Hypatia, Inc.

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups
by Cynthia Burack
Review by: Patricia Hill Collins
Source: Hypatia, Vol. 20, No. 4, Analytic Feminism (Autumn, 2005), pp. 227-230
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810900
Accessed: 18-09-2016 06:47 UTC

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 Book Reviews 227

The final chapter of Campbell's book takes to task a section near the end of
my 1995 Rewriting the Soul. Campbell is right to criticize me for writing as if cer-
tain women's memories were entirely a matter of personal recollection, and were
not embedded in the communal experience of women who have been abused in
so many different ways both in our time and times past. That is, I appear to treat
memories as if they were nonrelational. I am glad of the correction. I continue
to find it useful, however, to distinguish two phenomena. On the one hand,
some uses of memory may be almost as old as the human race, for maintaining
the self-identity of a group through oral history that often features terrible suf-
fering. (Not just Jews and the destruction of the Temple and onward, but also,
say, Armenians abroad who identify in terms of the Armenian massacre around
1917.) On the other hand, new uses have come into being relatively recently and
are part of the way in which positivist sciences of memory replace the soul as a
ground for personal identity by the person's memories. The politics of women's
memory should, I urge, be understood against that larger backdrop.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups.

CYNTHIA BURACK. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Patricia Hill Collins

In Healing Identities, Cynthia Burack brings together the tools of psychoanaly-

sis and political theory with the theoretical work of modern Black feminism
in order to shed light on the workings of groups. The six chapters in Healing
Identities render difficult concepts in all three discourses accessible to readers
who may be unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, political theory, or Black feminist
thought. Burack believes that all three theoretical traditions have important
things to say about developing the kinds of groups that will be adequate to
social justice projects.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore the connections between psychoanalysis and
political theory, in order to introduce the repressive nature of groups. They also
survey how race and racism appear in both discourses. Chapter 3, titled "Repara-
tive Group Leadership" is in many ways the heart of Healing Identities. Burack
introduces Black feminist thought, which she describes as both an academic
and identity group discourse that is produced by Black women scholars for a
primary audience of Black women. Burack perceives Black feminist scholars so
defined as comparable to the leaders of other identity group discourses, and sees
them as group leaders. Burack uses the term "reparative," which she suggests
has a positive and healthy meaning within Black feminist thought. Burack

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228 Hypatia

understands reparative groups to be those that "collectively work through issues

that routinely plague groups without giving in to the worst, most destructive
and unfortunately most common group possibilities" (59). When applied to
groups, the term "reparation" suggests a group's ability to mend harms done or
desired, possible or imagined to other groups. With psychoanalytic theory and
Black feminist thought so defined, Burack proceeds to examine the differences
between group psychoanalytic expectations associated with group leadership
and the actual reparative group leadership of Black feminist thought.
Using Black feminist thought as a touchstone for analysis, chapters 4 and 5,
titled "Conflict and Authenticity" and "Bonding and Solidarity," respectively,
take up different dimensions of Burack's model of repressive and reparative
leadership. Chapter 6, "Coalitions and Reparative Politics," explores the
implications for mainstream scholarship of Black feminist thought's reparative
leadership: "Black feminist theorizing about groups violates pessimistic expec-
tations about group life that are widely held by social and political theorists.
The reparativeness of Black feminist thought is most plainly revealed precisely
by the dimension that is so often celebrated by scholars and commentators of
Black feminism: coalition-building and coalition politics" (159).
Despite its good intentions, Healing Identities raised two sets questions for
me. For one, there is the question of how Burack's intended audience affects
the overall organization and arguments of this volume. Healing Identities does
not seem designed for African American readers. Instead, this book appears
to be written to appeal to White feminist readers who are engaged in debates
about the merits of interpretive uses of psychoanalytic theory and of political
theory for Western feminist projects, especially those that might build feminist
coalitions. As the author points out, "black feminist thought... evokes emotion
in many of its readers. I am convinced that, like much passion in political life,
this emotion is defensive-an attempt to fend off guilt, self-examination, and
genuine confrontation with otherness" (5). Just who exactly are the readers who
would engage Black feminist thought as a site of otherness? Certainly not Black
women. In a similar vein, the author's goal to "refine a set of theoretical uses
of psychoanalysis for feminists and other interested in the social production of
groups" (4) seems undermined by her parallel claim that "black feminists are
more likely to bypass than to debate psychoanalytic explanations" (8). If this is
the case, one might wonder why Black women who are so involved in building
reparative groups would reject psychoanalytic frameworks.
Some Black women readers might see the treatment of healing and repara-
tions in Healing Identities as violating the very spirit of Black feminist thought.
Burack seems unaware of how the thesis of the damaged Black psyche renders
her focus on healing suspicious. Healing Identities walks headlong into this his-
torical minefield, blissfully unaware that many of the so-called Black feminist
leaders of Burack's version of Black feminism may reject psychoanalysis and a

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 Book Reviews 229

good amount of established social science precisely because mainstream schol-

arship has for so long uncritically accepted this assessment of Black damage.
What exactly are these Black feminists healing from or trying to heal? No
doubt, there are problems with the relations within Black communities that
need to be repaired-no one disputes that. But to elevate the quest for healing
to a high art more closely resembles the perception that Whites have of Blacks
that racism and sexism must be so destructive that its targets are irreparably
damaged by it. In a similar fashion, it seems unfortunate that Healing Identities
places the concept of reparations solely within the psychoanalytic and small-
group traditions considered here, and neglects any mention of longstanding
debates about reparations within African American political thought. For
African Americans, debates about reparations pivot on compensating Black
Americans for the economic damage done by slavery, not on modeling behaviors
that might help others heal.
The intended audience matters in yet another way. For a readership of Black
women, one striking dimension of Burack's arguments might be how little
they draw upon the broad range of texts that are the essence of Black femi-
nist thought. On a fundamental level, Healing Identities violates the populist
sensibilities of Black feminism. Black feminist thought is not confined to the
writings of a few intellectual leaders. While I am flattered to be included in
Burack's list of handpicked Black women luminaries, confining Black feminist
thought to this list renders a thin reading of the richness of the very discourse
that she wished to analyze. By reading more broadly within Black women's
literature, especially the work of contemporary Black feminists who do not
use academic venues, Burack might have countered the tendency to believe
everything that canonized Black feminists say, as if these works tell the whole
story. In some ways, Black feminism itself has moved on-the academic canon
so meticulously analyzed here is one that now exists more for college students
and faculty members than for the majority of Black women. Given this treat-
ment of Black feminism, one might ask why Black feminist was the discourse
selected for this type of analysis. Why not focus on lesbian identity politics,
Chicana identity politics, and other distinctive feminist discourses where issues
of damage, healing, and reparation are less value laden?
Healing Identities raises another set of questions for me concerning the
nature of groups. It is no secret that feminist politics has had great difficulty
with this issue of groups, in particular, the kinds of so-called identity politics
that have seemingly fragmented the women's movement. Hence, the attention
to groups is an important anchor of this project. Yet I found the discussion of
reparative group identity curious, especially as applied to Black feminism. If the
issue is to build solidarity among Black women by understanding the reparative
nature of working across differences of class, age, sexuality, region, citizenship,
appearance, and the like, then the model of reparative group processes seems

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230 Hypatia

apt. But here Burack might be deploying her own use of projection as a core
psychoanalytic concept to generate her ideal-typical regressive and reparative
framework. I was left wondering whether this entire approach projects onto
Black women as a group the types of reparative issues with which Western
White feminism continues to struggle. Stated differently, when it comes to
race, class, and gender within American society, is this yet another version of
the longstanding tendency within Western societies, to project onto Blacks and
similar groups who are stigmatized as societal "others" the characteristics, issues,
and anxieties with which dominant groups grapple? The issue that has intrigued
many Western White feminists, namely, the question of whether Black women
and White women can get along to build a multiracial, multicultural sisterhood,
seems to lurk on the margins of this quest for healing identities and reparative
group processes. Exactly who is being healed here, and for what purpose?
Overall, it is refreshing to see Black feminism meticulously analyzed as a
theoretical discourse and not simply exploited as a set of experiences that can
be inserted into existing models to make up for past exclusions. Healing Identities
does not simply "add Black women and stir" into the stew of psychoanalytical
and political theories of groups. Rather, to Burack's credit, the author seriously
engages the issues of all three discourses. Despite these strengths, Healing Identi-
ties is not a book about Black feminist thought, but rather one that uses this
discourse to examine questions that in many ways are quite removed from it.

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