Is racial trauma real? How restorative healing is central to reparation strategies.
Author: Shaun Wallace.
“There’s a fear of the white mental health psychiatrist or psychotherapist analysing us and messing with our minds, in some kind of negative way,” explains psychotherapist Jewel Love, co-founder of Black Executive Men, a service that helps black men in corporate America find inner peace. “There’s also a stigma about it being for crazy people. What is not often lumped in there is personal development, career advancement and self-improvement.
‘At what cost, [I] ask Love. “Loneliness. A sense of social isolation. Even if we have
friends around, it’s a feeling of not being truly connected or understood,” he
responds. “Not being able to be who we truly are because we’re always on the
It’s hard, too, not to tie all of this back to the gravity of our existence. We’re the most incarcerated and under-employed racial, ethnic or gender group. We also have the lowest life expectancy and are targeted by police at the highest rates. To say nothing of how our mere existence invokes feelings of rage and fear. As a result, we’re constantly walking a line between not being threatening and preserving a sense of our manhood.”
LeBron Barton
“Evidence shows that Black men are far more likely than others to be diagnosed with severe mental health problems and are also far more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. However, up until 11 years old, Black boys don't have poorer mental health than others of their age. There are multiple reasons for this including stigma, cultural barriers, and systemic discrimination, all of which are more directly experienced by Black boys and young Black men as they get older”.
Mental Health Foundation UK. 2021
Racial trauma has been indexed in contemporary psychology journals in the USA, identifying a phenomenon that is particular to the African Diaspora, and can be traced, backed by research, to the devastating cultural effects of Trans-Atlantic Slavery. While existing debates in this sphere focus on financial reparations and reparative strategies for the forebears of this, our cultural holocaust, debates with a clinical understanding of black trauma in a mental health context, is yet to find its footing in the UK.
This is entirely ironic, given the fact that Britain’s Empire building was implicit to this trade in Human souls, a trade that saw its tentacles unleash across all continents, imprinting black inferiority in political, cultural and social territories, globally.
We see its modern incarnation in the hostility towards black and brown migrants
fleeing war zones in places far from Africa, like the Ukraine. As much as naysayers proclaim it’s ‘all in our imagination’, and unworthy of an apology, let alone financial reparation, the ravages of a war in Europe once again reminded black and brown people of our place in ‘the pecking order of ‘humanity’.
It’s interesting to contrast the Ukrainian/Polish border officials’ demonstrably racist behaviour, with how Identity politics, or as middle aged hacks and commentators want to paraphrase the term, ‘woke’ culture, has been demonised by both mainstream and social media provocateurs - most notably, right of centre political bodies and their agencies.
For many black people in the UK, this dynamic - oscillating between harsh daily
media imagery and stories, and an identity politics backlash, is difficult to reconcile. Whether recognised or not, it leaves a trauma ‘footprint’ - to coin an environmental cliché.
Feeling victimised targeted and suffering from unresolved grief is a hangover, albeit a perennial one, from the monumental flashpoints in the last two years – the murder in cold blood of George Floyd in the US, [but screened globally], the Grenfell Disaster, The Windrush Scandal, disproportionate incidences of Covid and associated bereavements in the black UK communities; cuts to public services and gentrification projects that have eradicated community bonds in London boroughs with high black populations, overcrowded housing conditions in overpopulated boroughs with poor public health provision. Police Officers Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer referring to sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman as ‘dead birds’, while sharing their slain bodies to their colleagues on WhatsApp.
Much work is needed, beginning with consultation hubs, to continue efforts to
address inequity in our society and it is the perfect time to look at healing models for racial trauma, so that we can help to manage increasing cases of alienation felt from black Britons of different generations.
There is also much work to do within black British communities; a collective
responsibility for each of us to work towards our own healing, so that we do not
project it on others for spurious reasons. The Will Smith and Chris Rock debacle,
though distressing and an unneeded distraction to more pressing issues happening in the world, was a psychology masterclass in how unresolved anger can lead to emotions getting the better of oneself. It should also be the tipping point for those of us invested in community wellness.
The Funding of Racial Trauma therapeutic resources and services, delivered free to those who fit the profile, should in my view, be accessed without bureaucracy; in safe spaces that have culturally appropriate therapy; meaningful policies and
transformational practices.
The index of poverty, UK, indicates wealth accumulation in the UK Black
Communities/s are dwindling – in sharp contrast to other racialized minority groups.
I don’t think this is an inherent characteristic – i.e black people don’t know how, or
don’t want to build wealth. I do think, however, that financial well-being is not created in a vacuum – it’s a mindset and a community thing. I believe mental health in all its invocations whether it be from a lack of self-esteem, or a self-hate that is unresolved, thus shared, reduces holistic wellness – including that of financial wellness.
Society, especially one that has been intricately involved in creating the mental health rubric that a dis-proportionate number of black people find themselves in, has the complementary task, I would argue, to resource restorative channels to wellness in order to manage, if not combat, racial trauma in the UK.
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