ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the African American experience since Emancipation, specifically tracing a persistent pattern in which, as soon as the country progresses towards justice for African Americans, a powerful white backlash arises to keep black citizens subjugated. We begin with the 2008 presidential election and clinical vignettes related to the common black fear that a victorious Obama would be assassinated. Looking back at the constant violence and repression that emerged with the short-lived Reconstruction era, we see the emergence of white skin as “badge of superiority”; vagrancy laws, initially created to force freed slaves to work for their masters, and decades of lynching. Clinical examples demonstrate the survival of attitudes related to that history. Again, after the legal successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s, we saw attacks on affirmative action, the emergence of the war on drugs and the concurrent evolution of mass incarceration, and a general strategy of coded racism, with its myth of the “level playing field.” And finally, the explosion of racist hate crimes in the aftermath of Obama’s elections. These developments have had psychological impacts that clients and I try to process in clinical examples.
