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While writing the Letter from the Editor for this issue of fort da, and thinking about the ways identity, including race and culture, influence psychoanalytic thinking and technique, I received an essay about a personal experience involving difference, skin color, and oppression. As I read the piece, I recognized the author's words, not as the words I had been looking for, but as words I would not find within me — because of my whiteness, my experience of being a man, and other identities privileged (and not) that have shaped my point of view.
So, for this issue, fort da is publishing the following essay as a Letter from the Community. Opening this edition with a personal essay from a community member is a departure for fort da. The journal began over 25 years ago as a way to give voice to a community of Northern California psychoanalytic thinkers. Our community culture is now undergoing significant changes, reflecting larger cultural shifts, and the journal is dedicated to supporting these changes by welcoming different points of view from an increasingly diverse community of psychoanalytic thinkers, with an increased awareness of who is given the opportunity to speak.
The author wondered if her piece was a Letter from the Community or a Letter to the Community. It is both. Making a system more equitable that unfairly advantages some and unfairly disadvantages others starts with an awareness of perspectives that fort da wants to give voice to within these pages.
When a friend started wearing a stark “Black Lives Matter” pin on her dress to most events, I hesitated to ask her how she was brave enough to do so. At that time, in 2015, it was a bold move, given that she seemed to live in an all-white world.
I told her I supported the movement but that if I were to wear such a pin, I would feel ambivalent about how I would be perceived in the world of