his white clients".
This is the hi-jack, a narcissistic tone we need to look out for. There is noting more embarrassing than watching a fellow white perform a good white, partiularin in front of black folk who have great skills in recnogins this phenomena and offering side ey or a series of other facial expressions to note the occurence that whiteness is also very good at not regieering.
Whiteness is not a good thing or a thing in need of defending according to Noel Ignatiev who launched a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” The journal was launched in 1992 and on the cover was the slogan "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”. This speaks to the reactions that those who identify as white take to those who seek to dis-identify and grapple with whiteness and be “less white”. When Thomas Mair was asked to give his name at the trial for murdering Labour MP Jo Cox, he responded with “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. So being a race traitor is serious business and may well cost you, but never more than it has cost people of colour for centuries. It also returns something more essential than whiteness to the psyche, humanity.
People who are oppressed are not going to applaud us for being a decent human being or therapist. We are not doing this work for applause or recognition, maybe at first until we have grappled with the narcissism and object use of the other, again. If we read James Baldwin and Reni Eddo Lodge on why she isn’t talking to white people about race anymore, alongside George Yancy - especially chapter 7 of Black Bodies, White Gaze….. then we might be more at risk of coming to terms with the fact that there can never be such a thing as a ‘good white’. This means we can save ourselves from all the unnecessary efforts in that direction and get on with the task at hand - being less white. more conscious and a decent human being and therapist.
I haven’t done all the explorations around whiteness that I have been engaged in to feel ‘good’, although I do feel better for it. It has taken me to many dark nights and days of the soul, but nothing near what it is like to experience the multiple realities of racism. There are times in my life when I have had to face the chronic nature of a particular aspect of my psychological make-up. I was raised in the vicinity of alcoholism and domestic violence by traumatised and traumatising parents. I was educated by Irish teachers who had settled in England and brought with them their familial and ancestral legacies that infused the classrooms with fear, violence and shame. In the playground I encountered hatred and violence towards my yet unknown sexuality and expression as a boy. I was exposed to the radioactive shame of Irish catholicism. I was awash with toxin to the soul.
Facing the reality of the chronic manifestation of these realities was preparation for the recognition that I was also riddled with whiteness, a cellular imprint and embodiment of racism and at the core of it an empty shell of whiteness, the fact of its unreality. The consistent message from the writers I have kept company with is that to undo racism requires the undoing of whiteness, the eradication of whiteness, which won’t happen in our life time (see George Yancy’s book “Backlash”). We can make a start and recognise its inherent emptiness whilst doing less harm irrespective of the end game. In doing this kind of work I find that I make better contact with myself, my colleagues and clients. I piss a lot of people off too. But mostly, I become a larger, more embracing, more connected, less isolated being.
Some further words of warning. Sara Ahmed points usefully to white performances of anti-racism, where declaring myself as an anti-racist can simply - and in effect: solely - be used as a re-branding of whiteness exercise. Her paper on this very practice is another essential read. I could be accused of this very practice in the performance of this article and in making this statement about white performativity. What Ahmed and Clancy point to is that we are never outside of racism, yet we can do the work within it and meet our clients there.
White Ambush
George Yancy offers a useful notion, that of the ‘white ambush’ which can occur between people as well as intra-psychically, an encounter with the unthinking of whiteness.
“Learning from people of color, opening oneself to them, also places one in relationship to the possibility of being ambushed in new and radical ways. Whites must respectfully position themselves in relation to people of color such that whites will learn to expect to be ambushed, to be open to it. Whites who are open to life-affirming and transformative transactions with people of color are not simply waiting defensively in fear of new information that may threaten to destabilize their sense of self. Rather, there is an openness to having one's world transformed and cracked”.
Black friends and colleagues frequently ambush me about whiteness. My own mind will ambush me with whiteness. It isn’t always easy but that is the way it is. I practice embracing the dis-ease, breathing, then tending to reactions until thinking can resume - in our work we might call this self-regulation. In trauma work the therapist is initially the auxiliary regulator until the client can more optimally regulate themselves. Many of us may not have had someone model regulation of unravelling from whiteness as a therapeutic practitioner. We need to hear, see and be in the presence of that kind of practice to embody it as an orientation. Anti-racism needs to become an embodied internalised orientation and we can only get there through experiential learning in my view.
My ability to sit and think through challenging enactments comes of hours witnessing others in their practice of doing so, hours of studying the texts where there are detailed descriptions of these processes and practice where I am open to feedback and reflection. The very defensive haute of whiteness makes this particular challenging especially if we don’t make explicit provision for revealing how it manifest and then how to meet it.
This brings me back to Lynne Jacobs, in the absence of this specific kind of input in my training and since, her papers For Whites Only and Learning to Love - White Shame and Guilt: Skills for Working as a White Therapist in a Racially Divided Country offer a model of inner dialogue and reflection that demonstrated an integrity and honesty with herself that translated into her practice when addressing race and difference.
I recall a session with a young black gay man. At some point he said to me “You’re not racist, are you?”. Was this a question, a hope or a fear - or all three? What I did know was that he had up until that moment insisted that racism hadn’t affected him. Given that racism is trauma and he was doing his best to manage that within his ‘self care system’, I was respecting where he was at rather than attempting to pierce his protective structure. Yet this question offered a doorway. He said he wanted the answer. I shared that I did my best, that racism had gotten in, that it was there in me as a potential that I tend to. I chose a move of congruence, a modelling of how to be with poison that had gotten in that required a daily anti-dote. I was curious as to how this response might land. He was angry with me. Some part of him wanted it not to be so. Some part knew this was of course how it was. He began to tentatively speak of how racism had harmed him, vigilant to my reception and all the versions of whiteness that he anticipated. We had explored some of the hurts and impressions around his sexuality and this provided some ground for this work around his traumatic internalisation of racism and navigating whiteness.
Part of the practice of being ambushed is to keep the company of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Christina Sharpe, Sara Ahmed, Akala, Reni Eddo-Lodge and many more authors of Colour who ambush me repeatedly. Then there are the white folk who are doing this work of being ambushed such as Robin DiAngelo, Lynne Jacobs and Tim Wise who model and teach me how to do this from within a location of whiteness. I have needed to read their accounts of thinking through whiteness to find my own thinking and practice. MENTALSIIGN WHISLT WHITE I am grateful for an ongoing dialogue of 20 years with my friend and colleague Foluke Taylor. We have both been writing articles for Therapy Today and in constant creative dialogue. I am appreciative that ‘in the wake’ this “meeting-by-seeing-where-we-cannot-meet” that Lynne Jacobs describes, is possible. This potentiality is what I feel needs to be optimised within our profession and beyond as pockets of this work are taking place.
I understand from my studies that whiteness is a social construction impressed upon my psyche long before I had a chance to edit it. This understanding allows me to engage in the life-long project and practice of “being less white”, more anti-racist and more human. I do this because I want to be decent human being, friend, colleague and therapist and to find out what I am really made of as I work through layers of trauma, conditioning and distortion. I also think this kind of anti-racist work is also an ethical responsibility that as a profession we have neglected doing a thorough job of.
The last words from James Baldwin “How much time do you want for your progress?"
(See BACP website for an extended list of resources???? maybe).
Robert Downes UKCP Accredited Body Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Educator. rjdownes@mac.com https://bodypsychotherapyinlondon.com
1 George Yancy (2008) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America p.229
2 Lynne Jacobs (2005). For whites only. In T. Levine Bar-Yoseph (Ed.), The bridge: Dialogues across cultures(pp. 225-244). New Orleans: Gestalt Institute Press.
3 The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. 2013. p.10
http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
4 White Fragility - Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism Robin DiAngelo. p.103
5 Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In: The maturational processes and the facilitating environment.
6 George Yancy (2008) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America
7 White Fragility - Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism Robin DiAngelo.
8 https://racereflections.co.uk/2018/12/09/neuroses-of-whiteness-white-envy-and-racial-violence/
9 How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion Liberalism’s inherent racism. by Kẏra on December 10th, 2014 https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-to-uphold-white-supremacy-by-focusing-on-diversity-and-inclusion
10 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches page 130 1984
11 Toni Morrison In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS TV in the USA 1993.
12 George Yancy (2008) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America
13 https://harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-race.html
14 b o r d e r l a n d s e-journal Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti- Racism Sara Ahmed The University of Lancaster
15 George Yancy (2008) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America p.240
16Jacobs, L. (2005). For whites only. In T. Levine Bar-Yoseph (Ed.), The bridge: Dialogues across cultures (pp. 225-244). New Orleans: Gestalt Institute Press.
17 Jacobs, L. M. (2014). Learning to Love White Shame and Guilt: Skills for Working as a White Therapist in a Racially Divided Country. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9(4), 297-312.
18 Donald Kalsched. Trauma and the Soul. Routledge (2013)
19 Lynne Jacobs (2005). For whites only. In T. Levine Bar-Yoseph (Ed.), The bridge: Dialogues across cultures(pp. 225-244). New Orleans: Gestalt Institute Press.
20 Documentary: 1989 James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket. Director: Karen Thorsen
I come back to this article 4 days after Toni Morrison’s death and two weeks after Boris Johnson’s arrival in 10 Downing Street. I am aware of the vastness of Morrison’ mind and legacy and the manifestation of white supremacy that is Boris’s and the current project of sections of the tory party and the billionaire class. Morrison offers all we need to know about what is going on here.
Toni Morrison died 4 days ago as I attempt to re-think my way into this article where I am attempting to say a few things about whiteness and the therapeutic project, offering a few sketches rather than a comprehensive paper that addresses it all. This speaks to how much there is to study and work through for us to catch up.
TOni MOrrison turned away from meeting and accommodation the white gaze and modelling how to do that. She insisted on paying attention to black subjectivity and in that insistence provided much more to her people that white therapy often does. When black subjectivity is met with white fragility (aka white supremacy) black subjectivity frequently shapes itself around survival strategies and accommodations or move.
Complicating the White Therapist
What do I want to say about whiteness and the therapeutic project? begin to say and point us to …
We were undertrained.
Whiteness was avoided.
Diversity and cultural competency were safe ways fo not really addressing what needs to be addressed.
that racism is trauma and is very rarely on the curriculum as such
That we need to go beyond the usual curriculum to extend the reach
That it is a daily practice of being anti-racist generally and as a practitioner
That I can’t think about therapy without embracing critical theory that addresses cpaitalism and the constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality and the multiple otherings that cause harm and limit human expression.
The plague of unthinking and how systems of education are not set up to encourage critical thinking and compassion, things all educational practices should be underpinned by.
I came to therapy training after some training in critical theory from the likes of Stuart Hall and the people I was introduced to within Cultural Studies, as well as local authority experience of mean dn women as college and racism and trade union activities where marginalised and oppressed people were beginning to self organise more explicitly and have the difficult dialogues.
because people do harm
because srina is fucked up and doing har,
& Make List:
Write as I teach…
Nuaned descriptions of the intra psychic oerkd of whiteness
way attention and notice
ambush
Article of the teaching of it…..
and allowing some separation from whiteness and white fragility
how is the oppressor in you?
what is the point of therapy unless it provides for my emancipation ?
or my resilience in the face of on going?
I went to therapy because `I hated myself - let me re think that….
and because my workmen class lesbian feminist friend defied the bourgeois critique fo therapy and suggestion I go…
More accurately there was a hate inside of me that I couldn’t get rid of and it ached in my legs and burnt at my love & caused severe interference.
I wsa interested in my personal liberation and that of others - no point in being selfish about these things cos you can’t play with people if they too are preoccupied with inner hateful atmospheres - so I joined a gay therapy group.
how to be human with others
kind with others
because of hateful atmspohers
it was always a political which human endeavour that wasn’t for me alone
a longing on how to be human with others….
kinder with myself and with others
to have settled enough of that which was disturbed inside so that there was room for others, room for interest in others.
in the company of some others
I write of white
we were taught a white supreme training about a white supreme ego and took it in, as we did the first time round as children, we
we were training inside an re-enactment.
I was raised in whiteness and white supremacy
and then trained as a therapist in pretty much the same…
a white ego
whiteness
optional training
Read Toni - to de-centre whiteness…
An inadequete education - training
Complicating the White Therapist
Whiteness is a bad object
Unsuturing Whiteness
What is an anti-racist praxis and practice?
oni Morrison along with many other writers and thinkers of colour (James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Reni Eddo Lodge, George Yancy, Claudia Rankine, Akala, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Isha McKenzie Mavinga, Sara Ahmed, Ta-Nehisi Coates) have written about whiteness for decades. This archive of work offers a thorough account of whiteness as it manifests and operates. Turning towards that archive to inform our work of “being less white” has hardly got going, let alone is it anywhere near reaching its full potential. A more recent text by Robin DiAngelp speaks to the specific psychological practices of whiteness, the reactions inherent to whiteness and how white people deny the realities of racism. Much of this practice of white fragility stems from being raised in a culture that doesn’t want to deal with the realties of racism and therefore keeps the histories of colonialism, slavery and racism off of the school curriculums where they rightly belong if something is going to significantly shift. Whilst we are poorly educated about the nature of racism, its history and the problematics of the whole notion of whiteness - then white people from a position of lack of education will continue to offer opions and defences in response to a reality that we haven many options about and have studied very little.