“All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” — Zora Neale Hurston

Black celebrity is not evidence of Black power. It is evidence of how power manages dissent. What is presented as progress is often a managed spectacle, where a small number of Black individuals are elevated to obscure the conditions of the many. Visibility replaces transformation. Representation replaces accountability. This is not advancement. It is management.

Plantation politics does not disappear. It reorganizes. Plantation politics refers to a modern system of domination that mirrors the logic of the colonial plantation. In this system, Black people are strategically positioned to control, discipline, and silence other Black people on behalf of the white power structure (Cooper, 2024). Rewards, visibility, and institutional access are granted to those who align with dominant interests, while dissent is redirected, neutralized, or absorbed. In the 21st century, one of its most effective instruments is celebrity. In this context, celebrity functions as the cultural arm of plantation politics, shaping perception, regulating discourse, and narrowing how inequality is understood.

The Decadent Veil

The decadent veil describes how Black celebrity obscures the material reality of Black life. Moore (2014) defines the decadent veil as a masking process through which the visibility of wealthy Black celebrities distorts perceptions of Black economic conditions. A small number of highly visible individuals are positioned as evidence of collective progress, while structural inequality remains intact. This is not accidental. It is engineered. Media platforms circulate images of wealth through sports contracts, entertainment deals, and corporate partnerships. These images do not simply entertain. They reorganize perception. They create the impression that Black Americans are economically thriving despite persistent disparities in wealth, income, and ownership. The exceptional is made to represent the general, obscuring the conditions that make such exceptionality rare.

Celebrity, Activists, and the Managerial Class

Under plantation politics, celebrities, activists, and political figures function as intermediaries. They occupy positions within a managerial class that translates Black suffering into forms that are legible and acceptable to dominant institutions (Cooper, 2024).

As outlined in Plantation Politics – “Activists,” contemporary Black activism increasingly derives legitimacy from institutional recognition rather than community accountability. Visibility, funding, and access replace mass-based political organization.

Within this structure, suffering becomes currency, visibility becomes legitimacy, and legitimacy becomes access. What disappears is accountability. Celebrities are routinely positioned as spokespersons for the Black community regardless of their material distance from it. Structural problems are reframed as individual challenges. Systemic inequality is recoded as a matter of mindset, discipline, effort, entrepreneurship, or personal responsibility. These are not neutral messages. They are neoliberal and conservative myths laundered through celebrity visibility. This is not representation. It is management of perception and dissent.

The Political Economy of Illusion

The visibility of Black celebrity distorts the structure of economic power. Piketty (2014) shows that a large share of top incomes is concentrated among corporate executives and managerial elites, while athletes, entertainers, and artists represent only a small fraction of this class. This matters because Black celebrity wealth is made hypervisible, while the broader corporate class that controls ownership, capital, and institutional power remains comparatively invisible. The result is a racial illusion: Black wealth appears overrepresented in culture while remaining marginal in actual ownership and control. Black individuals generate enormous value in sports and entertainment, but ownership remains elsewhere. Professional sports franchises, media companies, and corporate institutions are overwhelmingly controlled by white elites. Celebrity does not redistribute power. It masks its concentration while rendering it less visible.

Psychological Conditioning and Aspirational Capture

The decadent veil reshapes how reality is perceived and how aspiration is structured. Young Black men are socialized to view sports and entertainment as primary routes out of poverty. These pathways are statistically rare but culturally normalized through constant exposure. At the same time, the saturation of exceptional success produces a false sense of collective advancement. It desensitizes audiences to widespread Black poverty, reduces attention to structural causes, and increases emphasis on individual achievement. This is not inspiration. It is aspirational capture. It redirects energy away from structural transformation and toward improbable individual outcomes.

Plantation Politics in the 21st Century

Plantation politics operates through incorporation. Black elites, celebrities, activists, politicians, academics, and professionals are integrated into dominant systems where they function as buffers between power and the Black masses. They absorb pressure, redirect dissent, and stabilize the structure (Cooper, 2024). Social dominance theory describes this as out-group favoritism, a process in which subordinated groups help maintain hierarchical systems that disadvantage them (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Within plantation politics, this alignment is incentivized and rewarded.

Conclusion

The function of Black celebrity is not visibility. It is distortion. It creates the illusion of progress while masking structural inequality. It elevates individuals while containing populations. It transforms systemic problems into personal narratives. The decadent veil ensures that Black deprivation remains politically invisible even as it is materially pervasive. Black celebrity, in this context, is not a reflection of liberation. It is a mechanism of control. Until that illusion is broken, plantation politics will continue to operate not in secrecy, but through spectacle, where visibility itself becomes a mechanism of control.

This essay is part of a broader series examining how plantation politics operates across domains, including activism, mental health, politics, culture, and knowledge production.

Be on the lookout for Plantation Politics in Academia: Knowledge, Legitimacy, and the Management of Truth.

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References

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Cooper, Y. (2026). Plantation politics – “Activists”: Elite capture, Black death, and the managerial class. Substack.

Moore, A. (2014, August 5). The decadent veil: Black America’s wealth illusion. HuffPost. http://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-decadent-veil-black-income-inequality_b_5646472

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.

If the Obama presidency demonstrated how representation and state power operate together within existing arrangements, Kamala Harris’s political trajectory reflects a more direct and domestically concentrated administration of that power through prosecutorial and legal institutions.

The Boundaries of Blackness

Kamala Harris is widely recognized as a Black political figure, yet her background complicates conventional understandings of Black identity in the United States. Her mother was Brahmin Indian, a background historically associated with elite caste status, and her father is Afro-Jamaican. While she is politically legible as Black, her lineage is not rooted in the historical experiences of U.S. chattel slavery and Jim Crow.

This distinction is not incidental. Plantation politics draws attention to how the boundaries of Blackness are constructed and mobilized, particularly in relation to Black elites. Harris’s rise reflects the flexibility of these boundaries, where identity is configured in ways that maintain political legitimacy while remaining compatible with institutional power (Cooper, 2024).

Rather than marking a rupture, this flexibility reinforces existing arrangements by expanding who can represent Blackness without altering the conditions that shape Black life.

This flexibility is not incidental. Racial categories are not fixed or internally uniform, but are historically produced through processes such as migration, slavery, and colonialism, resulting in shifting boundaries and differentiated meanings even among populations classified as the same race (Ifatunji, 2024).

A widely circulated image depicted Kamala Harris walking alongside the silhouette of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, drawn from Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting of Bridges being escorted to an all-white public school during the Civil Rights Movement.

Created by a white artist prior to the 2020 election and circulated widely afterward, the image visually collapses historical distance by positioning Harris within a lineage of struggle rooted in U.S. chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

While framed as a symbolic gesture of continuity, the composition suggests not merely accompaniment, but transformation, as if Harris represents an extension or maturation of that earlier moment. In doing so, the image does not simply depict history. It reorganizes it, allowing a contemporary political figure to be visually aligned to a people and with a specific historical experience to which she is not directly connected.

From Representation to Enforcement

Obama’s presidency was not limited to symbolic representation; it involved the administration of state power through surveillance, military expansion, and executive authority. Harris’s career is more directly rooted in the domestic administration of discipline through prosecutorial and legal institutions.

As a prosecutor and later as attorney general, she operated within carceral systems of surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration.

This trajectory is not incidental. Social dominance research suggests that institutional roles are not randomly occupied but are patterned in ways that reproduce group-based hierarchies, with legal and enforcement positions functioning as key sites where inequality is administered under the appearance of neutrality (Sidanius et al., 1991).

Her record reflects patterns of carceral governance, including policies that disproportionately impacted Black communities. Anti-truancy initiatives, for example, threatened legal consequences for parents, reinforcing punitive responses to structurally produced conditions.

As Murakawa (2014) demonstrates, liberal political actors have historically played a central role in constructing and expanding punitive state institutions, complicating narratives that position liberal governance as inherently less coercive.

This is not incidental participation. It is the administration of discipline. Plantation politics operates not only through mediation, but through enforcement embedded within institutional power, where coercive authority is exercised while appearing administratively neutral (Cooper, 2024).

Elite Alignment and Managed Legitimacy

Harris’s political support has been closely associated with professional Black networks, including organizations such as Alpha Kappa Alpha. This support reflects alignment with segments of the Black elite whose institutional positioning mediates between dominant power structures and broader Black populations.

This form of endorsement is not neutral. It produces legitimacy while narrowing the range of acceptable political positions. It reinforces a model of representation that is compatible with existing hierarchies rather than disruptive of them.

Accounts of Harris’s emergence as the Democratic nominee described the process as “open,” though in practice it reflected coordination among party leadership and elite actors rather than broad-based democratic selection.

Harris’s political trajectory reflects incorporation through elite networks already embedded within institutional power, rather than mass-based mobilization.

Misrecognition and the Targeting of Black Men

Harris’s policy outreach to Black men has been limited and misaligned with material conditions. Proposals centered on marijuana legalization or cryptocurrency signal political engagement that substitutes symbolic gestures for structural change.

At the same time, Black men continue to be framed as politically suspect or insufficiently supportive, despite voting patterns that demonstrate consistent alignment with the Democratic Party. This contradiction mirrors earlier dynamics in which Black men are disproportionately targeted with narratives of deficiency and irresponsibility.

Analyses of turnout scenarios indicated that the electoral outcome was not reducible to voter participation patterns, complicating narratives that attribute political failure to specific demographic groups.

This reflects a broader misrecognition of need. Structural inequalities are reframed as issues of individual behavior, and policy responses fail to address underlying material conditions, substituting narrative correction for material intervention.

This attributional pattern is not limited to campaign rhetoric. Emerging research on immigrant political attitudes, which finds that strong beliefs in American opportunity can produce cognitive dissonance when confronted with persistent racial inequality. Rather than revising those beliefs, individuals may resolve this tension by attributing inequality to the perceived deficiencies of Black Americans, reframing structural conditions as individual failure.

The Misdiagnosis of Structural Harm

Harris has expressed support for reparations in the form of investments in mental health and community resources. While such proposals acknowledge harm, they rest on an unsubstantiated premise that reframes structural inequality as a psychological condition.

In her own remarks, Harris declined to support reparations framed as direct material redress, instead emphasizing alternative forms of intervention.

These proposals misdiagnose the nature of the harm, erode the credibility of material grievances, and signal distance from the conditions they claim to address.

As a policy move, this shifts attention from collective material redress to therapeutic response.

State Alignment Beyond Domestic Governance

Harris’s support for U.S. policy in Gaza, despite mounting international criticism and a United Nations Special Rapporteur’s assessment that the violence may constitute genocide, reflects alignment with state power beyond domestic governance.

This alignment is not confined to domestic governance but extends to foreign policy, where the same patterns of institutional loyalty and adherence to state power remain operative.

Political incorporation into elite networks is accompanied by fidelity to those structures, even when they produce large-scale harm.

This is not a departure from plantation politics, but its extension. The same patterns of alignment, discipline, and legitimacy that structure domestic governance are evident in foreign policy.

Conclusion

Kamala Harris’s political trajectory does not depart from the dynamics observed in the Obama presidency. It extends them. Where representation can legitimize existing structures, institutional positioning enables their administration.

Plantation politics reveals that inclusion within systems of governance does not signal transformation. It marks the incorporation of actors who operate within and sustain those systems, even as they appear to represent those most affected by them (Cooper, 2024).

The question is not whether representation has been achieved, but what forms of power that representation ultimately serves, and whether it functions to transform existing arrangements or stabilize them.

This essay is part of a broader series examining how plantation politics operates across domains including activism, mental health, politics, culture, and knowledge production.

Subscribe now

Be on the lookout for Black Celebrity Is Not Power. It Is Plantation Politics.

References

Achen, C. H., & Bartels, L. M. (2016). Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government. Princeton University Press

Albanese, F. (2025, October 20). Gaza genocide: A collective crime (A/80/492). United Nations, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-report-gaza-genocide-a-collective-crime-20oct25

California study: Truancy data shows racial divide - CBS Sacramento. (2014, September 12). https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/california-study-truancy-data-shows-racial-divide

Cappelletti, J. (2024, October 29). Arab American voters struggle to back Harris over U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/arab-american-voters-struggle-to-back-harris-over-u-s-support-for-israels-war-in-gaza

Cohn, N. (2025, June 26). If everyone had voted, Harris still would have lost. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-election-trump-harris.html

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Hunt, A. (2020, November 11). Emory grad creates viral image of Kamala Harris and Ruby Bridges. Emory News Center. https://news.emory.edu/stories/2020/11/er_bria_goeller_harris_bridges/campus.html

Ifatunji, M. A. (2024). Toward an ethnoracial ontology for the study of race and ethnicity: The case of African Americans and black immigrants in the United States. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 10(3), 301-318.

Krumpenkin, M. (2024, September 27). The effect of beliefs about American opportunity on immigrants’ racial attitudes [Working paper]. https://masha-krupenkin.com/research

McDaniel, E. (2024, August 9). Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc., Harris’ sorority, forms a political action committee. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/09/g-s1-16307/alpha-kappa-alpha-kamala-harris-fundraising-committee

Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right: How liberals built prison America. Oxford University Press.

Shivaram, D. (2024, October 14). In outreach to Black men, Harris to vow to legalize weed, protect crypto. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/13/nx-s1-5151968/harris-weed-crypto

Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., Martin, M., & Stallworth, L. M. (1991). Consensual racism and career track: Some implications of social dominance theory. Political Psychology, 691-721.

theGrio. (2019, February 24). #AskKamala: Does Kamala Harris support reparations for Black Americans? [Video]. YouTube.

Walker, J. (2024, September 10). Pelosi claims Harris became Dem nominee through “open process.” KOMO. https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/pelosi-claims-harris-became-dem-nominee-through-open-process-nancy-pelosi-kamala-harris-donald-trump-joe-biden-2024-election-politics-democratic-party

Serious political analysis requires asking different questions: Who do political actors associate with? Who are they accountable to? Do their policies concentrate wealth and power or redistribute it? Do they materially improve conditions for the most vulnerable, or do they manage and contain discontent?

A hallmark of political unseriousness is the reliance on the logic of selecting the “lesser of two evils,” which substitutes constrained choice for structural analysis.

Both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris illustrate how the boundaries of Blackness can shift through identity politics. Obama, widely regarded as the first Black president, is revered by many Black Americans. Yet when examined through a structural lens, his political career reveals significant contradictions. Obama’s mother was white and his father Kenyan, and he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents.

This essay analyzes Obama through the framework of plantation politics, which conceptualizes how intermediary elites are incorporated into systems of governance to mediate, discipline, and contain subordinated populations while preserving existing power structures (Cooper, 2024).

Destruction of Black Wealth and the Consolidation of Elite Gains

Middle-class wealth declined substantially during the Obama presidency, with losses concentrated in housing, the primary source of wealth for many Black families. At the same time, the number of millionaires grew significantly and wealth remained highly concentrated among the top 1 percent (Cooper, 2024).

Obama had the ability to sharply ameliorate the foreclosure crisis and chose not to use the full power, money, legislative tools, and legal leverage available to him. His housing policies regarding foreclosures led to millions of families losing their homes, with Black families suffering particularly harsh losses. The homeownership rate fell significantly, erasing gains made during the housing boom and reaching its lowest level in decades. This was the greatest destruction of middle-class wealth since the Great Depression that disproportionately impacted Black wealth.

Subprime lending practices targeting Black communities intensified these disparities. Black borrowers were more likely to receive high-risk loans, even when qualified for conventional mortgages, leading to higher foreclosure rates and long-term wealth erosion.

The post-recession labor market also saw a measurable expansion in alternative work arrangements, including contract, temporary, and on-call labor, increasing from approximately 10.7 percent of the workforce in 2005 to as high as 15.8 percent by 2015. These shifts reflect a broader restructuring of labor toward flexibility and precarity (Katz & Krueger, 2019).

The Killing of Civilians

Obama dramatically expanded the use of drone warfare. He approved more drone strikes in his first year in office than President Bush carried out during his entire administration. During his presidency, he approved the use of 563 drone strikes that killed approximately 3,797 people. Many of the male victims were presumed to be terrorists due to being male.

This classification reflects a broader historical logic in which male identity is conflated with threat, rendering certain populations killable. The category of “military-age male” functions as a legitimating device that collapses the distinction between civilian and combatant while normalizing mass killing. Research on armed conflict has shown that civilian men are disproportionately targeted and are less likely to be recognized as noncombatants, often being treated as legitimate threats based on demographic classification. Similarly, genocide and conflict studies have documented the systematic targeting of “battle-age men,” where male identity itself becomes sufficient grounds for suspicion and elimination (Jones, 2000; Kreft & Agerberg, 2024).

These imperialistic ventures raise a fundamental question: by what logic are such practices not considered terrorism when they rely on the systematic targeting and killing of individuals based on presumed threat rather than demonstrated participation in violence?

A Harvard Political Review essay later argued that Obama’s drone warfare and related military practices warrant the label of “international war criminal,” reflecting violations of international norms.

Surveillance, Disinformation, and the Management of Perception

The partnership between government and internet companies began to form during the Bush administration but significantly coalesced during the Obama administration. This alliance also includes journalists, academia, foundations, and philanthropists.

Siegel (2023) describes the emergence of a “counter-disinformation complex,” an alignment between government agencies, technology companies, media institutions, academia, and philanthropic organizations. While presented as an effort to identify misinformation, this system operates more broadly to produce, circulate, and manage information while shaping the boundaries of acceptable discourse through counterinsurgency tactics.

Anti-Black Misandry and the Discipline of Black Men

Obama frequently invoked figures such as “Cousin Pookie” and “Ray-Ray” in speeches directed at Black audiences. These figures function as shorthand for irresponsibility, disengagement, and moral failure.

Obama relied on these tropes for many years when addressing Black crowds as a tool of condemnation and control. When Obama campaigned for Kamala Harris, he falsely accused Black men of being sexists for their supposed lack of support for Harris. The media promoted this propaganda and, after nearly two decades of ire and attacks by Obama against Black males, he experienced a backlash that did not generate accountability but a quiet retreat from these anti-Black misandrist tropes and coercive political devices.

Black women and men are the primary voting bloc for the Democratic Party. Black men vote in significantly higher numbers for the Democratic Party than white men and women, Latino men and women, and Asian men and women, yet these groups are not targeted with lies and myths and chastised for their imaginary or real politics.

This asymmetry reflects an underlying assumption that Black men are uniquely deficient, politically suspect, or in need of correction. It normalizes a form of public reprimand that would be unacceptable if directed at other groups, echoing earlier modes of racial control in which surveillance, discipline, and correction were disproportionately directed at Black males (Cooper, 2024).

What recent data indicate is that Black voters are tired of the gamesmanship of the Democratic Party and the lack of transformative policy for Black people.

These rhetorical strategies operate as disciplinary narratives. They launder caricatures that justify dominance, abuse, and coercion, while providing a rationale for withholding transformative policy and redirecting critique toward myths of individual failure, where Black men serve as proxies for broader social problems (Cooper, 2024).

The Laundering of Hope

Obama’s political rhetoric frequently centered on hope as a transformative force. However, Warren (2015) argues that the politics of hope operates as a mechanism that recodes ongoing subjection as deferred possibility.

Rather than confronting structural conditions directly, hope functions as a substitute for material change. It transforms despair into anticipation and struggle into symbolic progress.

Within plantation politics, hope operates as a containment strategy. It channels dissatisfaction into continued participation in systems that do not fundamentally alter the conditions producing that dissatisfaction. In this way, hope becomes not a pathway to transformation, but a mechanism that sustains the existing order.

This produces a recursive political loop in which continued participation is interpreted as progress, even as underlying conditions remain unchanged.

The Boundaries of Blackness

According to accounts of his early life, Obama came to understand that fully identifying as Black was essential to his political trajectory. Obama’s “Black” parent did not descend from U.S. slavery, yet he is able to claim a Black identity that is politically legible within American racial discourse.

Plantation politics critiques the boundaries of Blackness in relation to Black elites, showing how elite incorporation can reshape and deploy Black identity in ways that remain aligned with existing power structures rather than disrupting them (Cooper, 2024).

Rodriguez (2011) describes this as the “Black presidential non-slave,” a symbolic formation that detaches Blackness from the historical experience of slavery while reinforcing the mythology of racial progress. Obama’s rise is symbolically positioned outside the historical legacy of slavery, creating the illusion that Blackness is no longer tied to subjugation. But this “exception” actually reinforces the underlying system by masking it.

Obama represents the mystical “Black excellence,” and his presidency provides an anesthetizing symbolism that insulates against confronting the structural limits placed on Black life.

Plantation Politics and the Illusion of Agency

Bobby Rush describes Obama as someone who emerged outside the established Black political infrastructure and who was especially legible to white liberals and elite networks.

Reed (1996) critiqued Obama three decades ago as a foundation-backed, neoliberal figure whose politics relied on the language of community and authenticity while avoiding structural transformation and democratic mass mobilization. His critique emphasized small-scale solutions, kitchen-table intimacy, and the elevation of process over program. Obama’s political trajectory reflects this pattern.

Gilens and Page (2014) demonstrate that economic elites and organized business interests exert substantial influence over U.S. policy, while average citizens have little or no independent influence.

Some right-wing conservatives and those that endorse conservative and authoritarian ideologies may attempt to distort this post as an endorsement of their positions. Plantation politics focuses on democratic liberalism precisely because liberal ideology is more effective at obscuring anti-Blackness than conservative or right-wing ideologies, which tend to operate in more overt and less ambiguous ways (Murakawa, 2014). The majority of Black people align with liberal and progressive politics, making it a more effective site of management, containment, and ideological control (Cooper, 2024).

Conclusion

Obama’s presidency is not simply a symbol of racial progress or Black excellence, but a case study in how representation can coexist with the preservation of structural inequality. The elevation of symbolic milestones does not dismantle underlying systems of domination; it can instead obscure them.

Plantation politics clarifies how inclusion, rhetoric, and limited forms of representation can operate as mechanisms of governance, managing dissent while maintaining existing hierarchies. What appears as progress may, in practice, reflect the reconfiguration rather than the disruption of power (Cooper, 2024).

This essay is part of a broader series examining how plantation politics operates across domains including activism, mental health, politics, culture, and knowledge production.

Be on the lookout for Plantation Politics – Politicians: A Case Study of Kamala Harris (Part II).

References

Achen, C. H., & Bartels, L. M. (2016). Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government. Princeton University Press

Black Voter Project. (2024). 2024 National BVP Study. https://blackvoterproject.com/2024-national-bvp-study

Cooper, R., & Bruenig, M. (2017). Foreclosed: Destruction of Black wealth during the Obama presidency. People’s Policy Project. www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Daniels, C. M. (2024, October 11). Obama faces backlash for comments toward Black men. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/race-politics/4929604-obama-backlash-black-men

Friedersdorf, C. (2012, May 29). Under Obama, men killed by drones are presumed to be terrorists. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-obama-men-killed-by-drones-are-presumed-to-be-terrorists/257749

Gilens, M., & Page, B. I. (2014). Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564–581.

Hosie, R. (2017, May 3). Barack Obama proposed to a different woman before Michelle. The Independent. https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/before-michelle-barack-obama-sheila-miyoshi-jager-engagement-chicago-us-president-david-j-garrow-a7714771.html

Interview Archive. (2024, July 25). Bobby Rush interview Obama in pursuit of a more perfect union [Video]. YouTube.

Jackson, D. (2014, October 20). Obama to backers: Get “Cousin Pookie” to vote. USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2014/10/20/obama-cousin-pookie-congressional-elections/17603991

Jones, A. (2000). Gendercide and genocide. Journal of Genocide Research, 2(2), 185-211.

Katz, L. F., & Krueger, A. B. (2019). The rise and nature of alternative work arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015. ILR review, 72(2), 382-416.

Kreft, A. K., & Agerberg, M. (2024). Imperfect victims? Civilian men, vulnerability, and policy preferences. American Political Science Review, 118(1), 274-290.

Murakawa, N. (2014). The first civil right: How liberals built prison America. Oxford University Press.

Reed, A. Jr. (1996, January 16). The Curse of Community. Village Voice.

Rodriguez, D. (2011). The Black presidential non-slave: Genocide and the present tense of racial slavery. In J. Go (Ed.), Rethinking Obama (Political power and social theory, Vol. 22, pp. 17–50). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Rushe, D. (2012, November 1). US has added 1.1m new millionaires under Obama, says study. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/01/us-new-millionaires-obama

Siegel, J. (2023, March 28). A guide to understanding the hoax of the century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation. Tablet. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

Tilove, J. (2008, January 31). “Pookie” keeps popping up in Obama’s speeches. Newhouse News Service. https://www.chron.com/life/article/Pookie-keeps-popping-up-in-Obama-s-speeches-1788973.php

Warren, C. L. (2015). Black nihilism and the politics of hope. CR: The New Centennial Review, 15(1), 215–248.

Williams, P. (2021, September 29). Barack Obama is a war criminal. Harvard Political Review. https://harvardpolitics.com/obama-war-criminal

What stands out immediately is the reviewer’s emphasis on a core argument of the book: racism is not an occasional stressor or background variable. It is a trauma producing condition that is chronic, cumulative, and structurally embedded in American life. This framing directly challenges dominant trauma models that continue to privilege discrete events while minimizing sustained exposure to racialized threat, exclusion, and surveillance.

Racism as a Trauma System

The review highlights how the book pushes beyond individual level explanations by naming the systems that generate psychological injury. Housing policy, policing, education, labor markets, and media representation are not treated as context, but as mechanisms through which trauma is produced and maintained. According to the reviewer, the book brings these realities into clear focus, allowing clinicians to better understand the lived psychological consequences of anti-Blackness rather than defaulting to pathologizing interpretations.

This matters because when structural harm is ignored, Black men are often misdiagnosed, misunderstood, or framed as resistant to care. The review underscores that the book offers clinicians language and conceptual tools to recognize how vigilance, mistrust, emotional withdrawal, and anger can be adaptive responses to chronic racial threat rather than evidence of individual dysfunction.

Integrating Theory and Lived Experience

Trauma Psychology News also draws attention to the book’s integration of multiple frameworks into a cohesive model of racial trauma. Rather than presenting disconnected theories, the text synthesizes models that account for historical trauma, intergenerational transmission, and ongoing exposure to violence and discrimination. The reviewer notes that this integrated approach allows readers to see how past and present harms interact, particularly for Black men whose lives are shaped by both inherited vulnerability and contemporary risk.

Importantly, the review describes the book as accessible without being reductive. Theoretical depth is paired with clinical relevance, making the material usable for practitioners while remaining grounded in empirical and historical scholarship.

A Litany of Recognition

One of the most striking observations in the review is the characterization of the book as reading like a litany. Page after page, experiences described in the text are likely to be recognized by Black readers and familiar to clinicians who work closely with Black men. This sense of recognition is not incidental. It reflects the reality that many of these harms have long been known but rarely centered within mainstream trauma psychology.

The reviewer suggests that this cumulative recognition has an effect. It pushes readers beyond denial or minimization and toward acknowledgment. In trauma work, acknowledgment is not symbolic. It is a prerequisite for ethical assessment, effective intervention, and meaningful change.

Implications Beyond the Therapy Room

While the book is written with clinicians in mind, Trauma Psychology News makes clear that its implications extend far beyond psychotherapy. The review points to its relevance for researchers, educators, policymakers, and institutions responsible for shaping mental health systems. Training models, diagnostic frameworks, and evidence based practices cannot remain neutral if neutrality continues to reproduce racial harm.

The reviewer emphasizes the importance of clinician self awareness and cultural accountability, noting that failure to interrogate dominant assumptions about masculinity, danger, and pathology often leads to clinical misrecognition of Black men’s distress.

Moving the Field Forward

The review ultimately positions Black Men and Racial Trauma as a text that advances trauma psychology rather than sitting at its margins. It challenges the field to confront what has been systematically excluded from dominant models and to expand its definitions of both trauma and recovery.

As Trauma Psychology News concludes, this is a book that will continue to be read, cited, and engaged by those seeking to deepen their understanding of racial trauma and to carry this work forward in research, clinical practice, and public health.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) took shape within this transformed landscape, where political legitimacy increasingly flows through institutional recognition rather than mass mobilization.

BLM emerged as a hashtag and quickly became the most visible Black political organization of the twenty-first century. From its inception, BLM framed itself as a Black feminist and Marxist organization, presenting this framework as an improvement on what it characterized as the internal failures of the Black Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. Unlike earlier movements, however, BLM rapidly accumulated extraordinary levels of philanthropic and nonprofit funding, with donations exceeding $90 million. For the first time in a contemporary Black protest movement of this scale, organizational leaders amassed personal wealth while claiming to represent collective suffering.

As BLM’s institutional stature grew, its public messaging increasingly relied on symbolic performance rather than structural confrontation. At the height of this shift, one prominent leader suggested that liberation from white supremacy could be achieved through dance, a moment widely interpreted as emblematic of spectacle displacing political strategy. More recently, a BLM founder appeared on a national presidential ticket, further underscoring the organization’s integration into elite political circuits rather than its opposition to them.

The pattern of professional absorption extends beyond fundraising into cultural production, as when one of BLM’s founders transitioned into a corporate entertainment deal, illustrating how movement leadership is incorporated into institutional power circuits rather than mobilized toward grassroots power.

Over time, BLM lost credibility among many Black communities, particularly among those most directly affected by police violence. Critics accused the organization of hijacking a movement that had gained momentum around the killings of Black people, especially Black males, and redirecting that energy toward institutional recognition, donor cultivation, and elite legitimacy.

Plantation Politics provides an analytic framework for understanding this shift. It interrogates the role of a Black managerial class positioned to contain, mediate, and pacify the grievances of the Black poor and working class (Cooper, 2024). Modern Black activism increasingly operates through this class position. Rather than challenging structural violence, managerial activists translate collective suffering into grant proposals, media narratives, and professional advancement.

This critique did not originate outside the movement. Families of those killed by police and community-based activists repeatedly accused BLM of extracting symbolic and material value from Black death while remaining detached from the risks borne by those on the ground. These critiques reveal a central mechanism of Plantation Politics: the conversion of racialized suffering into legitimacy, visibility, and institutional access without corresponding accountability to Black communities.

Tamir Rice’s mother, Samaria Rice, articulated this critique directly when she accused BLM of “hustling Black death,” condemning the organization for leveraging her son’s killing while offering little sustained support to affected families. Similarly, the late Ferguson activist Darren Seals accused BLM of hijacking the Ferguson uprising and profiting from Black death while remaining insulated from the material and physical risks faced by local organizers. These voices made clear that the problem was not merely organizational failure, but a structural arrangement in which Black suffering was translated upward into elite recognition and professional advancement.

The specific mechanism of containment within BLM involved the adoption of theories and ideologies that lacked wholesale applicability to the material conditions of Black people in the United States, yet carried institutional legitimacy. Chief among these was Marxism. Black scholars have critiqued Marxism’s limitations in accounting for racial domination for nearly a century. Yet contemporary activists, leftists, and nonprofit institutions frequently rely on Marxism as their primary analytic framework, engaging in class reductionism that collapses race into economic abstraction and obscures the specific realities of racialized violence.

Between 2000 and 2021, 7,005 Black Americans were killed by police. Ninety-one percent were Black males, eight percent were Black females, and fewer than one percent were Black transgender individuals (Cooper, 2024). A public health approach to violence emphasizes prioritizing populations that experience disproportionate harm. Yet BLM routinely invoked Black male death as symbolic capital while justifying its organizational focus on other populations through the language of intersectionality.

What Plantation Politics obscures through ideology and professional mediation is made visible in the distribution of police killings themselves.

Intersectionality, however, lacks empirical grounding as a model of threat perception. Human cognition does not process danger through additive identity matrices, but through rapid categorical threat appraisal based on perceived risk (Cooper, 2024). Despite this, intersectionality has become a disciplinary ideology across academic, professional, and nonprofit domains, often discouraging empirical scrutiny and silencing community-based critiques. Many local activists experienced this framework not as inclusive, but as divisive and misaligned with the realities of police violence.

The dynamics observed in BLM are not unprecedented. Allen (1969) documented how corporate elites and philanthropic foundations, including the Ford Foundation, intentionally co-opted the Black Power movement by aligning with segments of the Black bourgeoisie to contain radical political thought. Rojas (2010) later showed how the Ford Foundation played a central role in institutionalizing Black Studies by prioritizing academic legitimacy and integrationist frameworks while systematically discouraging Black nationalist and explicitly radical orientations.

BLM represents a contemporary iteration of Plantation Politics. It illustrates how corporate and philanthropic elites, in collaboration with Black managerial actors, can absorb and neutralize political movements by reframing resistance through professionalized ideologies and nonprofit governance. Within this arrangement, suffering becomes currency, and legitimacy is earned not through confrontation with power but through alignment with it.

BLM was not a radical organization. It did not challenge existing hierarchies, nor did it pose a substantive threat to state or corporate power. Instead, it functioned as an assimilationist formation that enhanced hierarchy while producing no demonstrable structural change. What remains is not liberation, but accumulation; not collective power, but managerial legitimacy secured through Black male death.

References

Allen, R. L. (1969). Black awakening in capitalist America. Doubleday.

Cooper, S. (2020, October 6). Is Warren Buffett the wallet behind Black Lives Matter? Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/warren-buffett-black-lives-matter

Cooper, S. P. (2024, October 22). BLM collected over $90 million in donations. Where did it go?

The Free Press

BLM Collected Over $90 Million in Donations. Where Did It Go?

Can you name the scrappy start-up that struck gold in 2020, earning its three female founders worldwide fame and $90 million in company revenue? Multimillion-dollar homes and a production deal with Warner Bros. soon followed, while friends and family were showered in…

Read more

2 years ago · 329 likes · 313 comments · Sean Patrick Cooper

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Marxism and the negro problem. The Crisis; v.40, n.5 (May 1933): 103-104, 118.

Olorunnipa, T., & Burns, A. (2024, April 10). Cornel West names Melina Abdullah as his vice presidential running mate. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/10/cornel-west-black-lives-matter-activist-melina-abdullah-vice-president-00151525

Perry, I. (2021, May 24). Stop hustling black death. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/article/samaria-rice-profile.html

Reed, T. F. (2015, August 22). Why liberals separate race from class. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement

Rojas, F. (2010). From black power to black studies: How a radical social movement became an academic discipline. JHU Press.

Savage, N. (2021, June 10). St. Louis murder of activist Seals unsolved five years later. Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/06/09/st-louis-murder-of-activist-seals-unsolved-five-years-later

Stromberg, M. (2021, March 15). Boogie with Patrisse Cullors in a virtual electric slide. Hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/patrisse-cullors-electric-slide-hammer-museum

Thorne, W. (2020, October 15). Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors signs overall deal with Warner Bros. Television group. Variety. https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/black-lives-matter-founder-patrisse-cullors-warner-bros-television-group-overall-deal-1234806076

Over the next several months, I will be participating in a series of public programs, professional trainings, and international conferences focused on trauma, sexuality, violence, and structural inequality. These engagements span performance, clinical education, and scholarly convenings, each addressing different audiences while engaging related questions about power, vulnerability, and misrecognition.

Below is an overview of where I will be appearing and the focus of each event.

🎨 Skirball Cultural Center

Masters of Subversion: Confronting Cigar
Los Angeles, California

I will be participating in Masters of Subversion: Confronting Cigar, a live interdisciplinary program hosted at the Skirball Cultural Center in connection with the work of Philip Guston. The program brings together spoken word, music, and movement to examine how violence, subversion, and moral reckoning are embedded within visual art and historical memory.

📖 Book signing
Following the program, I will be signing copies of my book, Black Men and Racial Trauma: Impacts, Disparities, and Interventions, at the Skirball.

🧠 Cambridge Health Alliance Psychiatry

Treating Couples: Surmounting Challenges

I will be presenting as part of Treating Couples: Surmounting Challenges, a continuing education series offered through Cambridge Health Alliance Psychiatry, a Harvard Medical School affiliated health system.

My session, Black Couples Therapy: Clinical Theory and Practice, focuses on theory driven clinical work with Black couples navigating chronic stress, relational conflict, and structural constraint. The presentation addresses therapist positioning, diagnostic limits, and the risks of applying dominant clinical models without sufficient attention to social context. The session concludes with a moderated discussion and Q and A.

🏛️ National Association of Black Social Workers

58th Annual NABSW Conference
Detroit, Michigan

At the 58th Annual NABSW Conference, I will be presenting a 90 minute advanced workshop titled:

Black Men and Racial Trauma: Impacts, Disparities, and Interventions

This workshop examines how Black men in the United States experience trauma as a result of systemic racism, patriarchal violence, and structural inequality. It addresses collective and vicarious trauma transmitted through families, communities, and media, as well as Black men’s disproportionate exposure to sexual violence, intimate partner violence and homicide (IPV/IPH), police killings, and suicide.

The session challenges prevailing assumptions by drawing from Social Dominance Theory and genocide studies, including the concept of gendercide. Participants will examine how deficit based and pathology driven frameworks continue to shape professional practice despite limited empirical support, and will explore the implications of these models for social work, policy, and service delivery.

🧩 International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation

ISSTD Annual Conference 2026

At ISSTD, I will be presenting a 90 minute advanced workshop titled:

Black Men and Racial Trauma: Impacts, Disparities, and Interventions

This workshop examines the specific forms of trauma experienced by Black men in the United States as a result of systemic racism, patriarchal violence, and structural inequality. It addresses collective and vicarious trauma transmitted through families, communities, and media, as well as Black men’s disproportionate exposure to homicide, intimate partner violence, sexual victimization, police killings, and suicide.

The workshop draws from Social Dominance Theory and genocide studies, particularly the concept of gendercide, to explain why outgroup men are especially vulnerable to violence in hierarchical societies. It also critiques deficit based and pathology driven frameworks that continue to shape research and clinical practice despite limited empirical support.

Participants will gain tools to identify, articulate, and respond to these dynamics across clinical and non clinical settings.

🔑 Society for Sex Therapy and Research

SSTAR Annual Meeting 2026
Vancouver, British Columbia

I am honored to serve as a keynote speaker at the 2026 SSTAR Annual Meeting, themed Sexuality in Connection: A Systemic Perspective.

My keynote, Black Male Sexual Victimization, addresses the systematic underrecognition of sexual victimization among Black men and boys, and the consequences of this erasure for clinical practice, research, and professional training. The address situates sexual victimization within broader patterns of structural vulnerability and professional misrecognition, challenging long standing assumptions within sex therapy and sexuality research.

Closing

Across these engagements, my goal remains consistent. To bring empirical clarity to experiences that are often obscured, to challenge theoretical assumptions that limit understanding, and to offer clinicians, scholars, and institutions frameworks that more accurately reflect Black male experience.

More to come.

Happy New Year. I hope your holiday season was restorative.

In November, I ran a poll asking readers what topics they wanted explored next. The response was clear. Plantation politics in mental health rose to the top. That result was not surprising. Many people sense that something is wrong in mental health spaces but lack the language to name it.

What is Plantation Politics?

Plantation politics refers to a modern system of domination that mirrors the social logic of the colonial plantation. In this system, Black people are strategically positioned to control, discipline, and silence other Black people on behalf of the white power structure. Plantation politics describes a structural regime of control that relies on intermediaries, rewards, and racial discipline (Cooper, 2024).

Rewards, visibility, professional advancement, and protection are bestowed upon those who promote or normalize a white supremacist agenda, whether neoliberal, liberal, or conservative. These individuals are elevated as representatives of “Black voices” regardless of their political commitments, historical awareness, or relationship to Black working-class life (Cooper, 2024).

A defining feature of plantation politics is representation without accountability. Black immigrants and people who identify as biracial are often positioned as spokespersons for Black Americans and for social issues rooted in U.S. slavery and Jim Crow, despite fundamentally different historical trajectories. At the same time, select groups are elevated as “model minorities,” while poor Black working-class men and women, particularly those descended from U.S. enslavement, are cast as the permanent failure against which others are measured (Cooper, 2024).

Plantation politics also requires enforcers. Certain Black elites are positioned as modern-day overseers, tasked with disciplining “unruly” Black people for the benefit of the plantation’s owners. This dynamic is not metaphorical. It is structural, psychological, and institutional (Cooper, 2024).

The Black Bourgeoisie and the Psychology of Distance

Decades before contemporary DEI culture, Frazier (1957) identified the psychological foundations of this system. He argued that segments of the Black bourgeoisie suffer from deep feelings of inferiority and construct a world of make-believe to shield themselves from that reality.

This psychic insulation depends on distance. Distance from poor and working-class Black people. Distance from historical struggle. Distance from structural analysis. Status striving, token success stories, and proximity to whiteness become substitutes for collective liberation (Cooper, 2024).

Within this framework, platitudes about unity replace material analysis. Exceptional Black success is held up as proof that racism has been overcome. The Protestant work ethic is promoted as the cure for anti-Black oppression. Spiritual bypassing, including calls for forgiveness, reconciliation, and religious devotion, is deployed to neutralize anger and suppress dissent while leaving structures untouched (Cooper, 2024).

Neocolonial Control and Black Intermediaries

Allen (1969) offered a complementary structural analysis. In the late 1960s, he argued that direct white domination gave way to a neocolonial arrangement in response to Black Power militancy and urban rebellion.

The white power structure increasingly relied on indirect control through Black intermediary classes. Black professionals, politicians, academics, and celebrities were elevated and incorporated into the system not to dismantle it but to stabilize it. This intermediary class functioned as a buffer that absorbed pressure while redirecting political energy away from radical transformation (Allen, 1969).

Black capitalism and representation were deployed as containment strategies. Revolutionary movements were discredited, deflected, or repressed, while poor Black communities, especially unemployed Black men, were effectively sacrificed to maintain order (Allen, 1969; Cooper, 2024).

Plantation Politics Meets Mental Health

This history matters because mental health institutions did not escape these dynamics.

Contemporary mental health spaces increasingly reflect plantation politics. Symbolic inclusion without structural change. Black faces advancing frameworks that pathologize Black distress. Clinicians trained to individualize suffering while ignoring racial domination (Cooper, 2024).

Black professionals who align with hierarchy-enhancing ideologies are often rewarded with platforms, funding, and institutional legitimacy. Meanwhile, structural explanations for Black trauma are dismissed as too political, too angry, or unscientific (Cooper, 2024).

Social dominance theory names this process as out-group favoritism. It refers to the active or passive participation of subordinates in maintaining the very hierarchies that harm them. In mental health, this appears as diagnostic practices, therapeutic models, and policy frameworks that prioritize comfort for dominant groups while framing Black resistance as pathology (Cooper, 2024; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

Why This Resonates Now

The poll results suggest that many people are recognizing these patterns, especially as mental health discourse becomes increasingly detached from material conditions, state violence, and racial hierarchy.

Plantation politics thrives when language is stripped of history and psychology is severed from power. Naming it is not about personal attacks. It is about structural clarity.

If this framework feels uncomfortable, ask why.

What would mental health practice have to give up if structural explanations for Black suffering were taken seriously? Who benefits from keeping those explanations at the margins?

References

Allen, R. L. (1969). Black awakening in capitalist America. Doubleday.

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Frazier, E. F. (1957). Black bourgeoisie. The Free Press & The Falcon’s Wing Press.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the reader poll. The poll results reveal clear patterns in what people want to see examined next.

🟣 Summary of Reader Poll Results

Responses reveal a clear preference for essays that explore the nexus between race, power, and psychological discourse. Topics such as Plantation Politics in the Mental Health Field, Race-Based Conversations, and Emotions & Dehumanization emerged as the most compelling to readers. The next group of interests, Clinical Supervision & Anti-Black Misandry and The Racial Trauma Enterprise, continue this focus and highlight how structural and affective dynamics shape mental health practice. By contrast, the more clinically oriented topics (NPD and BPD) ranked lower and suggest that readers are most engaged by work that connects personal experience to broader systems of meaning and dehumanization.

Figure. Reader Poll Results

Average rankings for nine essay topics, with lower scores indicating higher reader preference.

Interpretation:
The highest-ranked topics, Plantation Politics in the Mental Health Field, Race-Based Conversations, and Emotions & Dehumanization, reflect strong interest in the nexus of race, power, and psychological discourse. Mid-tier interest areas include Clinical Supervision & Anti-Black Misandry and The Racial Trauma Enterprise, both of which extend this structural focus into therapeutic and institutional contexts. Topics such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) ranked lower overall and suggest that readers may prioritize analyses of systemic and relational issues over clinical primers.

💬 Closing Reflection

The range of responses underscores the many ways readers are thinking about culture, psychology, and power as interconnected mechanisms. If one of these topics especially resonated with you or if there is an angle you would like to see explored further, feel free to share your reflections in the comments. Reader insights often shape how future essays unfold.

Thank you to everyone who participated in yesterday’s poll. Many of you noted that the original 17-topic list was engaging but a bit long. I’ve refined it to nine key topics for a shorter, easier-to-complete version.

This updated poll takes less than a minute to finish. Your feedback will help shape which essays and discussions appear next.

👉 Click here to complete the updated 9-topic poll
(Poll closes November 10.)

🗂️ Topic Reference Guide

1. Race-Based Conversations — Do dialogues about race dismantle racism, or do they reinforce white supremacy?

2. Plantation Politics and the Mental Health Field — How historical power dynamics shape professional authority, visibility, and opportunity in therapy spaces.

3. Black Therapist Caricatures — Examining the stereotypes—and self-reinforcing images—of Black clinicians in media and professional circles.

4. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) — A primer on NPD, with attention to clinical definitions and cultural interpretations.

5. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) — A primer on BPD, exploring emotional regulation, attachment, and diagnostic framing.

6. The Racial Trauma Enterprise — How “healing” rhetoric can obscure structural harm and normalize coping over systemic change.

7. Emotions and Dehumanization — The role of affect, empathy, and sentimentality in sustaining anti-Black misandry and other forms of devaluation.

8. Clinical Supervision and Anti-Black Misandry — The paradox of clinical supervision that prescribes “repair” between supervisor and supervisee, even when repair requires Black male supervisors to accept dehumanization to maintain the relationship.

9. Anti-Intellectualism and Confirmation Bias — How digital culture and ideological sorting have eroded critical inquiry and nuanced thought.

💬 After You Vote

Once you’ve ranked the topics, feel free to share in the comments which one you placed highest — and why it resonated. Reader reflections often surface new questions and perspectives that shape future essays.

✍🏾 Author’s Note

These polls and essays invite readers to help shape future writing directions. Your participation helps guide which ideas are explored next.

I want to take a moment to thank you for following my work here. Your support means so much, and as a token of appreciation I’d like to share a special resource with you: a free infographic titled How to Process Grief.

This tool is designed to be simple, practical, and supportive — something you can return to when grief feels overwhelming or share with a loved one who might be struggling. My intention is that it serves as both a guide and a gentle reminder that healing is a process, not a destination.

If you’d like to go deeper, you can also read my three-part Substack series on grief, where I expand on many of the ideas captured in this infographic. Together, the series and the infographic provide both context and practical tools for navigating loss.

You can download the infographic here: How to Process Grief.

Thank you again for being part of this community. More resources, reflections, and updates are on the way, but for now I just want you to have this gift as a gesture of gratitude.

With appreciation,

Yamonte

Below is a thoughtful excerpt from that review, which captures some of the core ideas and importance of the work:

In Black Men and Racial Trauma: Impact, Disparities, and Interventions, author and scholar Yamonte Cooper offers a politically charged and critically thoughtful explication of the gendered–racialized environment and its psychosomatic effects on Black men. Cooper’s thesis posits that the cumulative effects of Anti-Black misandry—institutionally and socioculturally inscribed, gendered Anti-Black racism—produce uniquely racialized trauma for this population.

Beyond describing facts and figures, Cooper offers practical approaches to addressing the mental health concerns of Black men. He advocates for the Integrated Model of Racial Trauma (IMRT) as both a framework for research and clinical use, providing a holistic approach that merges psychological, cultural, historical, and health perspectives to support trauma-informed, culturally responsive practice.

Written with clinical practitioners in mind, Dr. Cooper designed the text for all concerned with the sociocultural environment that negatively affects Black men’s lives. This rigorous work empirically contextualizes the structural impact of racism and gender on Black men’s collective life trajectories and overall health.

To read the entire review click here.

What stood out to me was how politicians, journalists/news media, and officers from the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) fabricated stories in order to avoid rendering aid to the poor Black people of New Orleans. These fabricated stories were used as justification for killing Black men—by both NOPD officers and white vigilantes. The narratives included claims that a sniper had been shooting at a helicopter and that there was widespread lawlessness and violence, which contributed to panic and hysteria. These stories were unsubstantiated, and many Black people died as a result of not receiving aid or being evacuated.

Legitimizing Myths (LMs)

The fabricated stories created by politicians, journalists/media outlets, and police officers are what Social Dominance Theory (SDT) refers to as legitimizing myths (LMs).

According to Sidanius and Pratto (1999):

Legitimizing myths consist of attitudes, values, beliefs, stereotypes, and ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for the social practices that distribute social value within the social system (p. 45).

The LMs trafficked by politicians, journalists, and police conveyed the implicit message that Black people are not human and that Black men are dangerous criminals. Group-based hierarchy is maintained in part by legitimizing myths. The extent to which an individual sanctions LMs correlates with whether they endorse, desire, and support group-based social hierarchy.

Dehumanization

One survivor stated that the Black people of New Orleans had lost their humanity in the eyes of those who were supposed to help them. But what this survivor may not be aware of is that Black people are not viewed as human. I addressed this issue in my book.

Goff et al. (2008) found that both majority white and non-white individuals implicitly associate Black people (Black male faces were used in the experiments) with apes, while exhibiting a white–ape inhibition effect. Thus, Black Americans are mentally represented as less evolved—with a closer relationship to apes—while white individuals are represented as more evolved and symbolic of humanity. This Black–ape association was found to alter visual perception and increase the endorsement of violence against Black suspects in criminal justice contexts.

In addition, news articles about Black Americans convicted of capital crimes were more likely to contain ape-relevant language than those about white convicts. Moreover, those implicitly framed as more ape-like were more likely to be executed by the state than those who were not framed this way (Cooper, 2024, p. 189).

Goff et al.’s (2008) research revealed a Black–white humanity taxonomy where white people are conceptualized as representing humanity, and Black people as the opposite polarity.

Black males inhabit what Fanon (1952) refers to as the zone of nonbeing. This space, as described by Warren (2018), is a metaphysical nothing that sustains anti-Blackness—where Black people experience existence (i.e., inhabitation) but not Being.

Human is not a biological category but an ideological construct. Wynter (1992) interrogates this construct, revealing how "the human" is defined by whiteness and optimal middle-class variants. Black males are shut out of humanity, which is reserved for whites, along with the moral obligations reserved for those considered human.

The connection between humanism and whiteness, and dehumanization and Blackness, has deep historical and sociological implications. Humanism and colonialism are part of the same cognitive–political universe, structuring Europe’s self-discovery as "human" and the simultaneous discovery of its Others (i.e., the darker races) as nonhuman or nonbeing. This entailed the construction of "Man" as a biological ideal and the systematic degradation of non-European men and women.

White people experience the fullness of being human, which is verified by the absence of humanity ascribed to Black people. Black men and women experience their existence and lack of humanity in relation to whiteness. Therefore, Blackness is positioned as the antithesis of humanity (Cooper, 2024, p. 187).

Dehumanization is considered the worst type of discrimination a group can experience—and is a precursor to genocide. The Black people of New Orleans were never viewed as human, which enabled their dehumanization. Moreover, humanistic psychology and therapy models fail to address the critical problem of who is conferred humanity and who is not.

Black Death & Dying

Between 1,390 and 1,833 people died during Hurricane Katrina, and over 51 percent were Black, with 80 percent of those missing also being Black. According to Sharkey (2007), a significant number of Black Americans died in numbers that exceeded expectations based on their population size and age distribution in and around New Orleans.

Many people died due to the lack of responsive government intervention. Some may characterize the government's response as benign neglect, but this minimizes the magnitude of what happened and the intentionality behind the decisions made by politicians. LMs justified a hostile response that included aggression and violence, rather than aid and evacuation.

A grim example is the slow governmental response, during which the corpses of Black victims were left floating in the streets of New Orleans. Over half (51 percent) of those who died were Black. This disaster should be analyzed not only as a natural catastrophe but as an event used to hasten Black death and dying (Cooper, 2024, p. 183).

What we are witnessing is how a dominant group can sanction a psycho-social apparatus—and mobilize its resources, including politicians, journalists and media outlets, and police officers—in the wake of a natural disaster to ensure that an undercaste group remains in a subordinated position marked by neglect, suffering, and even death. Rather than providing humanitarian aid—a moral response owed to those regarded as human—these institutional actors functioned as instruments of terror and social control, reinforcing racial hierarchy under the guise of chaos management and public safety.

We should never forget Hurricane Katrina and the truths it exposed.

Sound off if you watch this documentary.

References

Brunkard, J., Namulanda, G., & Ratard, R. (2008). Hurricane Katrina deaths, Louisiana, 2005. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 2(4), 215–223.

Buncombe, A. B. (2015, August 29). Family of black man killed and burned by police still fighting for justice 10 years after Katrina. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hurricane-katrina-anniversary-family-of-black-man-killed-and-burned-by-police-still-fighting-for-justice-10478313.html

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin/White masks. Grove Press.

Five New Orleans Police Officers Sentenced on Civil Rights and Obstruction of Justice Violations in the Danziger Bridge Shooting Case (Press release). FBI. April 4, 2012.

Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M. J., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). Not yet human: implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of personality and social psychology, 94(2), 292-306.

Katrina’s hidden race war: In aftermath of storm, white vigilante groups shot 11 African Americans in New Orleans. (2008, December 19). Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/19/katrinas_hidden_race_war_in_aftermath

Lartey, J. (2018, October 18). White man who shot three black men during Hurricane Katrina pleads guilty. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/18/hurricane-katrina-roland-bourgeois-jr-shooting-hate-crime

Sharkey, P. (2007). Survival and death in New Orleans: An empirical look at the human impact of Katrina. Journal of Black Studies, 37(4), 482-501.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.

Warren, C. L. (2018). Ontological terror: Blackness, nihilism, and emancipation. Duke University Press.

Wynter, S. (1992). No humans involved: An open letter to my colleagues. Voices of the African Diaspora, 8(2), 13–18.

Here’s a description of the upcoming workshop based on my book, Black Men and Racial Trauma: Impacts, Disparities, and Interventions:

Black males are targeted in a patriarchal society with lethal violence and downward social mobility. Anti-Blackness is a form of trauma that is experienced interpersonally, collectively, and vicariously. Black males are disproportionately victims of sexual violence, intimate partner violence/homicide (IPV/IPH), and suicide. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young Black men in America. Frameworks such as intersectionality fail to adequately capture Black male vulnerability. Most frameworks that attempt to explain the experiences of Black males are deficit- and pathology-oriented frameworks that lack empirical evidence and are inherently racist.

According to Social Dominance Theory (SDT) and research, outgroup men are often targets of violence. Similarly, genocide studies articulate the gendercide of outgroup males who are targeted for extermination in countries experiencing conflict. The field of trauma studies has failed to recognize this dynamic and adopt appropriate language and interventions to address this serious problem. This workshop relates to Black psychology in that it provides comprehensive information on Black men and racial trauma that fills a critical and urgent void in the mental health field and the emerging scholarship on racial trauma. Therefore, professionals will be able to begin to adequately recognize and articulate the racial trauma of Black men and provide responsive care and clinical interventions that inform treatment approaches.

Whether you’re attending ABPsi or following from afar, I hope this conversation pushes us to expand how we understand vulnerability, violence, and institutional decimation in the lives of Black men. Feel free to share your thoughts or questions in the comments—I welcome the dialogue.

The premise of the story is that all involved are victims of the criminal justice system because a law enforcement practice they experienced included photographs of Black men that did not contain the actual perpetrator. 60 Minutes producer Shari Finkelstein said studies have repeatedly shown that, when the actual perpetrator is not included in the photo or physical lineup, eyewitnesses will often pick the person who looks most like the assailant. But the research on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony has been available for decades.

The “healing” is facilitated through a group that entails meetings between rape survivors and the exonerated Black men. Some of the white women described feeling “guilty” for falsely accusing the wrong men.

What’s missing from this feel-good story is reality. When I was conducting research for my book, I pulled data from the National Registry of Exonerations*, which lists exonerees who, since 1989 (excluding time spent incarcerated prior to conviction), spent time in prison for crimes they did not commit prior to exoneration. Approximately 51 percent of the exonerees have been Black men. These men served a combined total of approximately 23,792 years incarcerated.

Black Americans who are imprisoned and convicted for murder are 50 percent more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers. Black Americans imprisoned for murder are more likely to be innocent if they were convicted of killing white victims. Only approximately 15 percent of murders by Black Americans are committed against white victims, but 31 percent of innocent Black murder exonerees were convicted of killing white people.

A Black person convicted of sexual assault is three-and-a-half times more likely to be innocent than a white sexual assault convict. Assaults perpetrated by Black men against white women are a small minority (approximately 11 percent) of all sexual assaults in the U.S., but they account for half of the sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentification that led to exoneration. Approximately 70 percent of white sexual assault victims were attacked by white men.

Innocent Black sexual assault defendants receive harsher sentences—an average of almost 4.5 years longer in prison before exoneration—than whites upon conviction, and they face greater resistance to exoneration, even in cases that ultimately lead to their release. Gross et al. (2017) posit that most wrongful convictions are never discovered, and there is no direct measure of the number of convicted innocent murder defendants. They estimate that the true numbers significantly eclipse known figures (Cooper, 2024, p. 73).

This type of programming is irresponsible and does not address structural racism or anti-Black misandry. Over the past 15 years, I have been acutely aware of the promotion of what I call these white humanizing projects (e.g., white fragility)—promoted through white scholars, the mental health field, and liberal media outlets—alongside the recent growth of the racial trauma enterprise. White humanizing projects continue to humanize white people (e.g. recasting them as victims) while simultaneously dehumanizing Black people. They include a superficial and soft analysis, but do not include a critical analysis.

The racial trauma enterprise has grown exponentially over the past few years with articles, workshops, and trainings touting buzzwords such as anti-racism, decolonizing, and healing (Cooper, 2024, p. 1).

These women were obviously sexually victimized and are victims in that context—but they are not victims in the context of falsely accusing Black men. There is no level playing field between these women and the men they accused, and to suggest so is a false equivalency. These women did not spend decades caged based on a false accusation. This is time that these Black men cannot get back.

White women have been central and instrumental in the co-creation of carceral mechanisms, and it is simply dishonest to now claim victimhood of the same systems and structures that were part of their “protection” from the so-called savage darker races of men. Misidentification or false accusations of Black males by white women are part and parcel of U.S. history and were foundational to the lynching of Black males. Black males are caricatured as rapists and criminals, which justifies their dehumanization and extermination.

Black Americans arrested for violent crime in the U.S. constitute only 1 percent of the Black population and approximately 2 percent of Black males. But the approximate 2 percent of Black males who are arrested for violent crime are used as justification for dominance and discrimination against the Black population at large—and for the deaths of Black males more broadly—where Black maleness equates to criminality (Cooper, 2024, p. 83).

In addition, the “opposing” and antithetical embodiments of Black men and white women have consistently been weaponized in American racial discourse as markers of who is threatening to white patriarchal interests and who represents the greatest “good” of the in-group. Protection of white women is considered paramount, as they are deemed the conservators of the white race (Cooper, 2024, p. 159).

This type of programming is dishonest and promotes benevolent sexism and patriarchal protection, while the Black men are relegated to a secondary cast of characters whose incarceration was simply a “mistake.” Liberal programming that continues to obscure mechanisms of white dominance demonstrates a parasitic dynamic: when white people feel guilty about the harmful institutions they created, they recruit unknowing Black participants to be part of their “healing journey.” This is simply an exorcism of guilt—where a subordinated group is used to help release white guilt. Meanwhile, Black people—especially poor Black people—return to lives structured around anti-Blackness with no systemic changes, just a fleeting moment of white feel-good.

Western media has historically been an apparatus of specific ideological beliefs that shape perception and reality.

The media routinely exaggerates Black male offenders and white female victims even though most homicide is intra-racial crime involving men. Lundman (2003) found that journalists gravitated towards unusual cases where the victims were white women and what is deemed typical cases where the perpetrators were Black men. But reporters choose not to cover the murders of Black Americans by whites or of white men by white women. Therefore, newsworthiness is based on scripted stereotypes grounded in white supremacy and the construction of white fear of Black men (Cooper, 2024, p. 88).

Healing must begin with changes to the material conditions of these men and entail transitional justice—systemic and structural changes in society that include accountability and reparations to the Black men who were victimized.

*To my knowledge, this is the first published analysis to disaggregate data from the National Registry of Exonerations by both race and gender.

References

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Gross, S. R., Possley, M., & Stephens, K. (2017). Race and wrongful convictions in the United States. National Registry of Exonerations.

Lundman, R. J. (2003, September). The newsworthiness and selection bias in news about murder: Comparative and relative effects of novelty and race and gender typifications on newspaper coverage of homicide. In Sociological forum (Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 357–386). Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers.

Newman, L. M. (1999). White women's rights: The racial origins of feminism in the United States. Oxford University Press.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.

I would like to share this NBCC article, where I discuss the impact of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in helping couples heal through deeper emotional connection. Emotionally Focused Therapy Offers Hope to Couples (click link to read)

I’m excited to share that the Audible version of my book is now available! Nationally recognized voice actor Bill Andrew Quinn narrates the book.
🎧 Listen on Audible

Moreover, I’ll be a featured author and panelist at the Bay Area Book Festival (BABF) on June 1. Come through if you’re around!
📚 Event Details

Lastly, I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled Black Male Sexuality: Race, Genre, and Class (Cambridge University Press). I’m excited about this project, as I’ve assembled a brilliant group of scholars. This will be the first anthology to examine Black male sexuality outside of feminist, queer, and masculinity frameworks. Stay tuned for its release in 2026.

I appreciate all your support!

In gratitude,

Yamonte

Common Sex Myths

Orgasm is the ultimate sexual experience

Orgasm is not the ultimate sexual experience and can actually reinforce performative-based sexual scripts and mediocre sex. Many people report that their greatest sexual experiences did not involve an orgasm. If one desires an orgasm during partnered sex, that is fine, but it can lend itself to goal-oriented performative-based sex. Optimal sexual experiences are embodied, where one lets go and has peak experiences.

Sex as a pass-fail intercourse test

Sex is not a pass-fail intercourse test. Intercourse and penile penetration are not the only forms of sex. In fact, sex doesn’t have to involve penetration, an erect penis, or a penis at all. Sex encompasses numerous pleasurable and erotic experiences.

Sex is spontaneous

Most sex is semi-spontaneous, where there is planned intimate time without the planning of a specific sexual script. Refraining from a specific sexual script retains novelty and eroticism.

Your partner is responsible for your orgasm

Not true. A person can make explicit their sexual preferences, but their partner is not responsible for their pleasure. Each person is responsible for their own pleasure, including giving themselves an orgasm if they so choose. Performative-based sex leads to "spectatoring" and is motivated by anxiety about one’s sense of worth as a partner, value as a lover, and the competence of their body. Sex becomes a mechanism of validation and attractiveness that lacks intimacy and connection.

A penis operates like a dildo

A penis does not get and remain erect on demand; it will wax and wane and has a refractory period after orgasm. “Erectile dysfunction” is a misused term that is often used to describe erectile disappointment from unrealistic expectations, stemming from a lack of understanding of the variability of erections.

Men want to have sex while women want connection and intimacy

Not true. There is very little difference between men and women in terms of sexuality. Exceptions include masturbation frequency, pornography use, casual sex, and attitudes toward casual sex.

In modern dating and relationships, achieving a balance between intimacy (emotional connection) and eroticism (desire & arousal) is essential. However, many people lack formal sex education that focuses on pleasure, and instead are taught sex through societal myths and media portrayals. These often reinforce unrealistic expectations and lead to mediocre, performative sexual experiences rather than deeply connected, embodied ones.

References

Buss, D. M. (1995). Psychological sex differences: Origins through sexual selection. American Psychologist, 50(3), 164–168.

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Cooper, Y., & Holmes, E. (Eds.). (2023). Black Couples Therapy: Clinical Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, Y. (2023). Emotionally focused therapy with Black couples. In Y. Cooper & E. Holmes (Eds.), Black couples therapy: Clinical theory and practice (pp. 127-165). Cambridge University Press.

Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American psychologist, 60(6), 581-592.

Kleinplatz, P., & Ménard, A. (2020). Magnificent sex: Lessons from extraordinary lovers. Routledge.

McCarthy, B., & McCarthy, E. (2019). Rekindling desire (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Petersen, J. L., & Hyde, J. S. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993–2007. Psychological bulletin, 136(1), 21-38.

This is a hot topic in popular culture, filled with myths and misconceptions. Infidelity is broadly defined as engaging in emotional or sexual relations outside the agreed-upon boundaries of a relationship. This includes behaviors such as sexting, flirting, having an emotional connection, or sexual intercourse. According to Glass (2002), the workplace relationship is the most common context for affairs. 

Infidelity is relatively common with most men and women reporting engaging in some form of infidelity at least once during their lifetime. Moreover, close to half of those in relationships have engaged in infidelity. Infidelity is the primary cause of divorce in the U.S. but over 70 percent of marriages survive an affair. An affair can disrupt romantic relationships and damage the trust, connection, and intimacy with devastating consequences to the well-being of both partners in the relationship including children, extended family, and friends. This includes feelings of discontent, depression, blame, and frustration. In a relationship, both individuals often contribute to factors that can lead to infidelity.

Relationship variables tend to be the predictors of infidelity and include relationship satisfaction, relationship length (longer relationship length), desire, sexual satisfaction, romantic love, and some sexual activities (anal, oral, or vaginal sex) within the relationship. In addition, to a lesser degree, individual liberal sexual attitudes (e.g., use of sex toys, anal sex, or masturbation with a partner) are a predictor of infidelity.

Drawing on investment model research (Rusbult 1980, 1983; Drigotas et al., 1999), Doherty (2021) suggests that many participating partners take a “consumer” approach to the relationship where they focus on what they are not receiving from their partner instead of what they themselves are not investing in the relationship. It is not uncommon for betrayed partners to have invested more in the relationship than they have received in return. This dynamic reflects Western socialization, which often conveys a sense of consumer entitlement to exciting relationships and great sex, and fosters behavior that suggests people are disposable or can be easily replaced. Thus, if one is feeling deprived, they are permitted to go elsewhere to meet their needs.    

It is recommended that relationship issues are addressed when they first arise in order to prevent future infidelity. This includes addressing desire discrepancy issues by discussing sexual needs and desires in the relationship where they can be potentially met. An active affair will need to be discontinued in order to repair the relationship. Signs of ongoing infidelity may include a lack of empathy, resistance to displaying warmth and care, and persistent negative attributions projected onto the injured partner. Continued deception deepens the trauma and prolongs the repair process. Injured partners who have recently learned about their partner’s affair may experience a broad range of negative emotional and behavioral effects, including perpetrating intimate partner violence (IPV), depression, suicidal ideation, acute anxiety, and symptoms similar to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; flashbacks, rumination, hypervigilance).

It is not uncommon for couples to experience high rates of severe conflict and verbal or physical aggression in reaction to an affair. Partners who were injured from an affair often feel betrayed and angry. They may vacillate between feelings of rage, powerlessness, victimization, and abandonment. In addition, they also may feel a sense of responsibility due to “missing the signs” or not being available to their loved one and thus experience internalized anger coupled with embarrassment and shame. Moreover, they may experience a loss of identity, a sense of sacredness with their partner, and a sense of purpose that are foundational to emotional security.

The injured partner may begin to incessantly investigate their partner’s activities and verify their partner’s whereabouts. The investigations and continual inquiries along with the participating partner’s justifications for their behavior may establish a hierarchy within the relationship. This dynamic encompasses the participating partner feeling pressure to report their activities to their partner with the injured partner scrutinizing their partner’s actions. This hierarchy can exacerbate the relationship issues and create an imbalance of power within the relationship. Interrogation can trigger defensiveness, which will hinder the process of repairing the relationship. Furthermore, a therapist often needs to help clients understand the boundary between privacy and secrecy.

If the goal is to repair the relationship, then it is imperative that safety is created which is fundamental for honest and vulnerable communication. A lack of safety exacerbates relationship issues that contributed to the infidelity and obstructs repair. The therapist will have to manage anxiety and emotional reactivity in order to maintain safety. Further, they will need to evaluate the following: the duration of the affair, number of participating sexual partners, gender of the third party, level of sexual activity, whether both partners were engaged in an affair, degree of emotional attachment, each individual’s relationship with the third party, extent of deception and secrecy surrounding the affair, awareness or consent of the affair by the other party, and how the affair was perceived by the social circle of the individual or couple. Trust will have to be rebuilt including improving communication with honest and open dialogue along with the creation of a new relationship.       

The participating partner may experience guilt, a loss of self-esteem, as well as depression, suicidality, and acute anxiety, particularly when the disclosure or discovery of infidelity results in separation or threats of divorce. They may also take on a protective role where they attempt to protect their partner from the hurt or the pain of the affair. The guilt coupled with the desire to protect can prevent them from talking about the affair with their partner which may impede processing feelings that are instrumental in repairing the injury caused by the affair. Fear may be experienced by both individuals where the decision to work on their relationship necessitates addressing difficult issues.

Therapists must create and uphold a safe therapeutic environment by fostering trust and safety, demonstrating competence, and preparing the couple for therapy through the provision of a conceptual treatment model. Limiting aggressive exchanges within session in a firm but empathetic manner is instrumental in establishing safety and trust. Building and sustaining a therapeutic alliance with both partners can present specific challenges. For instance, injured partners may find it difficult to accept the therapist's empathic responses to the guilt, hurt, or loneliness experienced by the participating partner. In addition, therapists who hold strong moral beliefs about infidelity will need to examine if their beliefs will impede building an alliance with the participating partner. Even though both individuals in a relationship contribute to the relational context (e.g., emotional unavailability, excessive negativity, prolonged absences, significant emotional or behavioral problems, or desire discrepancies) that can lead to an affair, the participating partner is still responsible for their decision to engage in an affair.

Early on, it is crucial to address questions such as whether to continue living together, how to manage the involvement of the third party in the affair, whom to inform about the affair and what information to disclose, how to handle daily responsibilities like meals and childcare, and how to manage conflicts to prevent emotional or physical harm, all in order to mitigate further damage to the partners or their relationship.

An integrative approach that integrates a three-stage process is optimal in treating infidelity with couples who desire to repair and strengthen their relationship. Stage 1: Dealing with the initial impact - Partners are taught specific skills for managing emotions and decision-making that address relationship crises, and the disruption of individual functioning caused by the affair. During stage 1, the injured partner writes a letter exploring their feelings and reactions to the affair. The therapist can provide initial feedback on the draft of the letter with the injured partner reading the letter to the participating partner during a joint session. The process supports the injured partner exploring their reactions and feelings while maintaining their emotional balance in a manner that is not attacking or abusive, thereby increasing the likelihood of being heard by the participating partner. Once things have de-escalated and stabilized, the therapist helps the injured partner ask the involved partner specific “who,” “what,” and “where” questions. Evaluative comparison questions (e.g., “Why them compared to me?”) are excluded as they are not helpful and “why” questions are generally discouraged early on, as the involved partner may not yet be able to articulate their reasons. The injured partner can bring up “why” questions during stage 2. But the involved partner will need to be honest and transparent and avoid being evasive or minimizing the affair including lying by omission. It’s also important to prepare both partners for the possibility that no amount of understanding will fully explain the affair, and that it may always seem, to some extent, irrational or unfathomable.

Stage 2: Exploring context and finding meaning – Interventions help partners explore factors within the relationship, external to their relationship, and within themselves that heightened their susceptibility to an affair. In stage 2, the main areas of exploration include aspects of the relationship such as communication challenges or time constraints, external stressors like job pressures, financial issues, or conflicts with relatives, the participating partner's beliefs about relationships or their social development history, and issues specific to the injured partner such as their developmental background or relationship skills. Within each domain, the therapist guides the couple to reflect on these factors regarding their potential roles as predisposing or precipitating influences that lead to the affair, factors affecting the maintenance of the affair and its eventual discovery or disclosure, and influences shaping the partners' subsequent responses or recovery. This information should be incorporated into a shared coherent narrative that explains how the affair came about which is instrumental in developing a new set of assumptions about themselves, each other, and the relationship. This can be a task that they would prepare for during a follow-up session, or it can be a written letter where each person describes what they understand to be relevant factors. Afterward, the therapist, together with the couple, discusses aspects of the relationship that may require further attention and how these can be addressed to prevent future betrayals. Through this process, the therapist transitions from focusing on the past to emphasizing the present and future of the relationship.

Stage 3: Moving on - Interventions assist partners in examining their personal beliefs regarding forgiveness and their relevance to recovering from the affair. Moving forward involves each person achieving a more balanced perspective of their partner and the relationship. They commit to not allowing hurt or anger to dictate their thoughts or behavior towards their partner, or to dominate their lives. They willingly relinquish the right to perpetuate continual punishment for their partner's actions or demand additional restitution. Moreover, they choose to remain in the relationship after realistically assessing both its positive and negative aspects. Furthermore, the therapist should assist partners in exploring their personal beliefs regarding forgiveness and how these beliefs influence their efforts to move on from the affair. The therapist may need to confront beliefs held by partners that could hinder their ability to move on in an emotionally healthy manner. It is crucial for the involved partner to express genuine remorse, as this is essential for the forgiveness process. The therapist should discuss aspects of forgiveness with the couple, covering descriptions of forgiveness, common beliefs about forgiveness, consequences of both forgiving and not forgiving, and barriers to forgiveness or moving on. Some individuals struggle with forgiveness due to beliefs that forgiving their partner suggests weakness, condones or excuses the behavior, equates forgiveness with forgetting, or fears vulnerability to future harm. The therapist explores these beliefs and discusses whether they can forgive while still holding their partner appropriately accountable for their behaviors. Other obstacles to forgiveness include anger and resentment that pertain to current dynamics, such as perceived power imbalances resulting from the affair or an inability to restore a sufficient sense of safety within the relationship. Therefore, anger may serve a protective function for the spouse experiencing anger. The anger may also indicate unresolved relational issues or violated assumptions that were not addressed or resolved in earlier stages. Sometimes challenges in transitioning from anger to forgiveness stem from lingering resentments related to the affair rather than current relationship dynamics. In such instances, it is recommended that the therapist assess motivation for change by examining the costs and benefits of maintaining their current position versus actively letting go of anger and moving past the betrayal. Final interventions focus on specific strategies to fortify the relationship and safeguard it against potential threats to fidelity in the future.

Although this is a progressive stage approach, it is not linear as an individual may need to revisit an earlier stage after progressing through that stage (e.g., returning to stage 1 after experiencing a flashback). This process can take anywhere from 6 months to 1-2 years of weekly sessions, depending on the level of pain and injury, motivation, accountability, and commitment to the relationship.

References

Allen, E. S., Atkins, D. C., Baucom, D. H., Snyder, D. K., Gordon, K. C., & Glass, S. P. (2005). Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors in engaging in and responding to extramarital involvement. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 12(2), 101-130.

Amato, P. R., & Previti, D. (2003). People’s reasons for divorcing: Gender, social class, the life course, and adjustment. Journal of Family Issues, 24(5), 602-626.

Blow, A.J. and Hartnett, K. (2005), Infidelity in committed relationships II: A substantive review. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 31, 217-233.

Doherty, W. J. (2021). The ethical lives of clients: Transcending self-interest in psychotherapy. American Psychological Association.

Drigotas, S. M., Safstrom, C. A., & Gentilia, T. (1999). An investment model prediction of dating infidelity. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(3), 509-524.

Glass, S. P. (2002). Couple therapy after the trauma of infidelity. In A. S. Gurman & N. S. Jacobson (Eds.), Clinical handbook of couple therapy (3rd ed., pp. 488–507). The Guilford Press.

Glass, S. (2007). Not "just friends": Rebuilding trust and recovering your sanity after infidelity. Simon and Schuster.

Haseli, A., Shariati, M., Nazari, A. M., Keramat, A., & Emamian, M. H. (2019). Infidelity and its associated factors: A systematic review. The journal of sexual medicine, 16(8), 1155-1169.

Hertlein, K. M., Wetchler, J. L., & Piercy, F. P. (2006). Infidelity: An overview. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 4(2-3), 5-16.

Lefkowitz, E. S., Shearer, C. L., Gillen, M. M., & Espinosa-Hernandez, G. (2014). How gendered attitudes relate to women’s and men’s sexual behaviors and beliefs. Sexuality & culture, 18, 833-846.

Mark, K. P., & Haus, K. R. (2019). Extradyadic relations. In A. C. Michalos (Ed.), Encyclopedia of quality of life and well-being research (pp. 2102–2105). Springer.

Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of experimental social psychology, 16(2), 172-186.

Rusbult, C. E. (1983). A longitudinal test of the investment model: The development (and deterioration) of satisfaction and commitment in heterosexual involvements. Journal of personality and social psychology, 45(1), 101-117.

Snyder, D. K., Baucom, D. H., & Gordon, K. C. (2016). Treating infidelity. In S. B. Levine, C. B. Risen, & S. E. Althof (Eds.), Handbook of clinical sexuality for mental health professionals (3rd ed., pp. 209-220). Routledge.

Spring, J. A. (1996). After the affair: Healing the pain and rebuilding the trust when a partner has been unfaithful. Harper Collins.

Thompson, A. E., & O’Sullivan, L. F. (2015). Drawing the line: The development of a comprehensive assessment of infidelity judgments. The Journal of Sex Research, 53(8), 910–926.

Vowels, L. M., Vowels, M. J., & Mark, K. P. (2022). Is infidelity predictable? Using explainable machine learning to identify the most important predictors of infidelity. The Journal of Sex Research, 59(2), 224-237.

Weeks, G. R., & Treat, S. R. (2001). Couples in treatment: Techniques and approaches for effective practice (2^nd ed.). Brunner-Routledge.

Compulsive sexual behavior disorder is characterized by a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges resulting in repetitive sexual behavior.

Symptoms may include repetitive sexual activities becoming a central focus of the person’s life to the point of neglecting health and personal care or other interests, activities and responsibilities; numerous unsuccessful efforts to significantly reduce repetitive sexual behavior; and continued repetitive sexual behavior despite adverse consequences or deriving little or no satisfaction from it.

Criteria:

1.     The pattern of failure to control intense, sexual impulses or urges and resulting repetitive sexual behavior

2.     Manifested over an extended period of time (e.g., 6 months or more)

3.     Causes marked distress or significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Distress that is entirely related to moral judgments and disapproval about sexual impulses, urges, or behaviors is not sufficient to meet this requirement.

Sex addict has become part of the American lexicon to describe secrets that revolve around one’s erotic conflicts. Patrick Carnes (1983) coined the term sexual addiction (SA) which gained traction during the AIDS epidemic. The label and the myth of an increasing problem was bolstered by media coverage and increased access to pornography (i.e., sexually explicit imagery) along with the emergence of a heteronormative self-help system (e.g., 12-step program) and a privately paid therapy industry in the U.S. Moreover, the term sexual compulsivity was coined by Quadland (1985) and used to describe gay and bisexual men from New York City who sought treatment. The sex addiction label has continued to proliferate popular culture through the news and media and the obsession with celebrities and media personalities.     

Compulsive sexual behavior is often thought to primarily afflict males, but Marchetti (2023) found no significant differences between males and females and across age which dispels common patriarchal myths regarding male and female sexuality. But women may report compulsive sexual behavior less than men due to the stigma associated with women’s sexual behavior.

Sexual behavior is fundamentally different than substance use and gambling as it is informed by different moral and cultural conditions including other forms of shame. The label sex addict is frequently used to describe individuals grappling with internal moral conflicts, characterized by intrapsychic distress stemming from moral incongruence, self-discrepancies, and competing internal motivations. These conflicts may be influenced by factors such as religiosity, puritanical socialization, or imbalances in excitatory and inhibitory processes. Consequently, individuals may experience a sense of being out of control, manifesting as compulsive sexual behavior driven by difficulties in emotion regulation, preoccupation with sexual thoughts, attempts to seek out sexual partners, or perceived lack of impulse control.

CSBD is often comorbid with mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, personality disorders, ADHD, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. In addition, it is not uncommon among many who identify with CSBD to have had early past experiences of sexual victimization and abandonment that produced an avoidant-attachment style that resembles superficial relationships with others that can be primarily sex-focused.    

In many cases, men accept a sex addict label from their partners due to concerns about pornography consumption or infidelity. Many partners can feel threatened by their partner’s porn viewership as porn viewership often involves masturbation (solo sex) and fantasy. Many people believe myths that indicate that a partner watching porn means that they desire something or someone else which is not accurate as a person’s erotic fantasies don’t necessarily indicate a desire in real-life, but it could indicate a preference that they would like in their romantic relationship that they are apprehensive to disclose. Moreover, the other myth that many people believe is that their partner masturbating is indicative of their failure to please their partner. Solo sex is actually more common than partnered sex. In addition, the sex addict label is used by individuals and their partners as an explanation for infidelity or an excuse for one’s decision to engage in an affair or multiple affairs and to avoid accountability (externalized responsibility).  

Problems are not disorders and it is imperative that CSBD is thoroughly assessed by therapists which includes whether various domains of a person’s life has been affected (e.g., dropping out of school, losing jobs, unwanted financial losses, social isolation, marital adversities, and mental health distress) including assessing for co-occurring disorders before diagnosing their client with CSBD.  

Treatment for CSBD include groups designed to specifically address CSBD, individual therapy, couples therapy, and any co-occurring disorders would need to be addressed. Group therapy typically is 6-months of weekly group meetings and include assessing for motivation, sexual health principles, and the goals of accountability for behavior change, self/attachment emotion regulation, emotional intimacy, authenticity (e.g., the development of a positive sexual/erotic identity), and vulnerability with others. A 12-step program (12-step groups/addiction model) is not recommended as they have a religious foundation that can increase feelings of addiction to sex and pornography due to moral incongruence between beliefs and behaviors. Further, a person’s ability and self-efficacy can be diminished due to responsibility being placed on a higher power. Lastly, moral incongruence can be increased due to the promotion of abstinence-celibacy.

References

Braun-Harvey, D., & Vigorito, M. A. (2015). Treating out of control sexual behavior: Rethinking sex addiction. Springer Publishing Company.

Briken, P., & Turner, D. (2022). What does “Sexual” mean in compulsive sexual behavior disorder?•: Commentary to the debate: “Behavioral addictions in the ICD-11”. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 11(2), 222-225.

Briken, P. (2020). An integrated model to assess and treat compulsive sexual behaviour disorder. Nature Reviews Urology, 17(7), 391-406.

Carnes, P. (1983). Out of the shadows: Understanding sexual addiction. Minneapolis: CompCare Publications.

Fuss, J., Briken, P., Stein, D. J., & Lochner, C. (2019). Compulsive sexual behavior disorder in obsessive–compulsive disorder: Prevalence and associated comorbidity. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 8(2), 242-248.

Grubbs, J. B., Grant, J. T., & Engelman, J. (2018). Self-identification as a pornography addict: Examining the roles of pornography use, religiousness, and moral incongruence. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 25(4), 269-292.

Herbenick, D., Fu, T. C., Wasata, R., & Coleman, E. (2023). Masturbation prevalence, frequency, reasons, and associations with partnered sex in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from a US nationally representative survey. Archives of sexual behavior, 52(3), 1317-1331.

Kraus, S. W., Krueger, R. B., Briken, P., First, M. B., Stein, D. J., Kaplan, M. S., Voon, V., Abdo, C. H., Grant, J. E., Atalla, E. & Reed, G. M. (2018). Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD‐11. World Psychiatry, 17(1), 109-110.

Marchetti, I. (2023). The structure of compulsive sexual behavior: A network analysis study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52(3), 1271-1284.

Munns, R., Dickenson, J., Candelario-Perez, L., Kovic, A., Rider, N., Berg, D., Coleman, E., Girard, A. (2020). Psychotherapies in the treatment of CSBD. In P. Briken, & R. Balon (Eds.), Compulsive sexual behavior disorder: Understanding, assessment and treatment (pp. 109–128). Washington DC, USA: American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

Quadland, M. C. (1985). Compulsive sexual behavior: Definition of a problem and an approach to treatment. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 11(2), 121-132.

Sassover, E., & Weinstein, A. (2022). Should compulsive sexual behavior (CSB) be considered as a behavioral addiction? A debate paper presenting the opposing view. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 11(2), 166-179.

Thompson, D. (2010, May 12). The “reality” of sex addiction stirs debate. https://www.healthday.com/health-news/sexual-health/the-reality-of-sex-addiction-stirs-debate-636637.html

This June I will be discussing how Black males are disproportionately victims of sexual violence, intimate partner violence/homicide (IPV/IPH), and suicide. This is one of the topics that is covered in depth in my new book. Recent data from the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS/2022) indicate that 58 percent of Black males report sexual violence, physical violence, and or stalking by an intimate partner. Black males overwhelmingly report being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, and unwarranted sexual contact where the primary perpetrators are female. Frameworks such as intersectionality fail to adequately capture Black male vulnerability. Most frameworks that attempt to explain the experiences of Black males are deficit and pathology-oriented frameworks that lack empirical evidence and are inherently racist. This presentation provides comprehensive information on Black male sexual victimization that fills a critical and urgent void in the mental health field. Therefore, professionals will be able to begin to adequately recognize and articulate the sexual victimization of Black males and provide responsive care and clinical interventions that inform treatment approaches.