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Like many (too many) white colleagues, I spent many (too many) years attending psychoanalytic meetings in a sea of white faces without stopping to say, “Something is terribly wrong here.” The Trauma of Racism: Lessons from the Therapeutic Encounter invites us to consider the culture of organized psychoanalysis (e.g., why have our meetings been so white?), the assumptions that pervade our consulting rooms (e.g., the idea that race is an issue only for our patients of color), and the larger social order (e.g., the pervasiveness of white supremacy and how it impacts our work and our thinking). Beverly Stoute and Michael Slevin have done a masterful job of pulling together twenty-two papers—some scholarly articles, some personal testimonies, and some mixtures of the two—that capture important information and points of view in a conversation that is coming late (though better late than never) to psychoanalysis.
The book is organized into five parts: Historical Perspectives; Living with the Trauma of Racism; Learning and Re-Learning Race; Being Aware of White Privilege; and Interpreting Racism in Jordan Peele's Get Out. Though I think it would be fine to sample from parts of the book in whatever order one might want, nothing in the book should be skipped; each essay offers much to the reader. For the purpose of this review, I will be selective in what I mention, but that is not meant to imply any diminution of what I don't mention; it's all worthwhile and important. I will say there are many clinical examples drawn from the authors' practices, most of which I won't repeat in this review.
Stoute and Slevin undertake to present multiple perspectives on phenomena that get grouped under the rubric of “racism.” In the contributing authors' work, racism is both a description of individual attitudes and behaviors, conscious or unconscious, and a characteristic of systems that tilt to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others. It is the latter characteristic of racism th