Embracing the Rainbow: Race and Therapy

Abstract

In this chapter I want to develop a view of what it means to live in a racialised world and to consider our need to facilitate a healing of the fundamental split between self and other. This split has been constructed along many lines including race, gender, disability, sexuality, age and so on, and obscures the sense that we are all connected and share an interdependence of fate. I will draw on my heuristic immersion into the experience of race in everyday life to lead us past western dualism, which emphasises difference and views race in relation to otherness. Instead, I will seek to explore race as a shared, generative story which is embedded in culture as a reservoir of stories. Ben Okri’s view that to change individuals and nations one has to change the stories they live by (Okri, 1996) is very pertinent for therapists and individuals interested in social change. Such a transformative goal entails an awakening to the formative presence of stories in shaping our lives and relationships. Furthermore he says:

Stories do not belong to eternity. They belong to time. And out of time they grow. And it is through lives that we touch the bedrock of suffering and the fire of the soul; it is through lives, and in time that stories — re-lived and re-dreamed — become timeless.

(Okri, 1996, p. 24)