by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT

CONFRONTING WHITE SUPREMACY REQUIRES STRENGTHENING OUR CAPACITY TO TOLERATE NOT KNOWING

I’m going to start by saying that I am a Chinese American, who finds myself in a space between Black and White. Chinese Americans have benefited from anti-Black racism and are seen as perpetual outsiders, never fully “American.” The model minority myth has been used as a wedge to divide people of color, and there has been a deafening silence in our communities about the oppression of Black communities under the system of White supremacy. I’ve been a therapist who’s worked with Black families and a client who has worked with a White therapist. 

During the week that protests erupted after the murder of George Floyd, I met with a Black mother who I see for family therapy. She and her young son are currently living in a shelter after escaping from domestic violence. She told me that she was annoyed that the protests prevented her from being able to live her daily life. Target and Walgreens were one of the few places she could go to, and now they were boarded up. She told me that speaking to other Black people was tiring, because emotions were so heightened, and that it was actually easier to talk to people who were not Black. “Not all cops are bad,” she said. “I’ve only ever met two bad cops. Cops actually helped me escape from my situation.” 

As she spoke, I felt myself wanting to say something about how policing itself is an inherently racist institution that serves the interests of capital and white supremacy. But I didn’t want to place myself in the position of power, putting my beliefs on her, in a way that is actually reproducing oppressive social dynamics in society. I also worried that staying neutral, and not giving my opinion, would be complicit with the status quo. In the room there was me, her, and our sociopolitical histories that were being communicated implicitly and explicitly (Cushman, 1994). I had been working with her for about a month, and this was the first time we had talked about race and our racial difference explicitly. I felt the urgency to show that I was a good ally and also the desire to slow down and meet her where she was at.

In the end, I opted to listen and support rather than share my own opinions. After the session, I felt a buzzing anxiety in my body that would not go away. Did I do the right thing? Was this my own fear of confrontation? Growing up, I learned to become small in the face of conflict. Should I have said something else? If I did the wrong thing, I definitely wanted to know. I took a long breath and tried to settle my body by feeling everything that was going on: the itch to reach out to colleagues for validation, the swelling in my chest, the rush to think of all the possible ways to handle it instead. “There is no right or wrong. I don’t know, and it’s ok. I might never know, and it’s ok,” I slowly told myself. My body began to relax. 

I reflected on what it felt like for me to be a person of color client working with a White therapist. Whenever I would bring up race, my therapist would start talking about the books she’s reading about race and telling me about all the things she’s doing to confront racism in her own life. I remember feeling angry that she was more interested in showing that she was good or proving what she knows than about listening to my experience. “Every time I talked about race, you made it all about yourself,” I told her during our termination session. 

There I was, catching myself wanting to do the same thing. In working with Black clients, I bring with me the racist narratives that I learned from my family of origin, racial trauma I experienced as a Chinese person growing up in American South, and my own work as an adult trying to confront these parts within myself. I was so anxious to show that I was “good” and not “bad” that I almost lost focus of my client. As psychodynamic therapists, one of the most important things we are trained in is how to withstand being in the transference and tolerate all sorts of projections. Being able to withstand not knowing and not showing we are “good” when it comes to encountering racial dynamics is just as important.