Commentary

Not a Minority? You Need Not Apply

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • March 4, 2024

The “Coloring Psychoanalysts” online periodical wants your contributions—but only if you are a member of the “BIPOC” community (black, indigenous, or person of color).

Coloring Psychoanalysts describes itself as an online community periodical that “seek[s] to dismantle the ways in which psychoanalytic theory has both ignored and pathologized BIPOC people, justified and reinforced systemic oppression, and affects our practice and our communities today.”

The organization’s “About” page contains a defense of limiting “white” participants, asserting the BIPOC-only periodical is a way to “divest BIPOC time, emotional labor, and intellectual contribution from spaces that too often diminish and devalue us.” In arriving at this conclusion, Coloring Psychologists cites a 2018 article entitled “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People”. Indeed, the organization makes it clear they are interested in seeing “psychoanalysis shift away from a White, colonial center.”

Figure 1. From the “About” page of Coloring Psychoanalysis.

Coloring Psychologists wants submissions, not just from writers, but from “poets, artists, dancers, musicians, and other creators” too. But if you are white, don’t bother clicking on the application form, which requires you to affirm that “I self-identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and understand that the intention of this space is to foster psychoanalytically-oriented dialogue by and for BIPOC.”

Figure 2. Required response on the Coloring Psychoanalysis interest form.

Notably, the organization relies on self-identification of race to uphold its discriminatory practices. How Coloring Psychologists deals with inappropriate cases of self-identification is unclear, but is a built-in flaw to virtually all of these types of racial screenings.

And if you are white, the organization’s response is very clear: go elsewhere. Or, as they so lovingly put it, “seek alternative spaces” for submissions. Even supposed “allies” to the BIPOC community are not welcome.

As Do No Harm has previously reported, not only are the consequences of these practices discriminatory, but they are entirely ineffective. The implied notion that psychologists should align with their patients on the basis of race rather than merit has been a consistently disproved practice. There is absolutely no evidence that having a black psychologist for a black patient—or a white psychologist for a white patient—leads to improved medical outcomes. Yet, that does not stop woke organizations from continuing to push for racial concordance in order to undermine our existing medical system.

However, in perhaps an encouraging sign of the organization’s potentially waning influence, they still have their submission page open for a project whose deadline expired more than four months ago. Perhaps limiting submissions to only self-identified BIPOC individuals has not panned out the way the organization had hoped.

Coloring Psychoanalysts was founded by clinical psychologist Meiyang Liu Kadaba, who claims to live “on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatyush Ohlone Peoples…who were the original inhabitants of the area that includes San Francisco, CA.” That’s a very long—and very woke—way of saying she lives in San Francisco.

Frighteningly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Kadaba has been an adjunct faculty member at the Wright Institute, a graduate school of psychology located in Berkeley, CA. She also worked in Wright’s DEI office. In other words, she is passing her politicized worldview of medicine onto the next generation of psychologists, indoctrinating them with the same toxic worldview.

However, Coloring Psychoanalysts is hardly the only entity in the medical arena to be engaging in these types of practices. From internships at medical non-profits, to admissions at major medical programs, to scholarships sponsored by private entities, Do No Harm has documented countless cases of discriminatory operations. It appears the use of blatantly racist criteria to screen-out unwanted racial groups is quickly becoming the norm. This bears a frightening resemblance to the pre-Civil Rights era’s “separate, but equal” practices used to justify the same types of discriminatory actions against black Americans.

In practical terms, locking out non-BIPOC members limits the dialogue in a critical medical field, stifles the free exchange of ideas, and places race on a pedestal above all-else. However, it is very likely that these outcomes reflect the goals of Coloring Psychoanalysts and similar organizations, rather than unintended consequences.

Whether it is Coloring Psychoanalysts or another entity, these types of racial screenings have no place in any field of modern medicine. They are relics of a discriminatory system that belong to the ash heap of history. Instead, they are unfortunately gaining traction among non-profits, colleges and universities, and private sector organizations. The sooner these inherently racist practices are repudiated and abandoned, the better.