The Colonization of Reporting's Psychic Space

Abstract

Nearly 20 years ago, Kelly Oliver conceptualized how personal and collective aspects of estrangement, hopelessness, and humiliation resided as key concepts ordering our shared psychological world. Although the author doesn't want to travel prolongedly with Oliver's psychoanalytic notions, the title cogently conceptualizes the idea of the collective psyche controlled and manipulated by outside forces. Oliver frames the colonization of psychic space similarly to Hanna Arendt's notion of totalitarianism. Crafted to this chapter, orthodoxy exists around proper inquiry and formation on why Blacks and Latinx are underrepresented in NYC specialized high schools. Put differently, the reporting of NYC's selective high schools exists in a shared colonized milieu, providing little actual investigation but a great deal of ideological cohesion.