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Eugene Ellis is the director and founder of the Black, African, and Asian Therapy Network, the UK's largest independent organisation working therapeutically with Black, African, Caribbean, and South Asian people. He is also a psychotherapist with a special interest in body-orientated therapies. The Race Conversation: An Essential Guide to Creating Life-changing Dialogue published in 2021 by Confer Books is his first published book.
Ellis proffers a generous invitation to his reader to join him in this important conversation about race, which, especially since the death of George Floyd at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, has come to the fore through organisations like Black Lives Matter. This book is therefore timely and will hopefully appeal to a wide audience.
Ellis writes in an accessible, clear, and engaging fashion, providing a diligent, step-by-step approach to engaging with the complexities and nuances of the issue of race; at multiple levels of mind, body, and even soul. He examines the psychodynamics and the psychology of race as well as its sociological impact
especially with regard to trauma. He invites you, as his reader, to pause and notice how the book's content impacts on your mind and body and this encourages you to trust in his approach to manage the consequential anxiety his words provoke.
Ellis draws on his experience as an activist and a writer, as well as a psychotherapist who has trained in multiple modalities. He approaches the issues around race with these experiences in mind, taking you on a journey in chapter 1 from what it means to be colour conscious, to live in a world that is far from race-free or colour-neutral, to a world permeated to its core with racial categorisations. In chapter 2, he describes how this trauma is experienced beyond words and often ends up located in the body. Chapter 3 examines what it means to be a racialised subject, which is then followed by chapter 4 where he deconstructs the idea of racial categorisation. C