Black Boys in the Eye of the Storm

It is essential that the psychoanalytic community begin to observe and study racism’s effects, its transgenerational and structurally embedded manifestations, so that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can be more helpful to Black people, and especially to Black children and adolescents, whose developing psyches are, unfortunately, being shaped within a culture of ongoing, if unacknowledged, racism. Black children are caught in the crosshairs of society’s brutal stereotypes that exclude them from social, educational, and employment opportunities. Such exclusions are sometimes exacerbated by their own non-adaptive responses to the hostile culture in which they live, thus affirming deep-seated racialized beliefs and social structures. Greater psychoanalytic attention to theorizing and understanding cultural attitudes on race, to understanding the impact of racism on how we think about Black boyhood with a psychoanalytic interrogation of transgenerational trauma, could positively impact our understanding of how racism impacts the therapeutic process for us all as clinicians and as citizens. It is doubtful that we will ever make the therapeutic arena hospitable to Black boys or Black men without integrating in our theoretical formulations the insidious effect of structural racism in American society impacting clinicians in all areas of mental health care.