Race Abating

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung

Racial microaggressions are an important part of modern racism. Racial microaggressions are the small insults and inequities that are often directed at People of Color by Whites.  They can build up in one’s experience and become a destructive force in the person’s life.  The fact that microaggressions are subtler than overt racism contributes to the difficulty in dealing with them.  People who are the targets of them aren’t always sure they actually have happened or often have a difficult time eliciting support form others because of the lack of clarity involved.

As few as the resources are for People of Color to deal with microaggressions, there are even fewer resources available for Whites who want to deal with their own microaggressions.  Many of us are simply not conscious of our biases and we often have intense emotional and psychological pressures to keep our biases out of our awareness, to keep them unconscious. It makes sense. The unconscious is the place to which we banish thoughts, feelings, and impulses that we cannot consciously bear. And in our society, one of the worst things a person can be is bigoted. In our society, being a racist is so bad that even committed White supremacists deny being racist.  They will say that they are defending their race against threats by other races, but they will often refuse to be considered racist themselves.  How much more difficult, then, can it be for one of us White liberals or those of us Whites who consider ourselves part of the antiracist movement to admit to unconscious bias? Whites who are able and willing to see their own unconscious bias are few and far between. And those of us who know in principle that we have them have a difficult time seeing them in action when we do act out on them.  Just as People of Color can be heard to say, “Did he really just say what I think he said?” a White person in pursuit of his own racial awareness development may ask himself, “Am I being racist?”  And if we believe we are, what then?  Where do we go with this knowledge? How do we build skill to overcome it?

Many people have experienced the psychotherapeutic model as a tool of oppression. I agree that it has been used that way.  It is a Eurocentric technique.  It has been used in an overall context of White privilege to further the goals of the oppressor. It has often been used by people who do not examine its assumptions critically. It has often been used by the privileged to dictate what is “normal,” and that “normal” almost always has a Eurocentric set of values.

I take a multicultural perspective. One of the values of multiculturalism is striving to respect all people and their cultural identities to the furthest extent that we are able.  This perspective includes respecting White culture, and as a White person it is important to me to create a cultural identity that nurtures my well-being. Just as it is sometimes the task of members of non-dominant groups to learn to love and respect their own cultures after having had them denigrated by White society, it is my task as a White person to learn what is lovable and respectable in my own culture once I have come to see Whiteness’s role in racial genocide.

It is in this spirit that I advocate for a psychotherapeutic approach to dealing with unconscious racial bias in Whites as a culturally appropriate approach.  None of us was born with our biases.  We were socialized to them.  They are not our fault but they are our responsibility. A White person could work with a coach-like person acting in the role of non-judgmental listener.  And this coach should also be a White person who is well trained and supervised at least in part by People of Color.  The hurdle of speaking openly about one’s racial biases to a Person of Color is too great for most people.  Admitting to bias is hard enough without worrying about attacking the racial identity of the listener. Just as talk therapy can help a person become aware of her or his unconscious motivations in life, this kind of “race therapy” can allow White people to become aware of their biases, make them conscious, and begin to learn to manage or even relinquish them.  Holding impulses in the unconscious takes up a great deal of our emotional energy and tearing down the dam that holds them back can release that energy and allow it to be used constructively. It will allow us to confront our biases when we act on them, and hopefully eventually, before we do.

In an ironic way, the psychotherapeutic model also addresses one of the critiques of White culture. White culture is highly individualistic and often nurtures no sense of personal history for its members.  Many other cultures have a good deal of focus on the past and one’s ancestors.  With its focus on the childhood, the psychotherapeutic model is a way that Whites can focus on their ancestors in a way that makes their impact on the present explicit. It is our version of evoking our ancestors.  Why would we want to deny us Whites that tool?