In this presentation, the author shares an exploration into her unconscious emotional world animated by a yearlong anti-racist project. The author frames the story of the antiracist project as difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998) and uses the psychoanalytic concept of transference (Winnicott, 1949) to symbolize and engage in the process of working through (Freud, 1913) her emotional experience. The author organizes the story of the antiracist project as (1) the “furor to teach,” fantasy of the antiracist educator, (2) difficulty with students’ uneven progress, (3) an attachment to and idealization of certainty, and (4) a racial melancholia. She presents that what is difficult about anti-racist education as an emotional situation is that educators must welcome what they do not know in a field that privileges and fantasizes knowledge and knowing. The author contends how her idealization of teaching and learning which reflects phantasies in the field of education resulted in her inability to accept her students’ uncertain progress. As an educator of colour, she also shares that she must negotiate the loss of idealised objects for her to better serve containing function (Bion, 1962) in supporting teacher candidates’ encounters with rack work.

Bion, W. R. (1962) Learning from Experience (London, UK, Heineman). Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Freud, S. (1913). On beginning the treatment. SE 12, 123-144. Winnicott, D. W. (1949). Hate in the counter-transference. Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 3, 348-356.