“In other words, we create, fix and respond to each other, intersubjectively according to collective and historical configurations we share as member of a particular social system. These historical patterns of relational configurations are more likely to become embodied and reproduced under certain circumstances. For example, when those whose body don’t belong, dare challenging power structures.
The issues here are consequently not simply representational. In the same sense that Black and Brown employees may experience terror and behave as though the historical traumatic agent was re-occurring, employers embody persecution and often sadism, by behaving as though they once again were colonial persecutory powers. Unconsciously. “
This post is the summary and write- up of a few Twitter threads I wrote focused on self-care for people of colour working in white institutions. The reflections presented below are based on conversations I have had with people of colour, some of whom have become seriously distressed and quite psychologically unwell in white organisational settings. Many have spoken of becoming suicidal. Others have retired on ill health grounds. Some have sought me as a friend or more formally as a therapist to help them make sense of their experience.
The level of psychological injury and disability people of colour sustain at work because of racism, is still an unknown quantity. Nonetheless, my aim here is not to try and quantify but, using an analytic framework primarily, to attempt and formulate what I am recurrently untrusted with. I have to say though, that I too as a Black woman, am…
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