Introduction - African American Children in the World of Structural Racism: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Abstract

ABSTRACT A contemporary concern for historical, social and cultural representations in the unconscious in contemporary psychoanalysis has joined with an expansion of psychoanalytic concern for work in the community at large. In this series of articles, the impact of racism in the worlds of African children is explored in the work of Kirkland Vaughans, Jama Adams, Michael Slevin and Marie Rudden. Vaughans discusses the impact of the intergenerational transmission of trauma from slavery on Black boys; Adams explores creative self-making in African American adolescents as they navigate an often racially hostile culture; Slevin reflects on his countertransference, often with regard to race and class, working psychoanalytically in the emergency room of an urban hospital, while Rudden meticulously demonstrates how structural racism combined with group dysfunction allowed the series of events that led to the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.