Chapter 1: Overview

For there is always light, if only we're brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it.

The impetus for the formation of The Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis (the Commission) in August 2020 came from mounting demand that American psychoanalysis express itself on the importance of psychoanalytic understanding of race. The

continuing racial atrocities occurring in the United States in 2020 became the catalyst for the leadership of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) to consult with the co-chairs of Black Psychoanalysts Speak (BPS), Craig Polite and Kathleen Pogue White, on how to address race within APsA. Following these discussions, APsA's leadership accepted the BPS recommendation that a commission be formed for the psychoanalytic study of systemic racism, naming Dorothy E. Holmes as chair. Three co-chairs of the Commission were chosen by the chair in collaboration with APsA leadership: Anton Hart, Dionne R. Powell, and Beverly J. Stoute. The chair and co-chairs collaborated to select the full membership of the Commission and the Commission Methodologist, Michael Russell. Commissioners were selected based on their extensive clinical and scholarly experience with and commitment to the understanding of race in psychoanalysis as well as to gain representation of multiple diversities (levels of experience, mental health disciplines, races/ethnicities other than African American/Black, gender, and sexual orientation) in order that our study of race be informed by broad aspects of intersectionality.1 Systemic racism is a key element in intersectionality in that systemic racism represents the fact of discriminatory practices embedded in the structural practices of organizations, occurring across institutions and across marginalized individuals and groups. Intersectionality most broadly includes numerous other identitie