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These papers originated in a panel at the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) Spring 2018 meeting in New Orleans, titled: “Searching for Home: When Racialized Legacies Collide.” The location of the conference was critical for the unearthing of enslaved peoples’ histories and for witnessing the brutalities of chattel slavery and the legacy of ongoing racism. The keynote speakers and dozens of panels explored aspects of this history and the internalized aspects of race, class, oppression and inequality. As White analysts, we wanted to reflect on how race is entering our individual and group work in ways we address, and often in ways that we cannot see, and thus enact.
We are now living in a shared, collective trauma. Therefore, we feel the need to situate the publication of these papers within the current contextual moment of COVID-19, social justice protests against racism, the violence of police brutality, and the flagrant inequities that abound in our culture. While the COVID pandemic is a worldwide collective trauma, in the United States, it has impacted a great number of people disproportionately based on race and class.
We wish to acknowledge that our papers speak to a microcosm of a far greater systemic culture of racism and inequity. The accumulated trauma of loss as a result of the successive killings of black men and women has, in the last year, culminated around the murder of George Floyd. It ignited a movement that has brought into even sharper focus the degradation, indignities and brutalities that have existed in the history of our country since the near genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. The imprint of slavery and the legacy of racism continue to manifest in murder by police and a virus that is killing people of color at devastating rates. These inequities, furthermore, have a powerfully destructive effect on people of color, as they live with a pervasive experience of danger and insecurity that continually threatens their agenc