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As I complete this review of Ibram Kendi's highly evocative and timely book, How to Be an Antiracist, Derek Chauvin has just been convicted for murdering George Floyd, and Keith Ellison, the lead prosecutor in Minneapolis, spoke of how hard it is in our culture to make enduring change. As if nodding to the unconscious and to Freud, Ellison spoke about the need to repeat. He alluded to a 1968 speech in which the renowned Black psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, who was investigating the causes of race riots across America, observed that reading reports of these types of investigations throughout the 20th century was “a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture re-shown over and over, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.” Repeatedly, as individuals and as communities, we fail to confront systemic, societal racism, born and cultivated in social institutions, which in their very structure and at their core inevitably discriminate and deny advantages to others based on their race. And as Kendi states, unless we admit this fact, both as individuals and as a society, we participate in it. Our blindness allows us to dismiss the notion that systemic racism exists.
After reading Kendi's book, I find myself wondering what factors contribute to this blindness and why does it continue? Elizabeth Kita's (2019) research on mass incarceration offers a particularly compelling reason. She suggests that massive projective identification plays a pivotal role. She states that, collectively, we continually disavow, deny, and dissociate the unwanted parts of ourselves that are embedded in our culture—such as the trauma of slavery and violence on which this country was founded. By projecting this responsibility onto and into other people, we affirm that this violence is not “ours,” but “theirs.” And like any primitive defense that is not made conscious, the prohibited introject being defended against and the guilt and shame accompanying it are ward