The impenetrable wall of whiteness. A response to Guilaine Kinouani

A history of the struggle against racism in the social unconscious of group analysis

“…There is no openly expressed hostility nor resentment towards black people in any part of this story. What we see instead is what I have referred to previously (Blackwell, 2003, 2018, 2020a) as ‘negation’. In these cases, it is not even black people who are negated so much as their blackness.…”

“…I was not, as I assumed at the time, talking to fellow group analysts. I was talking to what I have recently, with the help of my colleague, Guilaine Kinouani (2020a, 2020b), come to identify as the ‘impenetrable wall of whiteness’ (Blackwell, 2020a).…”

The white mirror: Face to face with racism in group analysis part 2—mainly practice

“…In reaction to the sub-group shifting forward in their seats while we were in heated exchange, I associated the fear I felt with those seconds before a body is confiscated for lynching. Kinouani (2020a) and Blackwell (2020a) have since articulated the way whiteness operationalizes as an impenetrable wall effectively smothering (or strangling) and neutralizing authentic expressions of blackness in the group matrix.…”

Black Power–White Halos. A response to Guilaine Kinouani’s ‘Silencing, power and racial trauma in groups’

“…I have little doubt that certain groups and social categories are marginalized within group analysis and certain topics are almost undiscussable. I referred in my last response to GK (Blackwell, 2020) to the way that words about ‘race’ and ‘class’ uttered in group analytic large groups drop like stones into an apparently unconscious black hole. I think here it is worth trying to think about what it is that is being defended and what it is that it is felt so necessary to defend against, and to what extent it is overdetermined.…”