This Black Thing

In 1960, my grandmother Julia piled her surviving eleven children into an old borrowed Cadillac and drove to meet her sister in New York City, searching for opportunities she could never have in rural South Carolina. Exactly twenty years later, I was born in Harlem, where she had settled, at a time in which race was still accepted as a primary defining factor of one’s life. There was a clear and bright “color line” and people were socialized to know which side of the line was theirs. Thus, I was born in a Black public hospital, lived in a Black neighborhood, attended a Black elementary school, went to a Black church, and knew mostly Black people. I was Black and those Black things were for me. 

When I began my career as a social worker, I worked in publicly funded hospitals, substance-use treatment centers, and foster care agencies in and around Chicago, also a racially segregated city. I opened my first private practice on the South Side of Chicago, where I lived, and saw whoever showed up looking for treatment, which turned out to be all types of working-class Black people. 

After being in private practice for three years, I moved back to Harlem and worked as a correctional counselor in New York City jails while I waited to be eligible for independent clinical licensure in New York State. The NYC Department of Correction is also heavily segregated by race, both in its administrative offices and within the jails: I worked with Black men detainees, almost exclusively, and my counselor colleagues who provided services in the jails were primarily Black and other people of color, while those who worked in the administrative offices were mostly white. 

Given my history of living and providing care in segregated spaces, when I was finally able to open a private clinical practice in New York City, I envisioned that I would continue to provide therapy to Black people exclusively. Even though I attended predominantly white universities and had pleasant collegial relationships with white colleagues, I lived and worked in segregated Black spaces. In fact, I had no desire to see white patients, partly because I could not imagine sharing such intimacy with folks on the other side of the color line that defined my life. 

While I could not imagine coexisting within the intimate space of the psychotherapy session with a white patient, I could imagine numerous other things. 

I imagined that I would not be as helpful to white patients compared to a white therapist because I would not understand “white” problems. I imagined that there was a “white” psychological experience to which I did not have access and which would therefore prevent me from fully understanding a white patient’s emotional and psychological challenges. I even imagined that white people’s problems would be trivial, which would make me annoyed and resentful. I imagined being rejected by prospective white patients since they would see me, a Black woman therapist, as second-tier at best. 

But perhaps most significantly, I imagined that I would be expected to inhabit the superficial and subservient role of “mammy” in order to function as a therapist for white people. I did not want to be another non-threatening, sensible large Black woman using my emotional labor to soothe white tears at my bosom. Upon arriving in New York, my grandmother worked as a day maid for families on the Upper East Side. If I provided emotional (i.e., domestic) labor to wealthy white people, would mine and my grandmother’s work effectively be the same? I was not interested in unintentionally engaging in race play or enacting racialized desires.  

With these fantasies in mind, I did not so much as discriminate against white patients, but I purposefully marketed to “women of color.” They were Black and this Black thing was for them. 

After a while in practice, I did begin to see white patients, some who were referred to me through existing patients and others who reached out through my directory profiles. 

Of course, the actual experience of treating white patients has not been what I imagined—an impenetrable obstacle that would prevent empathy, understanding, or helpful expertise. I have maintained a few long-term white patients with whom I have been able to do transformative work. But as I think it through, I find that race still shows up.  It shows in my hesitance to explore certain thoughts and feelings with white patients, for fear that I would be “making everything about race” or that the treatment frame could not bear such interpretations. Or it shows up when a white patient makes sure to disclose their progressive politics, or share their frustration about their outwardly racist parent or partner. Rather than as an impenetrable block, race shows itself in the instinctual ways that we both attempt to edit ourselves in order to foster connection. 

But these examples also point to the ways in which we are both implicated and shamed because we have been socialized to know how to navigate the “color line.” Our clinical session sits on top of that line, but at the session’s conclusion, we both go back to our sides: like my grandmother, who took the bus back to Harlem every evening after a day’s work on the Upper East Side in white people’s homes.