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In the introduction to her groundbreaking book, Psychoanalytic Theory and Cultural Competence in Psychotherapy, Pratyusha Tummala-Narra (2016) writes that it is “important to situate this book in its particular social, historical, and political context” (p. 3). Situating myself and this review in turn, I am an island-born, Puerto Rican, relational psychoanalytically oriented psychologist, writing in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally staged in Charlottesville, North Carolina, from August 11 to August 12, 2017. Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of the United States. The aforementioned rally was composed of a coalition of white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists who self-identify as members of the alt-right that spearheaded Donald Trump through the Republican primaries and later the presidential election. They descended upon Charlottesville with torches in hand, not unlike their lynching-prone predecessors, to protest the removal of statues throughout the city that commemorated figures of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Perhaps more honestly stated, they waved their torches with the intent of intimidating those others who threatened to change their history and culture: women, people of color, sexual minorities, and immigrants. They were met on the streets of Charlottesville by counterprotesters who supported the removal of these statues and who, with their own coalition of antiracist, antifascist citizens, called on this country to acknowledge and work through its brutal history and move forward in the pursuit of social justice.
During this rally, James Alex Fields, one of the alt-right protesters, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring more than a dozen people and killing a young woman, 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer. More than a dozen others were wounded in clashes throughout the city. In the wake of this riot, Donald Trump blamed the violence not on the white supremacists and neo-Nazi