The Afrikaner has denied the Coloured mother. He has denied the Coloured originator of his language. Denied the builder of his houses and the fashioner of his furniture. Denied the designer of his clothes and of his silver. Denied the preserver of his music and the creator of his pleasure.
The work of this book has been to engage with notions of human being that are mainstream in Western modernity. These common sense ideas have been forged and disseminated in the psy disciplines. I have sought to offer an alternative way of thinking about self and other that might alter how and why we think about our psychotherapeutic work. In the first chapter, I argued that the psy disciplines benefit when they learn from the humanities. In the final chapter, I outlined existing psychotherapy practices that already apply an understanding that human being is complicitous, even if those are not the terms they use. In between, I offered illustrations to bring into focus how systems of power evolve from specific historical events and from material practices, and then reinforce or underwrite these practices (see Kendi, 2016 for the example of racism in America as an illustration of how material practices can cause cultural formations as much as the other way around).
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