Photo from Pexels by Domen Mirtič Dolenec
TL;DR:
Talking about and paying attention to what it’s like to be in a body can be a way “in” to recognizing what shifts when the body is racialized. Because white people experience their bodies as at times “non-raced,” they can remain unconscious or oblivious of the ways their racialization is always present. How, then, does this dynamic impact the ways whiteness is suppressed in therapy sessions?
Picture yourself on a beautiful, cool summer morning. There’s a light breeze, raising the hair on your forearms and the back of your neck. Behind you, you hear the sound of two crows calling to one another. A breeze rustles the tree branches, and you hear the leaves rubbing against each other and tapping against a nearby windowpane.
Your feet are on the ground—maybe you’re barefoot, your feet deep in grass; maybe you have shoes on, and the ground beneath your feet is asphalt, or red brick. Maybe you’re hearing a city bus gun its engine, drowning out the sound of the crows. Or maybe you’re in a place so quiet you can hear the nearby hummingbird’s wings as it flits and darts.
You’ve taken a pause from whatever it was you were doing. You can feel your breath in your chest: maybe it’s high, and tight, and shallow. Maybe it’s low and slow, so you’re almost sighing with each exhalation. If your heart is beating rapidly, it’s likely your focus has narrowed; your field of vision contracted, scanning. You might have a dull throb of pain somewhere in the background from the tension in your hips, neck, and shoulders.
If you’re relaxed and fully immersed in your environment, you may be able to feel what’s behind you with almost the same clarity as what’s in your peripheral vision. You may be in your animal self, grounded in somatic awareness, your thoughts coming in at a slower beat than usual. You may be in a state of pure presence, your “self” fallen away, and your sensory being and engagement with the moment at hand, all there is.
It’s a strange thing, this being in a body.
Even as I think about what it’s like to be in my body, my mind snags on the word “in.” Why is the body a container? What’s inside it? A soul? A self? A mind?
Not one sentence into a discussion of embodiment, and already I’m haggling with Descartes. I don’t want to be a brain, trapped in a flesh jacket.
Sometimes I get to just exist. I move around, feeling, thinking, experiencing, and I can forget I’m being seen. Other times I am so aware of the others’ gaze I can’t find myself: I’m just the person who is refracted back at me.
One day I was driving in Atlanta, where I lived, a few weeks after Karl Rove had started really ginning up his hatred of gay people. A recent editorial in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the city’s main paper, had compared the threat of gay marriage becoming legal to the threat of the brownshirts bringing Naziism to a distracted public. A threat that initially appeared benign, but in retrospect meant the destruction of the entire culture.
I pulled into the parking garage of a local mall. My small, green, very old Camry was making its way up the ramp. Suddenly, a white Escalade rounded the corner of the floor above and drove straight at me. The car tipped over the top of the ramp, filling my view. The driver was a white woman with dyed blond hair, dark sunglasses, a light pink shell, black blazer, and a string of pearls around her neck. She looked at me. Her mouth was a firm, narrow line; she wasn’t smiling. I felt a flood of rage. “This woman hates me, wishes I were dead.” The thought came unbidden, full of certainty.
I’m a tall white woman, with short brown hair. I dress androgynously, most of the time. I’m gay. My stature, my haircut, and my gender presentation were so aberrant to the South’s ideas of what a “woman” looks like that I was regularly addressed as “sir”—in restaurants, at bus stations, even when holding the door open for others, which makes my chest stick out.
I was shocked by the ferocity of my response to this woman. I had no idea I was holding so much anger and terror, just outside of my awareness. My hatred for this total stranger was so absolute that I scared myself. Who was I to judge this person? Why was I so sure I knew who this person was, what she stood for, what her politics were, and most importantly, what she believed about me, in return?
I was trapped in a fantasy of a threatening world. And at the same time, I realized I had internalized the very real information that in this place, in this context, my body was received as a threat: to this pink, pearlescent woman and to others like her, with their money, their power—all of them seemingly materialized in this enormous white car, now bearing down on me.
Moments before, I had been unaware of my body. I was preoccupied with what I was going to buy at the mall, how much time I had before I had to get back to work. Was it the woman who made me unsafe? Was it my body, taken as a kind of provocation by others, that needed to be changed? I couldn’t flee from it, so perhaps I needed to flee from here.
I’ve been mulling over an article I read last week: philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff’s Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.
The field of philosophy that explores what it’s like to exist in a body, and to perceive others’ bodies, is called phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of lived experience: of how we understand, experience, and move through the world as embodied beings. We register the world through our senses, and that gives us an experience of embodiment. But that registering happens not just through our felt sense, but also through language, which creates meaning.
We have two forms of perception, happening at once. We have our physiology, our neurons, our skin, our eyes, our ears, registering (if we have access to all our senses). And we have the perceptive grid, like a window screen through which wind flows in summer, shaping our narrative of self and world.
We have moments like the one I described at the beginning of the post, where we are immersed in our “felt sense” of the world. And then we have experiences like the one I had in the parking garage, where our body is receiving experience and having a reaction (rage, fear, rapid heartbeat), but that reaction isn’t really coming from our sensory experience. Instead, our bodies are reacting to the thoughts, the assumptions, the stories we make and have made about the other.
Alcoff is interested in how the ideas about race that are competing with one another in public conversation and in politics are shaping our understanding of our own embodiment. She asks, how do those ideas work like that screen, shaping the way we make meaning out of our own bodies, and the bodies of people we see, as we’re moving around in the world?
She talks about the fact that race is often discussed as an “idea,” a fiction, with no intrinsic meaning—it is purely an invention, a concept rooted in the visual perception of a phenotype, mapped onto an idea that there are these identities, based on “race.” So from this vantage point, race is a pernicious idea that should be eliminated. It is this argument that’s often cited in “colorblind” ideologies: that we are all human, that we should focus on commonalities, that discussions of “difference” serve only to undermine the politics of unity.
And at the same time, race is also talked about as a sociocultural lived experience, one that impacts our material resources, our interpersonal dynamics, our dominant culture and our subcultures. The idea of eliminating race, or eliding race, as a concept, does nothing to ameliorate its very real effects.
At the level of the dominant culture, we are thus living with two competing racial frameworks, each of which is influencing our lived experience of embodiment. When I was mulling over Alcoff’s article, I started to think about the “felt sense” of embodiment, wondering if it was akin to a kind of experience of the self as “outside” racialization. I wondered if the body in that moment of pure presence is as close as a person can get, phenomenologically, to a moment of relief from the impact of white supremacy and structural violence. I wondered how it feels to be in a body that has a different relationship to power than I’ll ever have.
But then I asked: what is the experience of embodiment for white people, as they often experience themselves as both “non-raced” and “raced,” depending on whether they are in segregated or integrated spaces. And, further, is there anything therapists can take from phenomenology to help white people become more comfortable with talking about their embodied experience of race?
When I ask therapists who are white if they talk about whiteness and white supremacy with their white clients, most of them say they don’t. They talk to their clients who identify as non-white about race, and racism, and find it usual and expected. But when they broach the subject with white clients, they, and the client, often feel tense.
They tell me they want to be talking to their white clients about whiteness. But the topic never comes up. And so they feel weird, like they’re introducing a really vexed, charged subject into a client’s therapy session, when the client hasn’t expressed any interest in talking about it.
I get it. This is a really challenging issue. It brings up questions of ethics, transference, politics, disclosure. I think there’s an assumption, both among therapists and out there in the world, that white people don’t bring up whiteness and white supremacy as topics to talk about in therapy because they are nervous, or scared, or defensive. Or they don’t bring it up because they feel like they’re being blamed for something they didn’t do. In either scenario, they don’t want to look at it.
What all of these assumptions share is the idea that white people are consciously thinking about race, describing themselves as raced, privately acknowledging the impact of white supremacy on their own advantages and on others’ disadvantages and, because all of this material is loaded, deciding not to go there. From an analytic standpoint, this would introduce the question of whether the therapist has a role to play in directly naming the client’s resistance and anxiety: whether the therapist might be required to push past any of her own nervous counter-transference and raise the subject.
Though this may very well be the case for some clients, one look at the ferocious level of debate occurring about Critical Race Theory and other structural analyses of power demonstrates that this level of conscious awareness of white supremacy is not present for many white people.
Alcoff’s piece introduces another possible dynamic that might be in play: it may be that the subject of race, and particularly whiteness, isn’t coming up because the very experience of white embodiment is one of regular obliviousness to the fact of its own racialization.
Many white people walk around in the world not experiencing themselves as having a racial identity. They think of themselves as Robert, or Melissa, “the person.” They aren’t having much of an inner dialog about being white, or about the ways their racial identity is impacting their opportunities, or if their “Robert-ness” is hard for the other person to see because their whiteness is getting in the way. Their sense of embodiment is either detached—they’re “up in their head” all day—or it’s individualized; it’s “Robert’s body,” not a “white man’s” body.
And that’s because historically, white people have been positioned as the “norm.” White people’s history, feelings, tastes, philosophy, music, ways of being, thinking, and valuing experience have been hailed as “universal”: that is, as shared by all of humanity. The paradox of the white body is that it is at once universal—usual—and distinct, elevated, separate.
Because of this paradox, white people usually don’t have a phenomenological experience of being “raced” until they interact with a person who they identify visually, phenotypically, as non-white. And then they are flooded with the perceptive grid, that window screen of meaning systems, about bodies that are non-white. And only then do they become conscious of themselves as raced.
If I’m on to something with this looking at white embodiment as a kind of experience that is at times non-racialized, and at other times acutely raced, then we could ask this question: if the therapist is white, and the client is white, and the room (or space, given Zoom) in which the client and therapist are meeting is bland, or not explicitly racialized, then could we say that the space of therapy is one in which the white person does not experience himself as racialized? If so, then there is nothing to compel a white person to become curious about their racial identity, unless they have had an interaction with an individual that was explicitly “about” race that they want to process in a session.
To be clear: I’m not talking about racial collusion, here, between the white therapist and the white client. I’m not talking about discomfort with bringing up the subject of race, or whiteness, or white supremacy. I’m talking about the “before”—the ritual of what happens in a therapy session, the architecture of the therapeutic space, the idea of what therapy is “for,” the history of therapy itself, all present in the context of the therapeutic encounter, before the first word is even said.
If therapy is largely, historically and culturally, a “white space,” then the norming of whiteness as universal, and the phenomenological experience of the white person as de-racialized, all forbid conversations about whiteness or white supremacy from emerging organically in the therapeutic space.
What’s happening in this current moment, however, is that because of the BLM movement, because of the calls of white nationalists in places like Congress and the police force to overtly celebrate white power, and because the level of white violence, both structurally and individually, is so frenzied that even the dominant white culture can no longer deny it, white people are being thrown out of their habitual, de-racialized experiences of embodiment, and made to confront their embodiment as racialized.
They are, often without their consent, joining everyone else in the terrain of racialization. They are having to acknowledge that their experience of whiteness has been invisible to themselves, but to no one else.
When I think about the longstanding white experience of deracialized embodiment crashing into this historical moment, it makes me think about the oft-cited longing for a cultural return to the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement, when white people could exist in largely segregated environments, peacefully occupying white privilege, without having to confront its effects on the bodies of everyone else.
What, then, is the impact of the lack of conversations between white therapists and white clients about whiteness and white embodiment? What do these daily silences say about the work of therapy, as a field and a practice, in reinforcing and maintaining white supremacy, both at the level of the individual, and in relation to the broader public culture?
How do these non-conversations impact the work of institutional bodies like the Association of Social Work Boards, which last week published its first-time licensure exam pass rates, demonstrating a chasm between the test scores of Black and white applicants?
And for those reading this who are not therapists or in the field of mental health, how do these non-conversations appear in the power relations between boards of directors and middle management, between bosses and subordinates, between team mates? How often is whiteness or white supremacy, as a structure that saturates and impacts our culture, acknowledged as a norm that must be accounted for, and addressed, when thinking about housing, or healthcare, or economics, or education, or waste management, or courts?
To track whiteness, track the silence.
What isn’t being said, every day, in therapy