Complicating the White Therapist
Decommissioning whiteness in therapeutic practice and thought
A word from James Baldwin : (follow the ☞ for the video clip).
☞ "How much time do you want for your progress”?
In the paper For Whites Only1 white American therapist Lynne Jacobs offers “largely a stream-of consciousness reflection on being a racially conscious white therapist in racially divided America”. Her paper presented me with a model of reflecting on racism, white privilege, the psychodynamics of racialised encounters, therapeutic practice and teaching as a white practitioner who has engaged with the work of Black thinkers, theorists, activists and therapeutic practitioners.
This piece of writing is my reckoning with whiteness, a reckoning that is informed by a vast body of work drawing from black studies and critical race theory. I make a case for an inter-disciplinary approach to therapeutic thought, study and practice that reckons with and complicates whiteness in the service of the unravelling from white supremacy and its violences against black life as part of the project of racial capitalism. To reckon with whiteness is to also reckon with colonialism.
I have been absorbed by the writings of African American Philosopher George Yancy2 and his project of “complicating whiteness”. I have found particularly useful his notion of 'un-suturing'3, the opening up of the wound and defensiveness of whiteness. Yancy’s work offers a ground upon which the work of unravelling from whiteness can take place. He speaks to the necessity and urgency of this work in our deeply troubled world and of the problem of white supremacy that has been centuries in the making - as an embodied and institutionalised lie. This article speaks to the need for a considered urgency within our profession and practice, a joining with others who are calling for greater attention to the project of ‘complicating whiteness’ so that the daily realties of racism are more adequately responded to as well as refused.
This is an offering to white practitioners to assist white practitioners, as Yancy invokes “to get their shit together” so that we move 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 the Tories have followed their white counter parts in the US and gone to war with critical race theory. Why? Because the field and practice of psychotherapy has not fully reckoned with whiteness and the traumatic impact of racism and how institutionalised racism actively manifests in the field where representation is far from enough. Why? Because reductive accounts of that which troubles us all have focussed on Mommy and Daddy and not enough on the systemic realities that harm.
Why? Because of what Fred Moten, 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…”
—Stefano Harney and Fred Moten4
Have you wondered how this shit is killing you too?
“Bottom line: you would care enough to get informed. So consider racism a matter of life and death (as it is for people of colour), and do your homework”.
—Robin DiAngelo5
White American sociologist Robin DiAngelo challenges us to catch up, to do the study and in this instance integrate that into our therapeutic practice, teaching and institutions. Study is a key word and practice here. We have all sorts of positions and views on whiteness, white supremacy, colonialism, settler colonialism, racism and white privilege yet we rarely study these constructs and practices. Because whiteness is implicitly defensive of itself, critical and reflective study can be challenging if there is an identification with and libidinal investment in whiteness and the buoyancy it offers alongside the hope that there is such a thing as a good white, an innocent white - there isn’t! We will come to that because whiteness as a relatively recent invention can never be innocent given that it is rooted in anti-blackness and the projects of extraction and racial capitalism6.
For me catching up has been a life long endeavour. School didn’t teach me anything constructive about racism, whiteness or the history and legacy of the British empire. My psychotherapy training barely touched the surface even though the training was informed by the work of Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism). What did come to me came from elsewhere; the activists I encountered outside Birmingham City Library informed my teens; the TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ in 1977 burnt its way into my psyche; Irish family members critiqued the British empire whilst the release of Handsworth Revolution by Birmingham based reggae band Steel Pulse in 1978 offered another site of disruption and learning - music. Music has been both refuge and instructor. Then there was my A level sociology teacher who furthered my introduction to Marx.
Most of my learning around whiteness has come from personal study, dialogues with friends and colleagues and many hours in front of YouTube engaging with the writers and thinkers that have informed my thinking and practice. James Baldwin was my first encounter with a piercingly truthful and potent description and deconstruction of whiteness. Baldwin’s truth telling amongst others pierced the veils of the irreality of whiteness; Frantz Fanon7, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, Claudia Rankine, Christina Sharpe, Reni Eddo Lodge, Akala, Kehinde Andrews, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Sara Ahmed, Robert Jones Jr. (aka Son of Baldwin), Foluke Taylor, Gail Lewis, Ken Hardy, Lara Sheehi, Joy James and George Yancy are some of the many who populate this ‘undercommons’ faculty, a faculty that has informed and nudged me into the depressive position of whiteness, an antidote to the narcissism of whiteness.
It seems to me that there is no escaping whiteness, it is deeply embedded in our psyches born of social systems (racial capitalism8) and structures, the most we can do is to complicate and dis-identify from it as Geoff Dyer in White (1997/2017)9 points to. He states that the “The point of looking at whiteness is to dislodge it from its centrality and authority, not to re-instate it”. Thus to study and divest from whiteness is only of service if we tend to the work of recognising our attachments to whiteness and disrupt them. And still liberal engagements with whiteness that are chiefly superficial would have those subjected to the violences of white supremacy wait.
Given the lack of formal educational spaces placing the problem of whiteness back where it belongs, we have to improvise. I introduced an article called White Fragility (2011) by Robin DiAngelo to a psychotherapy class because the diversity module they were attending at the time wasn’t really resourcing students to formulate and work with the complex psychodynamics of race. Diversity was the focus and whiteness under examined. White fragility was a way in but also limited because whiteness is a violence ultimately, far from fragile and according to Erinn Gilson10 white fragility is very much a performance of invulnerability - a refusal to un-suture and deal with the wound and the violences of whiteness.
Embodied racialised trauma was not being taught so all of the students were left without the knowledge and experience of working with this particular site of racialised trauma. Nothing was made available to pierce the defensive structures of whiteness which reveals itself to be more of a complex of rigidity and violent refusal than a fragility. The problem of race was often carried on the shoulders of Black and Brown students and whiteness was off the hook. What I came away with was an appreciation that we needed more rigorous and deeper training when it came to the race matrix, one that explicitly addressed and resourced trainees to work with embodied racialised trauma drawing from the work of Resmaa Menakem, Prentis Hemphill11, Sonya Renee Taylor12 as well as specific thought and practice that addressed and tackled whiteness.
In On Being White and Other Lies James Baldwin tells us that ‘Being white means never having to think about it’. This absence of thinking about whiteness is significant when it comes to therapeutic practice where we are required to think and talk about so much. Developing the capacity to ‘mentalize whilst white’ is key to our work otherwise we continue to do harm and limit the potential of the therapeutic project.
DiAngelo speaks to a need to develop racial stamina which we can think of as formulating and developing anti-racist thinking and clinical practice which includes recognising that we are never outside of the problem. This is tricky because so much of the coding of whiteness begins pre-verbally so that the lie of being white is internalised as an implicit state, as a disorganised embodiment ultimately. Engaging with George Yancy’s written work and talks on line has been instructive in his offering back the formulation of the problem as being whiteness. For that we need to get to the place of not taking whiteness so personally, as a real thing that we are, as opposed to something we were born into. Yancy offers a range of tools to do this work that make it possible. I will come to them in another piece where I apply his ideas from a chapter called 'Un-Sutured' from the book: White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism. How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem? Edited by George Yancy.
Complicating & Un-Suturing Whiteness
“Don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practise racism are bereft? 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.13
In his book Black Bodies, White Gazes (2008)14 George Yancy's invitation to “complicate the white self” requires self reflection on whiteness critically to address the craziness that Toni Morrison refers to. In complicating both white therapist and field, a significant amount of disrupting the curriculum and the training establishments would need to occur to tend to the unexamined craziness of whiteness, so we might start with our personal work of ‘un-suturing whiteness’.
In a letter in the New York Times to white America, George Yancy asked that he be listened to with love and his letter is indeed a profound work of love.15
“I ask that you try to be “un-sutured.” If that term brings to mind a state of pain, open flesh, it is meant to do so. After all, it is painful to let go of your “white innocence,” to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness".
Yancy invites an opening to a vulnerability and a capacity to receive the realities of racism and the lies of whiteness. This becomes possible when we understand that whiteness is never going to be a good object let alone subject. If the normativity of whiteness is disrupted enough then we see it for what it is, a lie that serves as a strategy of domination with nothing remotely authentic about it. There is no transformation of bad whiteness into good whiteness - a return to our humanity is what is on offer, with a view to ceasing the violence of racism.
Whiteness is a big bad object that cannot be redeemed. There is nothing essential about whiteness - it is and was a construction passed down in all kinds of complicated and institutionalised ways. It is embedded systemically. Absorbed from the ether. Invented to justify subjection and exploitation at a particular point in the history of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.
Take a minute to imagine a before whiteness as well as an after whiteness.
'staying in the anguish of being a problem”16
In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo maps out many of the psychologically defensive operations of whiteness that are useful to consider when complicating and un-suturing whiteness so that we come to know the mechanisms more intimately.
“White Fragility is 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.” 17
In training groups I have invited participants to get intimate with these movements and strategies of shoring up whiteness; the egoic activities that refuse entry to anything that disturbs the white status quo. Touching into what resides beneath these strategies enables an examination of what lies there (shame, guilt, deficiency, hatred, envy, superiority to name a few), the ‘un-sutured’ vulnerable version of ourselves that George Yancy speaks of. This needs to happen if we are to be touched by the realties and harm of racism and the harm to our own souls, if we are to be open as practitioners to all of our clients and able to read the transferential matrix through the lens of race. If we don’t tend to the whiteness of our psyches and all the defensive manoeuvres that make up its operation, then I think we are residing within an ethical breach in our refusal to be undone and in the practice of reckoning with whiteness on the daily.
George Yancy instructs us that to un-suture opens us up to the negotiation of “staying in the anguish of being a problem”, although as white people we are always at liberty to flee and re-assume white innocence and ignorance. However, if we are ethical beings and practitioners, why would we do that other than for some false comfort that comes at the expense of others. So we practice staying in the anguish as a mode of critical empathy and radical hospitality.
There is much to be learnt from Yancy’s work, more than I can account for here - you know what to do. One more thing though, Yancy addresses the need “to cultivate spaces where white students, and white people more generally, can experience crisis”. The kind of crisis he refers to is that of making a decision that has momentous implications and this requires of white practitioners and institutions to think about how to make such spaces as well as trainings that more fully meet the needs of all students and their potential clients. Resmaa Menakem's18 work on embodied racialised trauma ought to be central to much of our training.
On Being White and Other Lies - Find and Tell Yourself the Truth
James Baldwin pierces the illusion, the lie of whiteness in his 1984 article for Essence magazine
“…in this debasement and definition of black people, they have debased and defined themselves. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they dare not confront the ravage and lie of their history.” 19
"We are born into lies about race and whiteness, whiteness as “the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations”. (George Lipsitz)20
Some of us take racism to be something for people of colour to overcome because we have not been formally confronted with the fact of whiteness being the problem. This lie serves to limit the arenas in which we get to examine the lies, including therapeutic arenas that have failed to provide that space to unravel from and recover from the lies so that we are more able to sit with ourselves and others in our consulting rooms whilst addressing the lies and their consequences with all of our clients.
It is hard to dare the truth when whiteness is experienced as some sort of secure base that comes with benefits. To consider whiteness as psychotic, as pathological narcissism isn’t an attractive proposition for most of us. Given all of that, what would motivate white people to uncover the lie? Maybe there is a relief from whiteness.
Telling the truth is revolutionary says African American philosopher Dr. Cornel West in relation to James Baldwin’s truth-telling. Seeking and telling the truth of whiteness to ourselves and each other is revolutionary when it is in the service of decommissioning whiteness. White people going up against whiteness are often constructed as race traitors. In fact, the very construction of whiteness is ultimately being a traitor to our shared humanity - here might lie the motivator - a return to humanity, a recognisable potential outcome of the therapeutic project although what we return to might be something other than humanity because whiteness also decided who was and who wasn't human (see Sylvia Wynter’s work on the human21)
So how do we turn the therapeutic project towards a more radical and inclusive project?
Baldwin was gifted with the capacities of sharp compassionate truth-telling, deep witnessing of the harms done to his people, - a requirement in our work - deep witnessing and recognition... a loving and recognising presence, he is therapist/activist/story teller/container/ one who loves and much more in his writing, in his oration, in his recognition of what continues to happen. Baldwin’s eyes and mind continue to be here. He is an embodied presence that demands and calls for us to join him in the truth, he compels so many in the direction of the truth because people with depth and integrity are attractive, the truth is attractive - unless it isn’t for a whole set of complicated reasons we usually call defences against injury - aka wounds to the soul - & whiteness is both wound and wounder of the soul.
As white practitioners we need to approach whiteness as a problem and leave behind what Yancy calls the project of suturing up whiteness to be invulnerable. This requires what Yancy calls being 'ambushed' through taking in the realties of racism and its impact on the lives of Black, brown, people of colour. This can disrupt and counter our white-centric universe. To do so requires giving up expecting the work to be comfortable. We really need to refrain from asking or demanding of people of colour that they tell us of their experience of our racism in sensitive ways that don’t upset us or ‘trigger us’ or make us uncomfortable. Discomfort is the medium.
People of colour don’t get to ask the same in reverse, there is no sensitive or comfortable racism. Rather than insisting on tone policing (which is another refusal to undo whiteness) we really need to develop the resilience to hear and feel how it is told and what we hear within our white minds as part of the work of un-suturing so that we develop the capacity to tolerate the impact of what we hear and take back the projections and evacuations.
We investigate why we don’t want to hear?
What gets in the way of hearing?
When the defensive manoeuvres of whiteness eventually rest, all that resides beneath the reactivity of whiteness is revealed for our attention and tending: deficiencies, projections, splitting, entitlement, shame, guilt, privilege, shameful convictions about the other, envy, superiority and ultimately, borrowing and extending Winnicott’s notion of the false self, the false self of whiteness is revealed alongside the empty shell of white narcissism. This requires a particular kind of stamina and resilience that comes from deep psychological work that is only of value if the inner work serves shifts and actions in the outer material world.
How do we incentivise this work I wonder?
And where do we get to do this work?
Modes of Empathy for White Practitioners.
As a human being first and foremost, as someone racialised as white, as a therapist with responsibilities to the people I work with to receive them and their realities, as an educator, I needed to seek and investigate the lie of whiteness, to know myself beyond the defensive and privileged structures, to dare entry into the emptiness of whiteness that in time returns more of my humanity, a painful journey as layers of delusion are stripped away (nothing like the pain of racism) made worthwhile because I prefer the truth of how things are rather than the lies. To set about actively to recognise whiteness with its privileges and practices of domination, as a gaze, is to see the everydayness of racism, the every momentness of racism. It is to be witness to all that is disturbing in what Christina Sharpe calls ‘The Wake’, about which she says “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.”22 This past in the now bell hooks describes as "the ways in which whiteness acts to terrorize”23. If we are moral and ethical practitioners, then it is our duty to disrupt this terror as part of our therapeutic practice, teaching and being in the world.
Active recognition of the realties of racism is a mode of empathy that is required in our work. Black and brown people, people of colour do not need our tears, our guilt, our shame - what is required is a deep reckoning with how it is and to do what we can to recognise and disrupt racism whilst doing less harm and fessing up when we mess up. Unravelling from whiteness isn’t a self help or self improvement exercise, it is a de-commissioning practice that returns us to the vicinity of decency and humanity. We need to improvise spaces to do this work until our institutions catch up - if that is on their agenda in any meaningful way.
Superficial diversity modules have reached their sell by date and representation is far from enough.
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. 2013. p.10
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. (2019).
White by Richard Dyer 1997 and 2017
Erinn Gilson, 2011 Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression Hypatia. vol. 26, no. 2 (Spring, 2011).
Toni Morrison - 1993 TV interview with Charlie Rose
Black Bodies, White Gazes (2008) by George Yancy
Dear White America - George Yancy in the New York Times
Yancy G. (editor) White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem? Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. (2019).
On Being White and Other Lies - James Baldwin in a 1984 article for Essence magazine
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the "White" Problem in American Studies George Lipsitz American Quarterly Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 369-387
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe Duke University Press 2016
hooks, bell. Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism Edited by Ruth Frankenberg Duke University Press 1997
A great piece Robert thanks. The unsuturing is so necessary. I think we might be waiting a while for our professional institutions to catch up.
Disgusting woke racist nonsense.