ABSTRACT
The theoretical comments from an ongoing psychoanalytic ethnographic study of a racially wounded town with urban attributes in the American Midwest. Finding and arresting the alleged murderer revived memories about Midway in the national and local media. This period of time of collective remembering of the murder of the young woman and what it meant to the soiled imagery of the community became the ideal conditions to organize a psychoanalytic ethnographic project involving focus group discussions with Midway civic leaders concerning their racially wounded community. The purpose of the collaborative problem-solving workshops is to move towards developing a collaborative civic leadership non-profit organization that would sustain the effort to develop a more open community and academic sector through resolving economic, health, educational and political challenges, which contribute to the racially wounded image and realities of the community. This chapter also discusses how a black sociologist gained access to the civic leadership of an overwhelmingly white community as an ethnographer later.
