Reply to Commentary

It is indeed a formidable challenge to speak—and to listen— across racial lines. The need for such conversations is great, but, as we know, the stakes are high and thus the outcome is often less than certain. My experience of Dr. Harris's discussion is of feeling heard. Harris raises questions that are vital to the effort to expand our psychoanalytic understanding of prejudice and also of usable, effective racial identities.

My intention in presenting some of my work with Gloria was to capture some of the unmetabolized clinical process that goes on in everyday clinical practice when issues of race and identity come into play. I agree with Harris that it is in those exchanges that we may come to see, as she puts it, the “haunting presence” of encrypted racial trauma. It is that trauma that becomes enacted. Such moments show our gravitation to the racial reasoning that Toni Morrison (1992) and Cornel West (1999) suggested lies at the heart of cultural experience in the United States. Racial enactments show us our collective susceptibility to the cultural milieu in which we live and work.

Harris organizes my clinical material in terms of the escalation and oscillation of the shaming experience of envying and being envied. This is a quite useful perspective. Her comments bring out a critical dimension of the clinical process. They resonate with the way in which conventional “markers of privilege” (e.g., a college decal or admission to an analytic institute) are often understood to be, in some ineluctable sense, “white.” To the extent that Gloria and I buy into this perspective (one strand of the racial enactment), our thinking about each other and ourselves does become impoverished. The ensuing racial enactments become the location of our differing efforts to contend with this searing intrusion of racial trauma. At the same time, blackness is in our exchange the site of pride and privilege of its own. Gloria's question to me, “Are you really black?”, becomes, in time, a q