Melancholia and the Racial Order: A Psychosocial Analysis of America’s Enduring Racism

Abstract

This article has focused on the invidious nature of racial distinction and the defensive purposes that racial categorization continue to serve in a melancholic society. In fact, the human anxiety generated because of loss, disappointment, and discontinuity with others and the racialized defenses against knowing it might also be described as a crisis of trust: racial categorization as a defensive palliative to the anxieties of profound mistrust. The experience of basic mistrust between one another and the brokenness of the world describe in different language the same experience. Differentiation, separation, and loss are profound human emotions. In an ideal social world we might expect that, at each stage in a person's development, necessary resources are provided by various social institutions to reassure the person that the painful process of individuation from one's past and from one's ancestors is recognized and accommodated. Provisions are provided in early schools to reassure children upon their first separations from home that they are safe and their caregivers will return. Even in the first job, provision is typically made to the un-ease of a new worker at being able to perform competently from the beginning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)