You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When I was asked to review Hári Sewell's book, I was conscious of my negative feelings towards the topic and found myself thinking ‘not another one’. However, these feelings swiftly changed as I studied the cover, my eyes fell on ‘a handbook for practitioners’ and I thought, hmm, that's a new angle.
When I read Suman Fernando's foreword I began to feel engaged as I had enjoyed reading his book (1991) when I was preparing for a Bowlby Conference.
This handbook for practitioners has cleverly sectioned chapters. There are many case studies to support Sewell's viewpoint, and ethnicity, race, and culture are given individual consideration, unlike many books on this subject.
Having explored definitions of ethnicity, race, and culture, Sewell looks at the matters of race, institutional racism, and nomenclature for black and minority ethnic groups. He examines these issues further by looking at why ethnicity, race, and culture are important in the Mental Health Services.
Sewell states that race is the most fundamental of the terms in the title to be considered because of the historical backdrop of systematic forms of racial oppression: for example, slavery. He goes on to remind us that race was considered to be fixed through biology, and that as science progressed it has become clear that old assumptions about race were inaccurate. Arguments have been made since the early twentieth century that biological theories on the division of humans into races is flawed. Sewell cites Banton (1967) and Rack , who have set out powerful arguments for dismantling the concept that races are well defined groups of people who are biologically and genetically alike. The genetic differences within so-called racial groups are often greater than those between different races.