Deanne Bell

"Black is Not Enough"

The election of the first African American president of the United States of America invites a re-visiting of race consciousness. This paper reexamines the racial concept ‘black’, from a contemporary Jungian perspective. It proposes that black is a cultural complex that unconsciously oppresses the colored person’s self. Looking back, black emerges through the trauma of slavery, racial segregation and as the projection of the inferior other. As a term, chosen historically by the white oppressor, the first and foremost meaning of black was as “the color of evil” (Fanon, 1986, p. 197). These racial monikers, in use today even by the most libertarian amongst us, are loaded with a vile history of oppression; they are not value-free, bleached terms.

Thomas Singer’s idea of archetypal defenses, specifically the “daimonic defense system” (2004, p. 18) is utilized to examine the psychological mechanism through which people of color buy into the black/white binary to protect themselves against further trauma.

Finding that black is not enough, that maintaining the use of racial ideas to divide humanity is inadequate, several questions arise as we consider how the collective may transform itself beyond this division. These questions include: What are different relational coordinates, beyond the black/white binary, that would dismantle race trauma and promote healing? What images move beyond engagement at the black level interrupting a psychology that is inimical to the colored self? How can we transform color consciousness?

References

Beebe, J. (2004). A clinical encounter with a cultural encounter. In T. Singer & L. Kimbles    (Eds.), The cultural complex: Contemporary Jungian perspectives on psyche and society (p. 223-236). New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge.

Fanon, F. (1986). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto.

Singer, T. (2004). The cultural complex and archetypal defense of the group spirit: Baby Zeus, Elian Gonzales, Constantine’s Sword, and other holy wars (with special attention to “the axis of evil”). In T. Singer & L. Kimbles (Eds.).  The cultural complex: Contemporary Jungian perspectives on psyche and society (p. 13-34).  New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge.