ABSTRACT
Archetypal Grief recognizes the accompanying sorrow that shows itself not only in the Africanist women who live today in a perpetual state of worry and concern for their male family members but also the historical pattern of abuse directed at African American men—sons, fathers, uncles, grandfathers. Forces, ideas, commitment to harming African American men and women appear to continue as part of the American collective racial psyche. This type of harm revolves around the shadow of racism. African American men who have been victims of law enforcement attacks and murder have been filmed by phone cameras, video cameras and even police body cameras. The historical fact of American slavery and cultural trauma lives in the psyches of African American women and men. It still calls out on an archetypal intergenerational level. The underlying unconscious American collective pattern of "feeling" a need to contain, to control these male members of our society, continues centuries after the official end of slavery.
