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I think there are important parallels that can be drawn between the grieving process and white racism, and want to explain this in writing.
My overall view is that white racism can be understood as the enactment of repressed grief, where repressed means unconscious and therefore both actively pushed away from consciousness and pulled toward the unconscious. The grief regards the loss of black lives, and repression of grief is how black humanity is obscured so that black lives do not seem worthy of being grieved within white communities. White supremacist systems of oppression can be understood as materialized projections of psychoanalytic defense mechanisms that aim to maintain illusions of superiority through institutionalized forms of domination. White racial consciousness transformation can be understood as confronting once-repressed racial grief, and white racial justice activism can be understood in terms of the grieving process. My master’s thesis is about the role of emotion in white racial justice activism, but I am not allowed to express these ideas there because psychology wants to be a “hard” science, so I’m sharing these ideas on Medium instead.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: America needs psychoanalysis now more than ever if we are to understand white racism and heal the cultural wounds that maintain communal white participation in systemic racism. A lot of my work has white healing as its aim, but I think before we can get there we must first understand what the problem regards from a…
