Relational Racialization and Segregated Whiteness

Abstract

ABSTRACT Both the poet Claudia Rankine, in her 2020 collection Just Us, and the psychoanalyst Lauren Levine, in “Interrogating race, shame and mutual vulnerability: ‘Overlapping and interlapping waves of relation,’” recount the outcomes of dyadic conversational experiments regarding race. For Rankine, the experiment is to approach white male strangers with an inquiry into their experience of white privilege. For Levine it is to adapt the psychoanalytic frame of the analyst as listener to initiate a more personal discussion of the experience of race within the analytic mixed-race dyad. In both experiments, a tensile field of relational racialization opens up between the pair in the dyad, a field that is neither simply composed of the black/ white dichotomy nor of multiple, variable, acts of racialization isolated from each other. Instead, such conversations reveal a field of relational racialization that subjects all the people in the encounter. Levine both argues for the need for such encounters, and demonstrates how they may require expansions in clinical technique for the relational analyst who feels the need to deal squarely with race.