Open AccessBearing Black
Author(s) -
Deanne Bell
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal for social action in counseling and psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.119
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 2159-8142
DOI - 10.33043/jsacp.5.1.122-125
Subject(s) - psychic , race (biology) , racism , humanity , consciousness , white (mutation) , sociology , gender studies , critical race theory , epistemology , political science , law , philosophy , medicine , biochemistry , chemistry , alternative medicine , pathology , gene
In this essay I critically examine the idea of race in light of the killing of Trayvon Martin, an African-American unarmed teenager, in Florida in February 2012. I utilize ideas from liberation psychology, including psychic colonization, and depth psychology, including cultural complex, to explore the racialized black as a colonized, traumatized other. I also use my autoethnographic experience (as a Jamaican who now lives in the United States) to discuss how identities built on race are a source of suffering both when we make others black and when we are made black. Bearing black robs us of the possibility of our humanity. Throughout, I ask several questions about sustaining race as a sociological idea if we truly intend to dismantle racism. I invite us to reconsider race in light of an instance where Rastafarians, a small group of Afro-Jamaicans who express profound race consciousness, determine their own image, not only as black, and as a form of resisting white supremacy.