Racial melancholia, ambivalence, and shame: a psycho-social examination of white student resistance to anti-racism in a secondary classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT This critical ethnographic study uses the concept of racial melancholia to investigate white student resistance to anti-racism in a secondary classroom. I employ a psycho-social (the interplay between psychoanalytic and social processes) approach to examining racialisation through a theoretical and empirical exploration of racial melancholia’s role in engendering a traumatic conflict between desiring anti-racism and betraying whiteness, a conflict that I argue serves as the core of white subjectivity. I analyse three different ways in which racial melancholia caused white students to vacillate between coveting anti-racism and reproducing racism. These students waged a psycho-social battle with whiteness that was mediated by social forces including family, friends, and classmates intersecting and overlapping with psychical processes related to ambivalence and shame. I conclude with how methods for storytelling can open pathways for working through racial melancholia.