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Introduction: This is the recorded spontaneous discussion of the papers by Drs. Oliner, Ursano, Barratt, Gordon, Morganstein, Holmes, Blank, and Van Slyke, as well as general issues from the first day of the conference. This includes the speakers, as well as questions/comments from the attendees.
Dr. Gordon: That first formulation I gave of first-stage double consciousness … I should say, I’m one of the people who’s a critic of internalized racism as a category, and it’s because I’m a critic of models of the self that tend to be hermetically sealed, this notion that we’re always outside in relations. What many people call internalized racism I tend to call investment in the legitimacy of the racist system. In other words, there are people who buy into it, so they think they are the way a racist system describes them. That’s why I contrasted it with potentiated double consciousness, which is the realization that one is being sold a lie, but as many people in this room who are therapists know, that even if you are living a lie, on the level of believing it, you’re living it in reality.
So, that’s the way I usually talk about it, but there’s a lot more involved, and one of the things is there’s this other level where if one turns it inward enough, it leads not only to narcissism, because people who tend to deal with what’s called internalized racism also buy into the logic that there’s something exceptional about them. So, they’re the ones who buy into the idea that they’re not like the others, or if something happens to them, they don’t criticize the society—they say, “What did I do; what’s wrong with me?” but they never really ask what’s going on in a society in which there is such hatred toward them without even someone knowing them … and if it pushes inward enough there’s a term I use for that; I call it implosivity. It’s the point at which one becomes so depersonalized, so marked, that the relationship to the rest of the world begins to disappear.
An attendee: I am n