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“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion.”
James Baldwin, with eloquence and depth, articulated the lived experience of being Black in America. He understood the defensive psychological forces operative in binding aggression and hate in racial attitudes at a time when psychoanalysts were dissecting race and culture out of our theory of the mind, and struggling to understand racist thinking. We had not yet conceptualized othering as a psychodynamic process, or the relative importance of dignity as a construct. The social sciences came to the conversation on race and racism before the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and even now, we have a long way to go in understanding racism on a psychological level and elucidating how our unconscious racial attitudes affect health care delivery and practice in the field of mental health.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' publication of the acclaimed Between the World and Me (2015), a letter to his son in homage to James Baldwin, reminds us of the necessity for dialogue made stark by the ongoing public outcry after the shooting of Trayvon Martin and numerous unarmed Black men, including a mental health worker, by police officers (Grimm, 2016). These deaths haunt us as a society and return us to the conversation on race and racial socialization spearheaded by James Baldwin early in his career. Published initially in The Progressive in 1962 for the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin's letter to his nephew entitled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” was reprinted as the first chapter in his acclaimed work, The Fire Next Time. The May 17th, 1963 issue of Time magazine