Thinking Race: Exploring the Scene of Racial Enactment

The scene of racial enactment animates ideas of the Other that are both implicitly internalized and unconsciously communicated. The receiver, themself subject to an uncontained experience, becomes the receptacle for both a dissociated process and disavowed content. This paper explores the visceral experience of received “microaggression” and an imagined group moment to study how intrapsychic and intra-group encounters with the fantasies and realities of racialized experience disrupt interpersonal processes of containment and recognition. I suggest that racial enactment involves the projection of both an unthought attack and unthoughtness itself, and these dissociations result in a confusing, illegitimized, and unthinkable experience in the receiver that simultaneously emanates from and results in a “psychological catastrophe”. A contagious breakdown of thinking triggers a threat of alienation and a search for substitutes to connection, such as a perversion of gratitude and the basic assumption of Oneness. Experiences of containment and creativity that bridge adamantly unthought realities of difference and their meanings to an explorable unknown can reorient the individual and the group toward the reestablishment of relationality, the restoration of thinking, and re-inhabitance of individual subjectivity.