Race Murder and Community Trauma: Psychoanalysis and Ethnography in Exploring the Impact of the Killing of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas

Abstract

This article uses a psychoanalytic ethnographic approach to explore the impact of the murder of James Byrd on the community of Jasper, Texas. Conversations with both White and African American residents of Jasper reflect the shared trauma of the murder and its impact on them both as individuals and members of a community, as well as reflections about lived lives, relations with family members, childhood experiences, and attitudes and experiences related to race. When a community's social, political, and economic elements are sufficiently inclusive, they create a medium (a collective ego structure) that can absorb potentially divisive (and regressive) conflicts, impulses, and anxieties such as those that threatened to erupt in Jasper. For a significant portion of Jasper's African Americans, the community was a suitable target of externalization, a meaningful psychological construct in which they were invested and which they experienced as an extension of themselves. These factors helped contain the rage and anxiety that swept over the community in the aftermath of the murder. Rather than centrifugal processes leading to psychological fragmentation and splitting in the face of community trauma, centripetal forces were ascendant, reflecting longings for cohesion and solidarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)