“In the US, race takes a particular form. Indians in the US and more broadly South Asians have, like every other cultural group that is raised upon migration, a framework for understanding race. More often than not these frameworks are less visible and more likely to be dismissed by notions of immigrants as people who choose to come to the US.”
Thank you to all who joined us for this year’s Relational Perspectives Series lecture with Dr. Usha Tummala-Narra. In an age of cultural fragmentation, learning spaces such as these are deeply important and we are grateful for the way Dr. Tummala-Narra told her story and brought awareness to the anxiety, racism, and xenophobia that is pervasive in our culture. During her lecture, Dr. Tummala-Narra wove personal experience with her own psychoanalytic studies, discussing how fear of immigrants reflects anxiety in multiple dimensions and carries with it much discriminatory potential.
“In the US and in parts of the world, the presence and growing visibility of immigrants triggered a sense of collective anxiety where dissociated defenses maintain emotional distance and identification with groups perceived to be threatening.”
