#Mockingbird Redux: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness Revisited 5 Years On
And as I watch my book come out this month (Feb 2021), I am as astonished as my 6-year-old probably is that his early horrific experiences have led to something so rich and meaningful. Yet this is nothing new. There are many ways of using the pain of our experiences in order to create something meaningful and something new, and it is something humanity has done from the dawn of time. From the slaves who sang hymns to alleviate the pain and distress of their predicament, to the blues singers who write lyrics about their experiences, to Sam Cooke whose words within A Change Gonna Come arose from his experiences of entering a racist diner, to Prince who wrote about his estrangement from his abusive father. The use of one’s wounds as a conduit to something deeper has a resonance which transcends many barriers of race, colour, gender, sexuality.
Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy is 5 years old this week (Turner, 2021). Wow! How strange it is to write that phrase. My blog this month is an acknowledgement of just how much things have (and have not) changed since I birthed such a difficult and challenging book. Utilising parts of a blog I wrote in February 2021, so right around the time #Mockingbird was originally published, I wanted to say a small something about the world the book emerged into, the world its walked through, and the world as I see it now.
I recently had a girlfriend who told me that I had been through too much. To be honest, she wasn’t wrong. Also though, she wasn’t totally right. She assumed that the wounds I hold would be too much for me, or for her, and that they would break me. Yet the reality is the opposite. My wounds have made me very much who I am. It was the wounds of internalised racism in my own dreams which formed a part of my doctoral thesis, it was helping my participants work with their wounds around being the other, which have formed part of my book.
We need to remember that we were in the grip of a global pandemic when George Floyd was murdered. We were forced to sit at home, to self-isolate, to form pods of six people, to eat out to help out, to protect the National Health Service (NHS), whilst the powers that be did what they could to bring forward a vaccine for an illness which killed millions across the world.
Those lockdowns meant that when the pictures of Floyd’s demise were beamed out on social media platforms that it was incredibly hard to miss. Because we were already stuck indoors watching our phones and tablets, the wall to wall coverage of the protest and riots, of the performances and the rituals, all in aid of this one man who represented so much for so many of us, black and other, meant that we could not avoid the physical, emotional and spiritual impact of such an event.
Our profession was impacted by this as well, I feel, and people finally stood up. Those who knew before that racism was an issue within our helping environments spoke up and challenged those who did not wish to get involved in the Culture Wars, as they chose to call them. Some organisations, private courses and universities looked to provide safer spaces for the minoritised groups they took money from, whilst others resisted. Some of these efforts were performative, whilst others were quite genuine.
Yet, what all of these things had in common was the sense that they were impacted by watching the world wake up, to become WOKE to, the oppressions experienced by groups be they racialised, genderised, queer, neurodiverse, class based, or some other protected and non-protected intersectional characteristic.
My wounds are my vulnerability, yet they also are my creativity, my access to the source. My wounds lead me to my story, and my story is rarely just my story, meaning my wounds are rarely just my wounds. The wounds I have allow others to feel a connection, they allow others to see themselves at least partially mirrored in the experiences of a black man, as an other who is similar to them. Then they allow the other time and space to walk over the empathy bridge towards understanding and community.
Did we ever think there was never going to be a whitelash? Kinouani (2024), as an excellent example, was right to call this out in her writings and podcasts, as were the Scene on Radio . The re-motivation of, or let me change this to the need to re-centre, of those who identity as white was always coming. It was there back when Obama was elected, and it has come to fruition now in the rise of Reform and the Far Right in the USA (Lee, 2025).
Our profession is no more immune to the rise of Neo-Fascism and Populism than any other part of society. And our profession is no more immune to the faces of the far right being of colour or holding some other intersectional identity than just being seen as white. Ideologies do not follow binary pattern. The people they attract are often just as complex as those who sit outside of these positions. And many of these will be those whose main aim is to covertly criticise or overtly ingratiate themselves with the gatekeepers because they too, like Stephen in the film Jango Unchained, just wish to find a space closer to those in power (and have the power to oppress others in turn) (Tarantino, 2012).
Now, whilst I do not believe in the pathetically patient and prayer driven kind of hope promoted by churches and politicians, I do believe hope exists. It exists in the continued progression of voices of different from so many different diverse often intersectional communities. It comes with the sheer range and breadth of books which have emerged out of the shadows over the past few years to rightly take their places in the pantheons of psychological learning. It is barely buried in the ongoing, and I will add, unstoppable force which speaks up and speaks out, from those who tell their stories or who research the stories of Others. It is emergent in the refusal to be silent anymore.
In the desire to be Too Much.
It is obvious then, that the externalisation of my wounds is hugely important to me as it is this which saved me from whatever fate would have otherwise befallen me. So, from the 6-year-old, the 14-year-old, the 25-year-old, and the 51-year-old, I hope you all enjoy ‘Intersections’ (Redux)
References
Kinouani, G. (2024). Whitelash. Race Reflections: At Work The Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/whitelash/id1551468359?i=1000647871168
Lee, B. (2025). Overview of the Far-Right.
Tarantino, Q. (2012). Django Unchained. Columbia Pictures.
Turner, D. D. L. (2021). Intersections of privilege and otherness in counselling and psychotherapy (1st ed.). Routledge.