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"The Name of the Game is Shame" was scrawled on the side of a building in a black ghetto, probably in the 1970's or 1980's. These words apparently hit home; they remained on that wall for nearly ten years (Nathanson, 1992). What did that graffiti artist understand about shame, about life in the ghetto, about psychopathology and social unrest? Recognizing that shame is always present in trauma, I will explore the shame and trauma of slavery and of the Jim Crow years and beyond, and how that shame and trauma has been transmitted through the generations.
You may be wondering how I become so interested in two topics, shame and slavery, both of which have so rarely been discussed. My writing about shame began with a required paper for a supervisory training program. I had intended to write about anxiety in new therapists, inspired by my own chronic anxiety, which I came to realize, was actually shame. It was in my research for that paper that I came across the story of the graffiti, "The Name of the Game is Shame." I continued to read about shame and trauma, and several years later my work with a new patient, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, prompted me to pull out and review the 1982 Generations of the Holocaust, edited by Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy. Suddenly the phrase "generations of slavery" popped into my head. That is when I began to link shame to the generations of slavery.
Let us begin with Andrew Morrison's wonderfully evocative description of shame:
Of human emotions and affects, shame settles in like a dense fog, obscuring everything else, imposing only its own shapeless, substanceless impressions. It becomes impossible to establish bearings or to orient oneself in relation to the broader landscape. Like fog, shame distorts vision and influences what is seen. But more. Shame also feels like a weight, a heaviness, a burden, pressing down often at the top of the back, forcing the body into the characteristic posture that Tompkins (1962-1963) described - shoulders hunched, the body curved forward, head down, and eyes averted. The burden of shame can settle into different parts of the body - the pit of the stomach, the face or eyes,...