This Black Thing

In 1960, my grandmother Julia piled her surviving eleven children into an old borrowed Cadillac and drove to meet her sister in New York City, searching for opportunities she could never have in rural South Carolina. Exactly twenty years later, I was born in Harlem, where she had settled, at a time in which race was still accepted as a primary defining factor of one's life. There was a clear and bright “color line” and people were socialized to know which side of the line was theirs. Thus, I was born in a Black public hospital, lived in a Black neighborhood, attended a Black elementary school, went to a Black church, and knew mostly Black people. I was Black and those Black things were for me.

When I began my career as a social worker, I worked in publicly funded hospitals, substance-use treatment centers, and foster care agencies in and around Chicago, also a racially segregated city. I opened my first private practice on the South Side of Chicago, where I lived, and saw whoever showed up looking for treatment, which turned out to be all types of working-class Black people.

After being in private practice for three years, I moved back to Harlem and worked as a correctional counselor in New York City jails while I waited to be eligible for independent clinical licensure in New York State. The NYC Department of Correction is also heavily segregated by race, both in its administrative offices and within the jails: I worked with Black men detainees, almost exclusively, and my counselor colleagues who provided services in the jails were primarily Black and other people of color, while those who worked in the administrative offices were mostly white.

Given my history of living and providing care in segregated spaces, when I was finally able to open a private clinical practice in New York City, I envisioned that I would continue to provide therapy to Black people exclusively. Even though I attended predominantly white universities and had pleasant collegial relationships w