Normal rules do not apply
‘A challenged world is an alert world. And from challenge comes change’
(IWD 2021)
The covid-19 pandemic engulfed the world in a tsunami of mass trauma. This has exposed pre-existing racism and inequality across the globe. Like covid-19, racism is lethal. Its threat is very dangerous and real.
In 2019/2020, I was on the foundation course with the Institute of Group Analysis, London. This was the 55th year of the introductory course and students were told that its format had never been changed. Then, the unimaginable happened. The covid-19 pandemic evicted us from the mother soil and into cyber space. Around the same time, student members of GASi (Group Analytic Society International) were invited to join in a series of online large groups; established in response to the pandemic. I attended all of these online groups; as well as various other events hosted by GASi throughout the year and I am a committed member of the leaderless ALG (Alternative Large Group), hosted by the Hank Nunn Institute in India. In this article, I will share my thoughts and feelings about these experiences; under the headings:
Whiteness and Structural Racism in GASi’s 2020, Online Large Groups;
Misogyny in the Online Large Group;
The Chat Function in Online Large Groups.
Keywords: online large groups, whiteness, structural racism, misogyny, conservatism.
Whiteness and Structural Racism in GASi’s 2020, Online Large Groups
GASi ran their online large group from Sunday, 5th April to 28th June 2020. Open to all GASi members including students and associates, it was accessed from different locations around the world. There was over 100 members in each group. Like the pandemic, GASi’s online large group felt surreal and overwhelming. Together, we were experiencing prolonged periods of uncertainty, powerlessness and unprecedented levels of disturbance. Processing the impact of mass death and loss of liberty, I could feel the crisis, fear and despair. It felt like madness, or as Patrick De Maré, one of the founding members of the Institute of Group Analysis might have said, “mindlessness”. (De Maré, 1972, p. 57). In the early weeks, I believed that I had been invited in error. My presence felt out of place; like it didn’t belong.
As I began to thaw; I could see the hierarchy. The privilege. The age profile. Inequality was visible in plain sight. I wondered why there were so many doctors and psychiatrists? This isn’t balanced, I thought. Where were the other voices of people who had been on the receiving end of psychiatry? Where were the younger adults? Where were all of the other mothers like me, with babies? Everyone spoke English. So, I had to remind myself that this was an international group. What about the people who did not have access to the internet? Was there outreach for them? I suspected not. “The empty chairs are harder to see in an online group, but they are striking.” (Fegan, 2021) It felt disturbing.
Whiteness stared back at me on the screen. I could hear it. It sounded loud, Eurocentric and mono-tone. Whiteness was the authority. Moving freely around the group on a wavelength, whiteness influenced communication, behaviour norms and power dynamics. I was listening for cultural diversity and grassroots voices. The whiteness was dominant. I recognised myself as a privileged, white woman. As a newcomer to group analysis, it felt intimidating to speak and dangerous to be different. I was concerned for the people of colour in these groups.
Whiteness is about more than skin colour. Examining how “the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America”, historian, Noel Ignatiev explained that, while white skinned Irish people were eligible to take up their place as white members of the human race, their white skin “did not guarantee their admission; they had to earn it” and “in becoming white the Irish ceased to be Green.” (Ignatiev 1995) Social justice advocate Max Macias, describes whiteness as “the concept that European people and culture are more important than anything or anyone else”. (Macias 2016) Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge says whiteness is “a set of ideas and practices about race that has emerged from a bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery.” (Gopal 2020)
“I can’t breathe, Sir”
(Floyd, 2020)
George Floyd was murdered on the 25th May 2020. The Guardian reported that “transcripts of the minutes leading up to George Floyd’s death revealed that he told officers “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times, only to have his plea dismissed by Derek Chauvin, the white officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck, who said: “It takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.”” (Singh, 2020)
There was an outpouring of white fragility in GASi’s online large groups, following George Floyd’s murder. White fragility a term coined by American author and facilitator in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies, Robin DiAngelo as “a state in which even the minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.” (DiAngelo 2011, p.57) In the group, white fragility was my confusion, my identification and my silence. There was chaos. It was as though the group was screaming. People were talking over one another. It was like they were running out of space and losing control. It felt hostile, defensive and full of denial. One group member stated that they ‘did not see colour’ and another said ‘racism did not exist in their country’. Reni Eddo-Lodge describes colour-blindness as “a childish, stunted analysis of racism”; “discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad, without any accounting for the ways in which structural power manifests in these exchanges”. (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. 82) `GASi’s online large group was full of shame and guilt. In her book on ‘Why I’m Not Talking To White People About Race’, Reni Eddo-Lodge writes about how, denouncing the sin of racism, “shame and self-deprecation” …” keep non-oppressed groups in their place, and subvert the social pyramid of oppression, with oppressed groups at the top.” (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. 99).
Then, I began to see a pattern of erasure in the large group. When one group member highlighted the forced movement of people in South Africa, echoing the country’s history of apartheid and (in a different week) another group member described orphaned children arriving on doorsteps in India, I witnessed how the group directed the flow of the conversation and eradicated these subjects from existence. In his paper on ‘Psychodynamic intersectionality and the positionality of the group analyst’, Stuart Stevenson explains that, “‘Cultural Erasure’ is how a dominant group oppresses by negating, suppressing and removing the evidence of trauma of what they consider to be a subordinate group of people… in order to maintain a positive self-image and not to be persecuted with intolerable depressive anxiety, shame and guilt.” (Stevenson 2020) Prioritising comfort over reality, erasure in the online large group was oppressive and silencing. Priyamvada Gopal thinks that it is easier to shut out or down, rather than “confronting the idea of whiteness” and “acknowledging ugly truths, both historical and contemporary”. (Gopal, 2020)
This is how structural racism works. Reni Eddo-Lodge explains, that “the journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings” and even if the person of colours voice can be heard, it is not really being listened to. She says, “its like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further.” (Eddo-Lodge, 2017, p. x) Whiteness uses tactics like white fragility and erasure to keep the system as it is; protecting those who benefit from structural racism. There was a lot of denial about the extent of racism in these groups.
Misogyny in the Online Large Group
GASi held a Seasonal Gathering on the 13th March 2021. At this time in the United Kingdom, Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old, white woman had gone missing on her route home. She was publicly victim shamed on social media for walking home alone, before human remains were found and using dental records, Sarah’s brutal murder was formally announced. Women living in the area where Sarah had been abducted were advised ‘not to go out alone’. In response, Baroness Jones suggested in the House of Lords that, men should have a 6pm curfew. With her attempt to highlight discrimination overlooked, men were outraged and she was targeted with a barrage of misogynist tweets on social media. The alleged murderer, a police officer. In the aftermath of Sarah’s murder, a wave of missing black women and children came to the surface; all unreported in mainstream media. Like Blessing Olusegun, a 21-year-old business student, missing for a week before her body was found dead on a beach. Her death was reported as ‘unexplainable’ by police. On the day of GASi’s Seasonal Gathering, people also gathered in a large park for Sarah’s vigil. This ended in violent scenes of police using disproportionate physical force towards women.
‘Violence against women’ was named at the start of GASi’s event. This was an international opportunity to connect, listen and think about gender related issues in other countries. There was an online large group as part of this event. I noted that 59 people in attendance. The majority of the group were female. Both conductors were female. To begin, this large groups attention was diverted in a conversation related to makeup. My thoughts related to violence felt like they did not belong. Feeling isolated, I sent one group message in the chat, in an attempt to engage in a different way. Immediately, one of the female convenor’s chose that exact moment to discouraged the group from using the chat. I felt attacked and silenced.
In his book entitled, ‘CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami’, Farhad Dalal describes how “hyper-rationality uses a distorted and corrupt version of science to close down thinking. Rule-following comes to triumph over questioning and thinking.” (Dalal, 2019, p3) In the group, an authoritative figure introduced the idea of a rule. This influenced my actions and tampered with my ability to think. My creativity and flow of thought had been stolen. Setting the tone of the day, colonial whiteness had been restored.
It felt like I had been exposed in the chat by a gang. Most of this gang were silent bystanders. It felt persecutory. This gang killed off the possibility of meaningful dialogue about violence against women and buried the subject in the chat. Driven by destructive force and death instinct, this gang craved power. I imagine them as anti-life and anti-development, Freud proposed that “the goal of all life is death”; suggesting people often re-enact traumatic experiences. (Freud 1920) With (mostly white) women shooting up through the ranks, the oppressed have become the oppressors. Protecting traditional group analytic values, the gang were opposed to play and freedom of expression in this new, online medium. To me, this was an example of internalised patriarchy and misogyny in action. Something, I hope to think more about in the upcoming 44th Annual Foulkes Lecture, by group analyst Sue Einhorn.
The atmosphere at this online gathering went on to be verbally described as pleasant. I witnessed the gang drift into a psychic retreat; described by psychoanalyst John Steiner as a place “of relative peace and protection from strain when meaningful contact is experienced as threatening”. (Steiner, 1993, p.1) This was an act of forced and false toxic positivity. (David 2021) Gaslighting inflicted by women to women, it generated a false consciousness in the group. This group wasn’t pleasant. It was misogynistic.
The Chat Function in Online Large Groups
In GASi’s various online large groups, there is an ongoing debate about whether chat should be used. There is a power struggle in this debate and the need to control is clear. In online large groups, I cannot always follow the chat, but at no point have I thought that the chat should be stopped. As part of my MA art psychotherapy course at Goldsmiths University, London, I attended in-person, art therapy large groups, across three years. I know that it is not possible to see and hear everything in these spaces. I certainly cannot control everything that happens in a large group.
In GASi’s online large groups in 2020, I could barely see the chat. It was difficult to concentrate. The words jumped around and I could not piece sentences together. Impacted by the pandemic and awaking to whiteness and the sheer magnitude of racism, my body felt completely out of sync. Looking at the chat perpetuated my head-lessness. I have been formally diagnosed with dyslexia multiple times, but I know this inability to read the chat was happening because of anxiety. This was not the chat’s fault. I could not blame the people using the chat. I had to sit with the anxiety. I owned it and the discomfort passed.
Now a year on, I use the chat in the weekly Alternative Large Group. This leaderless, online large group is open to both GASi and non-GASi members. Here, I feel freedom of movement and I can think for myself about whether to use the chat or not. When I feel the desire to use the chat, my ‘mind and body’ are present in the struggle and flow of communicating with others in the group; something Dr Van der Kolk, a specialist in the field of post-traumatic stress suggests is essential in order to be able to think with clarity. (Van der Kolk, 2020). Moving between spaces, I am able to notice my anxiety in relation to what is happening. This helps me to feel engaged and stay connected with the group.
On the 18th March 2021, I attended the ‘Intergenerational, Co-Leadership and Mutual Accountability’ event, held by the UN Women. We could only see the speakers, so the chat was the primary mode of group communication. Participants were actively encouraged to share, connect and collaborate with each other via the chat inside the group and social media outside the group. This felt accessible, inclusive and far reaching. It is current. Sadly, GASi’s online large groups have not felt like this. To me, they are authoritarian. Why would group members attack the chat and persecute those who use it? I believe this is political and underpinned by conservatism. I see it as an attempt to arrest the development of this new online medium and prohibit growth and change. Why else would people impose rules when normal rules do not apply?
It may not sound like it, but I am optimistic. My capacity is growing because of online large groups. New ways of thinking ARE possible. The true potential of these spaces is yet to be realised. It is exciting. Like Scottish rapper, Darren Mc Garvey, I believe that meaningful dialogue requires an “enhanced component of emotional literacy… It’s about engaging in a serious and robust way.” (Poverty Safari, p.167-169) Psychoanalyst Michael O’ Loughlin, suggests a “socio historical critical way of working” is required. (O’Loughlin 2020). Online large groups can create a potential space for us to do this. These groups give me hope and I look forward to seeing more of you at the weekly, Alternative Large Group on Sundays.
References
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Aisling Fegan
23rd March 2021
I am a white Irish female, mother, artist and art psychotherapist based in the United Kingdom; with a lived experience of recovery owed to a therapeutic community. https://accessarttherapy.co.uk/
accessarttherapy@gmail.com