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.
I am a US psychoanalyst who comments on books, movies and conferences from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. Intended for those curious about applied psychoanalysis, this site grows out of a project - the 10,000 minds project of the American Psychoanalytic Association - to help the public become aware of contemporary psychoanalysis. I post 2-4 times per month and limit posts to about 2,000 words.
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Friday, November 23, 2018
March – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Pictures John Lewis Remembering the Civil Rights Movement
John Lewis’ three part graphic novel March recalls in vivid,
one might even say graphic detail, his experience of the Civil Rights
Movement. He joined a movement that had
been gaining momentum and that already had towering leaders, and he emulated
these leaders and interacted with them as he, in turn, led the younger
contingent. He led students and others
in restaurant sit-ins and on the streets of the south to confront racism using
non-violent techniques.
When I teach the History of Psychology, students have, at
best, a sketchy knowledge of the civil rights movement. We generally focus on the Brown vs. Board of Education case that went before the Supreme Court and that struck down Plessy vs. Ferguson where the court had ruled that separate railway cars for African
Americans and for European Americans were fine as long as they were equal
(which they almost certainly were not).
We do this because two psychologists, Mamie and Kenneth Clark played a
key role in that trial – their data from the doll study – a study where they
used colored dolls (their term) and white dolls to show that segregation had
harmed African American Children by leading them to have internalized racism –
to hate themselves because they were of African American decent.
Actually the last sentence in the last paragraph is
wrong. It is the historical way that the
story is told, but when you read their data, the internalized racism, present
both in the southern children in segregated schools and the northern children
in integrated schools, was worse in
the children in Northern Integrated
Schools. The paper does not make
much of this – both groups clearly have internalized racism – but it does
portend what may have actually happened – integration of the schools actually
increased racism and the detrimental effects of it on blacks.
The class references this study because it is the first time that
data from a social science experiment was cited in a Supreme Court
decision. And we note that it was two African
American psychologists who were able to set this precedent at a time when
psychology was struggling to be recognized as a viable and respectable
science. Mamie and Kenneth Clark –
African Americans who experienced open racism from their doctoral supervisors -
are the only two psychologists that I know of that changed not just the course
of psychology but directly changed the course of history – contributing the
deciding data that led to what many have cited as the most important decision
of the Supreme Court in the 20th century. Pretty cool that this was done by minority
persons – and minorities in the field.
Kenneth was the seventh African American to achieve a doctoral
degree. Mamie didn’t come much
later. And they did things no other
psychologist has done.
John Lewis, whose graphic novel charts the work that he did
to both call into question the failure of businesses to heed the court's call to
end segregation and to work on establishing the right to vote
for African Americans, picked up where the Clark's left off. His story is an endearing one that follows an
arc that was typical for many generations of important political figures in US
history. He started life as the child of
poor farmers in Alabama. He had
aspirations of becoming a preacher – and his first congregation were the
chickens that he was raising. But he didn’t
just preach to them – he became attached to them – and he would refuse to eat
the chickens he had named when they were served for dinner. He loved them.
Another feature of his story that is a very typical American
theme is that he was driven to go to school and to do well there. When he was needed on the farm and was forbidden
to go to school because he was to work in the fields, he would hide until he
saw the school bus coming and then he would run out to take it to school. Ultimately, Lewis would see the world – as a teen he traveled
to the big city of Buffalo, New York with an uncle – and he chose to go to
college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was
there that he first began fighting for civil rights – he organized sit-ins at
local diners. It was also there that his work started to take precedence over his schooling - he prioritized the movement over his schoolwork.
I think that the graphic format is the right vehicle for
this story. The story is titled March
and, though Lewis was erudite and gave speeches that helped the movement, his
emphasis is on the actions that he and others took. He will sometimes cite speeches (I will quote
a surprising one in a moment), but it is the action of marching, not the “I’ve
been to the mountain top” moments that he maintains is the reason that the
civil rights protesters accomplished what they did. And the visual emphasis of the books support
this action based approach. The story
tells about deeds as much or more than it talks about words – and though there
are plenty of words – they are mostly words of dialogue – decisions that are
being made – they are frequently words about when and where to march. Lewis presents himself as a man of action and
this book is written and drawn to convey the actions that he took – and the actions that others took against him - not to
articulate the fine grained thoughts that he had.
That said, the philosophy of nonviolence is pretty clearly
articulated. Perhaps more clearly, the
teaching of the philosophy to those who marched – the training and the
importance of the adherence to the principles – and the difficulty of doing
this are clearly stated. What is less
clear – and perhaps it takes a bit of psychoanalysis to articulate it – is how
it is that the nonviolent movement clarified how much aggression was being used
by whites to suppress blacks. The
movement exposed the lie that is at the heart of American exceptionalism – an
exceptionalism that maintains we are not the aggressors – we only come in when called
upon – it is others that are violent and we are pacifists who are reluctantly
drawn into war – and even more that it is we whites who are not the violent
ones – it is the blacks (whether black hats or people of color) who are bad and
do bad things (and doesn’t the doll study demonstrate that they know they are the bad ones?).
What the nonviolent movement was designed to do was to
expose the truth that we are all aggressive – and that none of us are without
blame – as effectively as any analyst’s couch ever did. Whether it was furious counter clerks dumping
bleaching chemicals on students who sat in at segregated lunch counters or the
burning of the bus that carried freedom fighters to the south – or the murder
of black organizers or the murders of white students who came south to help out
– and whose bodies ended up buried in a dam being built – the peaceful
assertion of rights – inalienable rights – exposed the hostility that those in
power were using and had always used to retain that power. And Lewis’ self-portrayal here as the student
of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that while King articulated the tactics of
nonviolence – Lewis, the student, practiced them more devotedly and more
consistently than King did – and in doing this he pushed the issue in ways that
words never could. Lewis does not, however, try to elevate himself to a position of exceptionalism. He feels violent impulses - most powerfully, ironically, when King is threatened and he moves to physically defend him.
One of the challenges in teaching about racial and gender
battles in the History of Psychology has always been to help the students get a
sense of the level of injustice that existed – and even more to get them to
appreciate the levels that still exist.
OK, to be frank, this is something that I myself have struggled with. James Cone’s visit to our campus helped me
better understand this, as did Ta Nehisi Coates’. But I think the unprovoked actions of Trump – and the actions of hate groups – and the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme
Court bench – have helped me and my students be much more aware and sensitive to
the ongoing aggression that is at the heart of the repression of African
Americans and other marginalized groups, including women. I still have to do background work, but the
students are more quickly able to see that we are not just talking about
history, but the current state of affairs when talking about prejudice and
marginalization.
An example of the vivid immediacy of the material that Lewis
portrays is Nelson Rockefeller’s speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention. In the speech, Rockefeller quotes himself as
having said a year earlier that, “The republican party is in real danger of
subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority, wholly
alien to the sound and honest conservatism that has firmly based the republican
party in the best of a century’s traditions, wholly alien to the sound and
honest republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in
a changing world, wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the
broad mainstream of republican principles.”
Despite this, the party nominated Barry Goldwater – who, unlike DonaldTrump, was soundly defeated in the general election.
These books are introduced and supported by Lewis attending
the inauguration of a very different president – Barack Obama. His reminiscences serve as a means of
understanding how we were able to stand at that moment – the swearing in of the
first president of clearly African descent – the first president who identified
as a person of color. But, it seems to
me, Lewis might be asking whether that swearing in portended a backlash – a thinly
veiled racist tinged backlash by the radical, well-financed and disciplined
minority that would hijack not just the republican convention, but the country
as a whole. Just as the integrated black students in the north internalized self hatred more than the segregated black students in the south, northern and southern whites externalized their hatred of blacks in the wake of being ruled by one.
Lewis' book has the potential
to expose a new generation to the powerfully racist, sexist and repressive
forces in their naked form that drive what I hope to be a minority of people to keep others from
sharing in a privilege that we should be striving to allow all to have access
to – the privilege of leading lives that are as free as humanly possible. By focusing on denying access, I believe that
those in power help to maintain the delusion that they are exceptions to the
arc of being human – that they are the immortals who will always be on top. Unfortunately this kind of thinking is not good for any of us. It is my firm belief that a rising tide raises all ships - and by blocking the tide, we create a stagnant swamp that we will all be forced to wallow in until we are able to find fresh sources of water.
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