Living While Black: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Racial Trauma
- Rejane Williams
- Oct 30
- 2 min read
Guilaine Kinouani (2021, Ebury Press)
Kinouani is a UK-based radical and critical psychologist, therapist, equality consultant, and founder of Race Reflections. Living While Black is a particularly valuable book because it draws on her clinical, academic, and lived experience to explore racial healing.
The book provides a detailed overview of the psychological and embodied harm caused by racism, racialisation and racial trauma and responds to the question of what racial healing might entail.
TAKEAWAYS
Racism is not only interpersonal or symbolic; it also functions as covert acts, microaggressions, and systemic and structural patterns directed at Black bodies and psyches.
Racism causes psychological distress and physical health consequences across lifespans, generations, and social contexts.
Healing involves "confronting the nuances of Blackness" and "creating a tailored self-care plan." It is personal, political, relational, collective, and radical.
Being Black is not just about victimhood, suffering, or survival; it is also about resistance, joy, creativity, connection, hope, empowerment, and liberation.
MY HONEST REFLECTION
I really appreciate how she balances both the personal effects and systemic roots and consequences of racialisation.
She is also unapologetic about centring Blackness, aware that it is not real as a racial category but real as a lived experience. She names Blackness as a liberatory quest, recognising that "Racialisation imposes racial meaning on previously racially 'neutral identities' in order to reproduce a racial social order."
While racial healing will never follow a set formula, I sought to understand collective acts of healing. As with many others, this is recognised, but the underlying processes are not discussed.
“Speaking to those of us harmed most directly by racism, Kinouani lovingly operationalizes what healing can actually look like and reminds us that not only is joy possible in the face of racial trauma but that it is absolutely necessary for our healing.”
—Yaba Blay, author of One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
Comments