Defenses against Anti-Racism

Tummala-Narra (2020) discusses collective anxiety with dissociative defenses, maintaining emotional distance, which leads to the framing of immigrants and refugees as causes of unemployment, crime, and threats to cultural and societal fabric. This perception heightens policing of minorities and deportation of undocumented immigrants, including separating children from parents. The article explicitly connects racism and xenophobia and explores its applications for intrapsychic life and interpersonal relationships.

Xenophobia is described as fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners, linked to nationalism and ethnocentrism. The number of immigrants in a community inversely correlates with xenophobia; however, on a broader state and national scale, increased immigration exacerbates xenophobia due to a heightened perception of threat. Xenophobia has discriminatory potential and is linked to economic, social, and political instability, along with perceived resource loss. It is experienced in intrapsychic life and interpersonal encounters.

The article discusses intrapsychic life, which refers to inner thoughts, feelings, and experiences within a person's mind, including the fear of majority groups and the inevitable loss, disappointment, stress, and shifted identity experienced by immigrants adjusting to a new country. These issues are long-standing.

Therapists struggle with addressing multiple forms of social injustice, including cultural trauma and political polarization. Xenophobia and racism are described as conscious and unconscious and are embedded in early object relations and structural privilege and marginalization. However, discussing these issues in therapy can be challenging due to unresolved personal conflicts, feelings of guilt, shame, rage, and fear, along with histories of sociocultural trauma, internalized stereotypes, and prejudices.

The article discusses various layers of xenophobia and racism, including the role of unconscious fantasies of a homogenous community and the normalization of sexism. It also explores the impact of the "Trump effect" on the rise of racialized, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic bullying in schools.

The intergenerational transmission of traumatic stress and prejudice is discussed, encompassing defense mechanisms such as denial, projection, and rationalization. Xenophobic parents may consciously or unconsciously communicate these attitudes to their children, perpetuating xenophobia from early childhood.

The article includes case studies of individuals, such as John, a cisgendered white man, and Anika, an Indian immigrant. Both individuals struggle with internalized racism and xenophobia, which are rooted in their traumatic histories and familial dynamics. Their experiences highlight the complexities of privilege, marginalization, and identity.

The struggle between clients and therapists is discussed, as clients grapple with learned biases and defensive mechanisms, hindering their ability to fully engage in therapy. Therapists must navigate these challenges while humanizing the other and addressing the universal human need for dignity, identity, affirmation, love, and generativity.