Bearing Black

In this essay I critically examine the idea of race in light of the killing of Trayvon Martin, an
African-American unarmed teenager, in Florida in February 2012. I utilize ideas from liberation
psychology, including psychic colonization, and depth psychology, including cultural complex, to
explore the racialized black as a colonized, traumatized other. I also use my autoethnographic
experience (as a Jamaican who now lives in the United States) to discuss how identities built on
race are a source of suffering both when we make others black and when we are made black.
Bearing black robs us of the possibility of our humanity. Throughout, I ask several questions
about sustaining race as a sociological idea if we truly intend to dismantle racism. I invite us to
reconsider race in light of an instance where Rastafarians, a small group of Afro-Jamaicans who
express profound race consciousness, determine their own image, not only as black, and as a
form of resisting white supremacy.