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June 19, “Juneteenth,” 2025, marked the day, the late night of this day, that I finally completed editing the articles for the first-ever Psychoanalytic Inquiry issue entitled: “We Are Human First, Black Psychoanalysts Write.” It was close to 3 months after the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination that took place on April 4, 1968, and one month from the anniversary of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. George Floyd, a Black man, beleaguered by history, a destiny of discrimination and marginalization and trapped in the reality of his personal struggles to recover from his past; his death was carried out by a White police officer who crushed out his breadth with the pressure of his knee on George Floyd’s neck. It was in broad daylight, witnessed by bystanders, and captured on a 17-year-old’s phone video for all the world to see. We who saw will never forget. This moment in time captured a new history, a truth, which cannot be denied … It captured how the past shows up, once again, in the present.
On this same day of the completion of the articles for this inaugural issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, I pondered: “What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say?” And, imagining from across the globe, “What would Nelson Mandela or even Mohandas’ (Mahatma) Ghandi say if they were here on this same day, Juneteenth, 2025, to see the New York Times headlines: ‘White House Holds No Juneteenth Celebration’ and ‘Homeland Security Says it can Deny Congressional Oversight Visits to ICE Facilities?”
George Floyd and the conditions of his life, as well as the loss of his life, so very similar and even worse for so many globally, were/are a harsh and “crushing” message, the cruel reality, of an ever-present potential for this kind of pain and suffering to occur toward Black and Brown folks, toward People of Color.
Dr. King’s death, anathema to all he stood for, sheds light on a fundamental human blindness we all carry. We as humans constantly reveal examples of our l