Potential space: creativity, resistance, and resiliency in the face of racism.

An amended version of Winnicott's concept of potential space is used to depict and understand the creativity, resilience, and resistance of African Americans facing the pervasive realities of social oppression, marginalization, and alienation linked to white racism. In particular, I argue that familial-communal potential space functions to confirm, secure, and maintain subjective and intersubjective experiences of being persons-unique, valued, inviolable, and agentic subjects-over and against the depersonalization of racism.