Abstract
In the early 1970s the National Association of Youth Clubs in the UK set up what it called the Multi-racial Youth-work Project. In those days the youth service still thought in terms of ‘youth clubs’ as the primary medium of youth work, and imagined that if black youth and white youth could be attracted to the same clubs and engaged in ‘mixed’ activities, this would remedy ‘racial’ tensions and promote ‘inter-racial’ understanding and ‘integration’. I joined the project at its outset having completed a training as a teacher (part of which involved becoming acquainted with Paulo Freire). I brought to my role as research assistant a mixture of political awareness and naivety permeated by a struggle to escape from a ‘white’ perspective.
I had read Fanon as an undergraduate involved in student power and support for third world liberation movements, and I had perceived a connection between the colonized native (subject) and the industrial worker in the UK, (though it was not a connection I could find many others to appreciate at the time) I also knew that England was a racist society, that oppression was structural not merely psychological and that a liberation struggle was being conducted in English inner cities. So I began with a skepticism about the ‘Multi-racial Youth-work’ idea. Yet I was not entirely prepared for the speed with which the project was retitled, ‘Black Youth in the Inner City’. Nor was I prepared for the way my work was perceived by many members of the black community and some of the black staff involved in the project: another white student getting a degree from a sociological study of black people. A study, moreover, that was unlikely to change anything.
It soon became clear that it was important for the black community to conduct its own struggle, and anything I could contribute lead inevitably towards some sort of dependency on white academics or white leaders. I represented and symbolized ‘the man’. And the liberation struggle involved independence from ‘the man’.
At this time I discovered group analysis, which pulled me in a very different direction. There was no meaningful connection then between a black liberation struggle and a psychotherapeutic discourse embedded as it was in a wider discourse of psychiatry and mental health. Even therapeutic communities, one of the radical leading edges of the day, were populated primarily by white clients who were seen primarily as having ‘personal’ problems. Similarly, the other leading edge discourse, that of family therapy, was predicated largely on the idea of the nuclear family, albeit with wider extended family variations. Anti-psychiatry too, while it offered a potent vision of individual liberation within a repressive social context struggled to make a meaningful connection with the wider political situation and was only dimly aware of a ‘third world’, or of the sort of link made by sociologist John Rex, in his title, Race, Colonialism and the City (1973).
It is easy to underestimate the power of a psychotherapy training to socialize its students into a specific political discourse. It appears that what it does is to offer a more or less politically neutral meta-theory that identifies the universal themes and transcends former political and ideological allegiances, revealing them to be manifestations of certain forms of psychopathology. At this year’s S.H. Foulkes study day, a speaker in one of the large groups reflected on how, as a former communist, she had, during her psychotherapy training, become unaware of her political identity. She had somehow, lost that bit of herself, because somehow she got the subliminal (unconscious) message that it was not to be discussed on the training.
So it appears that a psychotherapy training depoliticizes its trainees. However to believe this is to fall for the propaganda coup that there is a ‘reality’ to be grasped. This ‘reality’ is allegedly ideologically neutral and somehow, scientifically objective. However, what it really is, is the ideology of the establishment. The triumph of hegemony is to pass down through the various levels of a society, the values of its ruling class. But those values manifest themselves, not as ruling class values, but as ‘reality’. The ‘reality’ that mother and father have sex that excludes the children, segues into a different sort of ‘reality’ in which, ‘the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate’ along with economic competition and certain assumptions about sex, gender, marriage and family, and the legitimacy of ‘authority’ become a sort of natural order to be adjusted to by the mature well adjusted personality, rather than manifestations of systems of power and domination to be critiqued and challenged. To challenge this ‘reality’ or natural order in terms of its implicit politics is called ‘being political’. To agree and accept it is called being neutral, apolitical, or somehow above politics. ‘Objective’ and ‘scientific’ are popular and well used terms. Thus ‘depoliticization’ becomes a form of socialization into a new invisible ideological, political perspective, which denies its political ideology as it promotes it. Depoliticization is a profoundly political process: an opposite of consciousness raising: a consciousness flattening or de-conscientization to borrow a term from Freire.
It was only beginning work with refugees in the late 1980s that enabled me to properly reconnect with the third world perspectives I had begun to understand as an undergraduate in the late 1960s. But back in the 1970s, I could only withdraw from the struggle in the inner city and focus my attention on psychotherapy.
One of the many educative experiences that stayed with me from the youth work project was the youth service’s attempt to provide youth work training for adult members of some black communities. These people were already engaged in youth work as volunteers but wanted some professional training. They began with high hopes but were soon telling their teachers that the training they were doing was of little use to them as did not address the real problems of young black people. It quickly emerged that the problem was not just the training but, as had become apparent in the Multi-Racial Youth-work Project, the whole concept of ‘youth-work’ as it then existed. If the problems of black youth and black communities were to be addressed, then the youth service had to engage with those communities in an entirely different way. It had to rethink its assumptions about youth-work.
This is an interesting lesson in the application in one discourse of the ideas from another, especially if one has changed discourses without noticing. We can also think of this in terms of context. The context of youth-work in English communities in the 1950s and 1960s was not the same as that of black communities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a lesson I had to revisit early in my involvement with group analysis almost as soon as I began working in the mental health field where a variety of different contexts and different communities of patients, required a constant rethinking and re-interpretation of what group analysis meant and how it might be done. It remains a problem in group analysis where we simultaneously pre-occupy ourselves with something called ‘standards’ while trying to develop group analysis in different contexts in different parts of the world where significantly different ‘standards’ may be more relevant.
So, in view of all this, David Woodger’s article is particularly interesting and significant. He is bringing together the educational theory and practice I studied, the problematics of youth work and racism I worked with, and some of the ideas from group analysis—Pat de Maré’s concept of ‘dialogue’, Farhad Dalal’s work on ‘racism’—that have informed much of my group analytic work. It also brings up a central problem in the development of group analysis in the 21st-century, and specifically the group analytic engagement with racism. Which is necessarily linked to the problem of depoliticization or de-conscientization.
I admire Woodger’s effort to address issues of what I would call ‘cultural identity’ (but what he seems to call, problematically in my view, ‘racial identity’), in a large group, and to address issues of racism directly. He has clearly created, or helped to create, a culture in which it has been possible for black and white people to talk about what it means to be ‘black’ or ‘white’, or Muslim or Pakistani. One where white people can talk about their privilege, their guilt, and most importantly, their unconscious or conscious racism, and where black people can talk about the legacy of slavery and challenge the resistances and rejections brought forth as responses. It looks like a fine piece of work and a great example of what can be done in a group analytic large group. Surely an example of what de Maré would call ‘Koinonia’ at its best. Yet I am left unhappy with Woodger’s description and theorization of it.
To begin with, I have a minor quibble or two. There is a significant group analytic history of studying ‘culture’ which includes the trans-cultural section of the Society, active since the 1980s, and a number of articles in this journal. There has also been a large group engagement with racism—the ‘Black and White’ group convened by Eric Ferron and Tony Clayton reported in group analysis (Ferron, 1991; Lyndon, 1992 and Gonggrijp, 1993). And several articles on ‘black and white’ issues more recently, but perhaps too recently to be included here. So Woodger’s article appears to emerge into a bit of a vacuum rather than connecting up with what we have already published.
However, the bigger problem is political. Woodger frames the issue as one of identity, not of political oppression. He brings to bear psychoanalytic concepts but he also brings the ‘depoliticizing’ effect of the discourse from which those theories are taken. Although he refers to power dynamics and structural inequalities, and to the way ‘whiteness’ defines ‘normality’ and is the ‘invisible perspective’, a dominant normative space from which difference is so often measured, he himself seems nevertheless to take another dominant normative perspective whose ideology is opaque if not denied. A space that is not structured or determined by power dynamics and structural inequalities but one from where they can be identified and their effects on individuals analysed.
Friere was clearly a Marxist of some sort and a self styled revolutionary. He was part of a 1960s and post 1960s movement sweeping across Latin America, which included Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and he quoted from Mao-Tse Tung on education and consciousness raising. De Maré too was a (former?) communist whose work continued to be influenced by the Marxist tradition, and who saw dialogue in large groups as a movement for political transformation—the sort of direct democracy envisaged by the ‘New Left’ of the 1960s. Yet Woodger makes relatively little reference to history or real social economic and political forces apart from racism. There is no reference to class and class conflict which is surely inseparable from ‘race’ and racism in any comprehensive and meaningful analysis; no reference to colonialism which has surely defined and continues to define ‘race’ and racism in the UK; only a passing reference to slavery; and no reference to the place of youth and community work in the system of power and oppression.
Woodger seems to paint a picture of a generally viable society with some aberrations and anomalies in need of analysis and correction from a benign liberal point of view. Anomalies such as ‘social injustice’ and ‘racial inequality’ are highlighted so as to be challenged and remedied. It seems as if individuals can be freed from the ‘system’ through development of an ‘identity’ without needing to act against the system to transform it, which is how I read Freire. In the UK of ‘austerity’, the so called ‘War on Terror’, and the systematic oppression of the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the whole underclass and much of the working class too, it is hard to see how ‘social justice’ and ‘racial equality’ are going to be any more than liberal hypothetical abstractions.
The application of group developmental phases and sub-groupings furthers the sense of depoliticization. Woodger writes, ‘A form of warfare . . . will ensue on various fronts in this phase of the group’s life’ (Woodger, 2015: 84). But the warfare is an extension of the real wars, declared and undeclared, that are actually going on in the communities in which these students are going to work. Invoking grand meta-theories of group development and sub-groupings, which reduce such warfare to just part of a phase in the group’s life merely serves to obfuscate the social reality and is not what either Freire or de Maré would agree to.
The concept of ‘racial’ identity is particularly problematic and strange in a context where Dalal is quoted with approval. The essence of much of Dalal’s work has been to challenge the whole idea of ‘race’, arguing that it is a social construct invented to rationalize historical systems of inequality and oppression. This idea of ‘racial identity’ seems to echo the problem Sartre addressed in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948) where he problematized a Jewish identity that was defined by anti-semitism. Is not ‘racial identity’ an identity defined by racism? The whole point of Black Power was to create a political identity based on a political purpose. The Black Panthers explicitly saw themselves as allied with working class and other ideologically radical groups. From that point of view, even the project of ‘cultural identity’ seems to be a retreat. But at least cultural identity allows for complex dialectics between and within cultures and allows for choice of allegiance and of praxis. We can indeed recognize, in the relationships between cultures, such dynamics as cultural imperialism, which psychoanalysis and group analysis can all too readily exemplify. ‘Racial identity’ by contrast seems extraordinarily narrow and excessively determined by the oppressor. Fanon’s much earlier description of the colonized subject offers far more scope. Which, in passing, raises a further question about the absence of Fanon (extensively discussed as central to Dalal’s book which Woodger quotes) in this whole formulation of individual identity and social process.
One of the centres involved in my 1970’s research project was just a few hundred metres from Goldsmiths University. It was a youth centre where, in those days, one could have an interesting discussion with young black people about why Malcolm X was more inspiring than Martin Luther King. Four years ago, I asked a black youth worker from South London if young people still talked about Malcolm X. He said he had not heard mention of him for over a decade. So a question arises about the level of political consciousness in the communities and within the Community and Youth Work courses too.
This brings us to the question as to where is Woodger himself, culturally, ideologically/politically, and ‘ethnically’ if one may use that term. He describes the facilitators of the group as ‘one black one white and male and female’. But we are not told if it is black male—white female or vice verse. We can guess he is the male. But he gives no indication as to whether he is black or white. Given the political significance of sexual pairings, the dynamics and fantasies/phantasies around a white man with a black woman are going to be significantly different from those around a white woman and a black man. In the best or worst psychoanalytic tradition, where the political and cultural identity and even the personal identity of the analyst seem to drift out of the picture to be replaced by a mixture of fly-on-the-wall observer and benign doctor healing the patient, the ‘facilitators’ too seem to facilitate but not participate. We may also ask what it means that the story of the group is told by the male facilitator? In Freire, the title of ‘educator/student’ is used to emphasize that the ‘teacher’ remains always a student too learning through the dialogue. The complementary title is student/educator, emphasizing that the student also educates the ‘teacher’. Yet there is little sense of the facilitators’ learning and personal identity development (their conscientization) in the reported dialogue. The observation about the ‘excellent national reputation’ of this particular Goldsmiths course and the concern to tell us about its ranking in some national league table, further suggest a worrying identification with a rather debatable set of hegemonic values. Who is supposed to be impressed by these claims?
I wish David Woodger, his co-facilitator and his students well with their work together. Despite all my concerns I view it as an adventurous and inspiring enterprise and a fine example of what can be achieved through large group dialogue. It also provides a basis for a continuing debate about racism, oppression, identity and group analysis, which I am glad for us to be having in our journal.