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ABSTRACT: Applying a self psychological perspective, this paper explores the effects of cultural racism on a person's sense of self. Racism assaults victims with experiences of being perceived as less-than-human by the social milieu. Such experiences can utterly erode self esteem and ambition and cause a "depression of disenfranchisement" whereby one feels abjectly ungrandiose. The paper utilizes a literary example and one from clinical experience to illustrate how chronic experiences of antipathy-derived from cultural racism-can erode a person's sense of self by virtue of the disenfranchisement of grandiosity.
KEY WORDS: racism; narcissistic trauma; disenfranchisement; grandiosity; mirroring.
Applying a self psychological perspective, this paper explores the ef fects of cultural racism on self esteem, confidence, and ambition. Cultural racism assaults persons in ways that are utterly opposite to the effects of mirroring. Indeed, I describe racism as antipathetic in order to capture the magnitude of its effect on the disenfranchisement (deprivation of ownership) of grandiosity and the erosion of one's sense of self. Moreover, I suggest that chronic, antipathetic experiences derived from cultural racism constitute cumulative, narcissistic trauma. (See Khan, 1963 for elaboration on the concept of cumulative trauma.) Such trauma can lead to the crumbling, a piecemeal breaking down, of a person's sense of self. This breakdown, or disenfranchisement, contributes to the sense of oneself as ungrandiose.
As therapists we know that patients, often, are concerned about how others perceive them. Indeed, we see individuals in treatment who are tormented about the prospect of being perceived in a negative light. Self psychologically, how one imagines one is perceived translates into a narcissistic fantasy of oneself in relation to a selfobject or social milieu. A negative sense of self derives, at least in part, from one imagining being perceived in a less-than-positive light by others. Cultural racism assaults victims with real experiences of being perceived as less-than-human, which can cause a "depression of disenfranchisement" whereby one feels abjectly ungrandiose. (See Whitsett and Whitsett, 1996 for other ideas, derived from object relations, as regards the consequences of racism.) Moreover, emotional experiences derived from a racist culture can affect the therapeutic relationship, particularly when the patient-therapist dyad is cross-racial (see Griffith, 1977; Brody, 1987; Proctor and Davis, 1994; and Perez Foster, 1998).
A particularly cogent depiction...