Black Lives Matter

The lives of most people living don’t matter to me at all.  I am overwhelmed by the prospect of keeping up with and engaging in the lives of those I care about and know.  One of the few things that rang false about the television show The West Wing were the number of times that the President and the staffers expressed genuine concern over the lives of people that they had never met.  That may sound inhumane of me.  But I think that, especially in situations where individuals are confronted by others having massive losses on a frequent basis, it is natural and human to become hardened to those losses – to build a protective shield so that we don’t become burned out by over-caring.

There was a period of time after the birth of my son when I had a hard time watching television.  There are an incredible number of deaths depicted on television shows – fewer 17 years ago – but plenty then – and I usually barely register them.  But in the wake of his birth – each of those deaths, whether in a drama, documentary or on the news, was not the death of some character, but the death of a child of a mother and a father whose grief at the loss of that particular child would be inconsolable.  Obviously I was overidentifying with those mothers and fathers and this was a measure of the fear of losing my own child.  I am reminded of David Lindsay –Abaire, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning play The Rabbit Hole who was told by his writing teacher at Julliard to write about what terrified him and he remembered thinking, “I got nothing.”  Then his first child was born and he knew what he needed to write about – losing a child:  Terrifying.  And to constantly live in this state is taxing and can, quite frankly, be paralyzing.  We live in a world where we have to act- and there are consequences – seen and unseen – to our actions.  So we generally exist in a state that is more weighted towards not caring than caring.

I think, in addition to it being natural not to care about many others, it is also natural to fail to appreciate other people’s perspectives.  We want others to appreciate our perspective.  As Hermia, in Midsummer Night’s Dream cries, when her father wants her to marry his choice rather than her own, “I would my father looked but with my eyes.”  In fact, as a professional who works hard to understand others ways of seeing the world, I know that it is ridiculously hard to actually have a sense of what others think and feel about a particular situation.  We frequently think we know what another is thinking (the reluctant wife consistently thinks she knows my mind better than I do – and her perspective is frequently both accurate and something I haven’t considered, but it is never the whole story), but to actually know what is going on in another person’s mind is all but impossible.

So, when a movement claims that Black Lives Matter, and they go on to state that this is different than Lives Matter, how are we to understand this?  The Black Lives Matter movement arises immediately out of a series of police shootings of blacks – usually black men or boys – and doing this over relatively minor offenses or in questionable situations where claims of perceived threat seem to be greatly exaggerated.  From a more distant perspective, it arises out of both the long civil rights struggles of African Americans and the history of deadly violence without due process that were the lynchings of African Americans.   The implication of the title of the movement is pretty straightforward – we need to quit acting as if black lives don’t matter – because not valuing them is contributing, most vividly, to widespread racial violence – though I think the impact is actually much broader than that.

Why don’t black lives matter?  At least for me, I think this is partly because they represent the other – the disowned aspects of ourselves that we would rather not acknowledge.  I base this assertion in part on the experience of dreaming myself to be Black when I was applying to become an analyst.  As a psychologist in a field dominated by physicians (indeed, until recently, psychologists were prohibited from becoming analysts), I feared that I would not be admitted – and even more, accepted as an actual member of “the club”.  While we might think that this is a representation of what was going on in the social world, I think it is more accurately a reflection of how I felt about myself – or struggled to avoid feeling about myself.  Consciously, I thought it would be foolish not to accept me – Psychoanalysis is in a precarious condition and they need people like me.  In ways that were represented in my dreams as my being African American, I did not feel up to snuff. 

Does this mean African Americans are not up to snuff?  No, it means that on some level that can be used to represent thoughts that I don’t want to acknowledge, I believe they are not up to snuff.  But it is more complicated than that.  I also believe – in that same place or perhaps right next door to it, that I am not up to snuff.  But I don’t want to believe that I am not up to snuff, so I think to myself something like – “Well, I may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but at least I am not black.”  The next step would be to do something like kill the blacks to rid the world of all the stuff that is not up to snuff.  The reasoning – such as it is – is that, “All the bad stuff is actually not in me, but in blacks, and getting rid of them rids us of all the bad stuff.”

I think that some process like this – and it sounds pretty weird, but I think there is something to it – happens on an individual and societal level.  The problem is that we are generally unaware that we are functioning in this way.  In so far as this is a defense mechanism, it is something that we are putting in place without conscious thought or awareness.  If you ask me if I am racist, I might say something like, “How could I be racist?  I have dreams about myself where I, myself, am black.”  The difference is that when I am representing myself as black, I want to protect myself.  When I move over just a tiny bit and represent the other as black, that life does not matter.  Quite the contrary, I want to get rid of it.

The most powerful moment that I, as a white American male, experienced of being singled out for an aspect of who I am, was on 9/11/2001 when I found myself under attack not for something I had done, but for who I was and what it was that my being that symbolized.  I was an American, and because of that I was hated.  That is not what I experienced immediately.  Quite the contrary: I felt angry, powerless and afraid and a myriad of other powerful emotions – emotions that I think were communicated to me by those who hated me.  They did what they did for many reasons, but one of those reasons was, I believe, to put inside me – and millions like me – the feelings that they had – feelings that they quite literally felt they could not contain, and they literally put in me.

I think that we have done a similar thing with Blacks in America.  We have put the feelings that are hard for us to contain – our fears, our aggressive impulses – into them.  Of course we have not literally done this, any more than the terrorists literally put their feelings into us – but we, for all our successes, are not a comfortably confident people.  We can fall from grace at any moment, and we aren’t sure there is a safety net to support us.  Blacks – and here I mean a particular view of blacks – the black of the ghetto – represents that part of ourselves that fears we won’t survive – that in this dog eat dog world, we will be eaten.  And we react against this part of ourselves – we hate this part of ourselves – and we communicate that through violence of various sorts, including shooting people who symbolize this.  (In this paragraph I have condensed a wide variety of possible and probable experiences into one simple narrative.  This narrative necessarily does violence to the many ways that individuals experience race relations, but it is intended to be a narrative representation that serves as a general summary – one that will relate sometimes quite well and sometimes quite poorly to individual narratives).

Of course, just as the terrorists on 9/11 communicated a range of feelings to us, I think our violence communicates a range of feelings to Blacks – they feel – not just their own feelings, but the feelings that we cannot tolerate in ourselves (James Cone has written eloquently about this).  We ask them to know terror – and then we don’t recognize it when that is what they communicate to us – as I failed to do with a fellow psychoanalyst, Dorothy E.Holmes.  We have disowned the feelings so thoroughly that we don’t recognize them when they are stated back to us.

Why should black lives matter?  Because our lives should matter: because our lives are incomplete when we disavow such broad swaths of them by disavowing our reactions to blacks – including disavowing that they don’t matter.  Perhaps the most chilling part of the New Yorker interviews with Darren Wilson, the police officer whose killing of Michael Brown touched off the Ferguson protests, is when Jake Halpern, the interviewer, asks Darren Wilson if he imagines what Michael Brown might be doing now if he – Darren Wilson – hadn’t killed him.  Despite Wilson’s having said many of the right things about race relations and his style of policing – things that Halpern indirectly questions as he interviews others – Wilson’s failure to even fathom that Michael Brown might have a life were he not killed seems to speak directly to the concerns expressed in the Black Lives Matter movement. 

That said, I had a close friend inadvertently (and it was never established who was at fault) kill two people in a car accident.  He was seriously injured as well.  Despite his mother’s wish to express remorse to the parents and spouses of the dead women – a wish that the attorney in the case quashed as it might represent guilt – my friend’s dominant experience, not without some reason, was that he was the one who was victimized – they were likely drinking and came around a blind corner and he was now seriously injured – injuries that will be with him through the rest of his life.  He felt himself to be the victim.  I have seen the same thing happen when I talk about date rape with various groups of men where just imagining that they have been accused of date rape leads them to imagine themselves victims rather than to focus on their potentially being perpetrators.

I do think that one thing that is hard for white people like me to keep in mind is that we are perpetrators.  We are not comfortable with that.  We want to disavow not only the disavowed things that I have stated above, but we also want to disavow that we have disavowed them.  This can, I think, cause us to feel unconscious guilt.  And we can imagine that if we open our hearts to blacks, that we will be manipulated because of this guilt.

I am writing this post from the shores of one of our Great Lakes in a resort community that is so white that the first blacks I have seen in a week were in last night’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream referenced earlier.  This production had a white Theseus preparing to marry a black Hippolyta and the same actors played the parts of Oberon and Titania – the Faery King and Queen.  The play notes point to Shakespeare having questioned some of the tenets of English History in much the same way that Hamilton is questioning the tenets of American History.  The Arts are leading the way in helping us to reconsider what it means to be marginalized – and more importantly, what it means to come in from the margins – how does this impact both those at the center and those on the margins?  And for both, this can be, but does not have to be, a violent interaction.  We can violently resist reowning the disavowed aspects of ourselves.  We can also enact the projected aggressive aspects – as the United States did in part in its war on Iraq – a misguided effort to attack terrorism that may have incited more instability and therefore more terror than it prevented – and, perhaps, as the attacks on the police officers in Dallas last Friday did. 

Coming to value each of our children as if they were one of our own – as if owning our own children, including their manifold antics, were an easy matter – but coming to value each of our children as our own – including, especially our black children – children who represent by just one attribute parts of ourselves that we would disown – and children who by virtue of being represented entirely by that attribute have their lives – the complexity of who they are – erased in the minds of others – this is a disservice to ourselves – it keeps us from appreciating and living with the tension of being the complex internally contradictory beings that we necessarily are – and it continues to oppress those who have been oppressed for generations.

I don’t know how we come to care about the lives of others – especially those that we do not – and maybe cannot – know.  The continual movement toward achieving the ambitious goals dreamed of by Martin Luther King – and by each and every one of us when we hear his inspiring words about it – is fraught with danger – we resist it, sometimes violently – and also paradoxically embrace the gains we have made and work for more.  As lofty as the goals may be, the terrain that we have to navigate to achieve them is the most treacherous of all – the complex minds and hearts of people whose complexity is something we continually work to avoid acknowledging, much less appreciating.  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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