Plantation Politics in Mental Health
Structural Power and Visibility in Therapy Spaces
Plantation Politics in Mental Health: What the Poll Was Really Pointing To
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.