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.
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
The 22 essays gathered in the edited book by Beverly Stoute and Michael Slevin feature mostly Black and White authors who share lessons drawn from their clinical, theoretical, and personal experiences with anti-Black racism and racial trauma, in personal life, consulting room, community, and from film. These essays stand out, among a plethora of contemporary works that address racism and racial traumas, for two merits: First, many of the chapters are written from a first-person perspective, with a number of contributors reflecting on their personal experiences of marginalization, trauma, or privilege-racial or otherwise. The personal and vulnerable nature of their writings, refreshingly free (mostly) of jargon, lends the book a feel of intimacy and relatability. Collectively, their shared experiences offer a vision of a racial comportment centered on empathic recognition of humanity and dignity in all of us, both White and Black. Second, the book offers implicit and explicit consideration, weaved throughout but especially powerfully presented by Beverly Stoute, of psychic resilience of the oppressed people. Psychoanalytic consideration of psychic resilience of racially oppressed people is a topic previously neglected in the literature; yet it is a very important topic, as it offers insights into the psychic, intergenerational, and intersubjective factors that help oppressed people survive and thrive. What can we learn from the African American community, which has withstood the nightmare of dehumanization and moral injury to survive, to carry on, and ultimately to thrive?
First, a general overview of the book. It is broken into five parts: in Part 1, Historical Perspectives, Beverly Stoute and Dionne Powell chronicle the history of race and racism