The Psychosocial and Racialized Hauntings

This chapter draws on Frantz Fanon’s conceptualization of racialization to consider how the past haunts the present and future in psychosocial ways. It first discusses the psychosocial features of Fanon’s much-cited example of being racialized by a child on a train. It then brings together theorization of the psychosocial, intersectionality, hauntology, and racialization. The chapter then presents two research examples that illuminate the inextricable linking of the psychosocial, racialization, and hauntology. The final section applies these theoretical notions to a 2021 British case where unfolding allegations of racism led to a crisis in English cricket. The chapter argues that for social change to disrupt racism, it is important to address the ways in which racialization permeates and haunts societies and subjectivities in ways that maintain historical inequalities that dehumanize those who are racialized as other and haunt the present.