Black Rage, White Gaze: How Can Black Lives, Historically Reified, Have ‘Room to Breathe’ in Contemporary Psychoanalysis?

Abstract

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were a stark reminder of the reality of problematic ‘race’ relations. This paper, originally conceived in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder with his final words ‘I can't breathe!’, examines the psychoanalysis of anti-black racism as a contemporary problem to address. This raises important epistemological questions about the forms of knowledge that get produced given the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and coloniality. Frantz Fanon unpacked the impact of racial violence and the white gaze as one of alienation, nonbeing and Black Rage in White Skin, Black Masks. This paper makes use of Fanon's 1952 thesis and clinical vignettes from analysts of colour in relation to ‘race’ as well as secondary literature on psychoanalysis and postcoloniality inviting the reader to appreciate Black Rage as a legitimate and constructive affect. I submit two ‘anchors’ for psychoanalysis to consider in theory and in practice for the birth of a physical and psychic ‘room to breathe’, a place for the black individual to exist with more psychological sovereignty: (1) an extension of Melanie Klein's depressive position and (2) an extension of the concept of mourning, as crucial intrapsychic processes for black lives to matter. The argument advanced is that, due to the extraordinary historical, social and political circumstance placed on black people as a racially oppressed group, the trauma of racism is one of alienation to a zone of nonbeing, a ‘space’ which, incidentally, offers radical hope in the form of Black Rage. Psychoanalysis is adequately positioned to acknowledge Black Rage as a powerful affect and civic tool, and this may be thought about through intrapsychic processes originating in classical psychoanalytic theory as well as Kleinian object relations, principally the concepts of mourning and depressive awareness, which considered together liberate aspects of therapeutic work.