ABSTRACT
The author brings “understanding chronic shame” to issues of power and oppression in society, using two case examples, one Canadian and one American. In Canada, Residential Schools for Indigenous children, as well as general colonization, have inflicted cultural genocide through stigmatizing shame and annihilating shame. In the United States, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration produces chronic shame in Black communities as well as oppressive injustice. In these societies of chronic shame, caste structures social power. At the bottom and top of a social system based on caste, shame is dissociated in very different ways. In the middle of a caste system of hierarchy, shame is dissociated through group narcissistic defences such as the Christian Right and Trumpism, and also through “conscientious blindness.” Ethical shame, like the reintegrative shame of systems of restorative justice, can be a gateway to working for social justice, especially for those implicated in social harms done. Facing White shame allows White clinicians a more grounded practice of psychotherapy.
