GASi, COVID19 and Black Lives Matter

Dear GASi Member,

I am writing to all members because the state in which we find ourselves, calls on us for new thinking. I am writing personally, not to articulate a position for GASi as a whole.  I was prompted to write, after receiving a letter from the chairperson of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, a woman of colour, in which she wrote of her response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I feel called upon to explore my own response, and history of responses, to the experiences of racism in our world. Within our Society, we carry the same blindnesses, incoherence, and differences over racism and inequality, which characterise the societies in which we live.  We are permeated to our core by that which we seek to make sense of.

We are challenged to respond to the unveiling of differences and the conflicts arising from them, which is taking place, globally.  It is an opportunity to recognise the limitations of our existing practices and to think, together, about our readiness and ability to develop new ones.

Internationally, we face dual crises – the COVID19 epidemic and emerging awareness of racism as a pervasive characteristic of social relations, globally.  In ways that are still being grasped, these two processes are inseparably linked.

In response to the first, we found ourselves seemingly united in shared vulnerability, but isolated in states of locked-down dependency on our different authorities.  In the UK, at least, those authorities resorted to the language of national identity and wartime spirit, to involve us in a project of collective defence.  From the outset, one key difference was acknowledged, between ‘carers’ and the rest.  Carers were celebrated and showered with gratitude, but also materially neglected and abandoned, to another form of isolation.  Moreover, there was a gradual, growing, perception that the task of caring and exposure to risk was disproportionately borne by Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups.

Nothing new in that, but the rhetoric of ‘all being in the same boat’ brought the guilty awareness of entrenched inequality more sharply into consciousness.

This was the context for the eruption of feeling that has taken place, in response to the murder of George Floyd. Many young people, who had been called on to protect their elders by remaining in the private sphere, have combined in bursting out of lock-down, to protest.  Their demonstrations seem to me to be a declaration that, after months during which it has been almost impossible to form pictures of the future, they will not accept a return to an intolerable past.

In the midst of these crises, our Sunday online group, difficult at times, has been a place where we can talk about our differences, which even extend to our interpretations of Group Analysis itself.  Our ability to pursue that process further is vital, for ourselves as a society and to our sense of what we are able to offer others.

David Glyn
GASi President
dearjee@gmail.com