I expect to disagree with most of the Americans who follow this blog about the subject of racial discrimination in the USA. However, they need not agree with me.

I raised a question regarding the violence of the police force in parts of the USA toward black people: explicitly I see it as a social phenomena that is tempting psychoanalysts to use their theories about the psyche of the subject to interpret it. I have reservations about that.    

I am not saying that something psychological is behind what is happening in the area of policemen’s recent (and not so recent) responses to black people.  Policemen have their own psychological problems, but I did not intend to explain their reaction as psychologically determined. I am thinking and writing about the phenomenon of people of law and order breaking the law with blacks in particular without any sense reservation. No doubt that somethings like that happens with white suspects too, but the flagrant defiant way it is happening with blacks ‘lately’ should raise our attention. Within days from a racial event of discrimination that raised the attention of a whole nation and the world another similar event happened and a third was just waiting for the circumstance to happen and t just happened. This sequence supports that what is happening -maybe not planned- but intentions -in waiting. 

However, the reaction of the black community should also catch the attention: rioting followed by looting followed by material destruction of whites’ manifestations of wealth, distinction, social power. Any way you want to play it will bring you back to a modern, contemporary, socially unjust society that is constantly on brink of needing ventilation. Could we say that it is an up-to-date struggle against slavery as a social disorder?! I believe so, because what is happening now is not limited to the black race. It is a social system that it is just hitting the blacks more severely. It is also practiced, but differently and less frequently, by people against people of their own race. In short, what is happening in the USA now in that regard is a new episode of emancipation that is facing resistance from the ruling class, white represented by the residuals of the old slave owners, authorities (law enforcers), and some blacks are not be aware of their participation in the new racial discrimination against themselves. I just finished reading a book by Bakari Steller which is all about the successful blacks with great admiration of those particular blacks (including himself) but with almost no mention of the majority of the struggling blacks.  The successful black community, mostly in academia, the media, politics, and upper middle class are not showing any serious concern about the majority of blacks who need to be freed too.

Now is a new age of struggle for liberation from unobvious and silent slavery.  The first movement of emancipation, expressed in the great civil war, did not get fully, properly, completely assimilated and the unassimilated part is now returning to engulf both whites and blacks. The old narcissistic mortifications are returning requesting some sort of healing. There is no escape from acknowledging that the civil war did not bring about all the objectives it happened to make happen. This is the nature of social change that does not take its natural course of evolving. We should not miss that there is still persecution of Jews and ethnic prejudices because the social movement to eliminate them did not walk the whole course of change.

When we come to what is happening now in the USA regarding racial discrimination we should realize, acknowledge, and accept that psychoanalysts-as an educated, cultured! and mature group of people, which shares the responsibility of patriotism with their peers: A patriot has to bring to the attention of his peers the flaws and failings in his country to work on correcting them (opposite to naïve patriotism that keeps talking about how……the country is , est….). So, when they see what could become psychical blindness regarding some on goings it will be important to configure what is wrong in a language that could have a clear meaning and real-world value so the none analyst would benefit from. That is why using the framework of our clinical proposition could mislead. Example: the notion that the police officer who shot the guy in his underwear was because of unconscious reasons or character disorder is hypothetical and presumably suggesting unconscious causes. But if that act reflects a state of mind of a society or a group of people (other officers who do things of the sort) this interpretation would be ridiculous: we should help n understanding a social phenomenon not foreclose it by giving it a psychological explanation. What is behind a social phenomenon is a socially determined meaning or value. The officer who shot the black man seven times while holding his under ware could have done that out anger, fear, reaction formation., but for us he did what officers are now do with balk guys. What is behind a social phenomenon is a conscious urge of the individual and his unconscious mental set up. We could also say that the residuals of the civil war that were not properly worked out but just got repressed are returning; hopefully get worked out fully this time.

What is happening now in the USA is dealing with residuals of the struggle with emancipation and creating a new “better” social consciousness for both whites and blacks.