Race Reflections

My good people, The Black Leader Power Matrix™ I have spend much time thinking about scholarly things, thesis things, metaphysics and all the rest, as I walk these last few steps to the finish line but I do not forget we exist within material and structural realities. I want to remind you that we are here still in the real world, still operating in the clinical space, and still supporting the workplace. To that end, I want to introduce to you to The Black Leader Power Matrix™ A programme designed to address some of racially specific experiences and challenges Black leaders navigate and the racialised structural dynamics that shape their workplace experiences and influence: - Does your leadership programme addresses widespread resistance to Black authority/expertise and associated sabotage or envy? - Does it recognise the ways group processes such as horizontal violence can lead to Black (and Brown) employees marginalising and being hostile to leaders who look like them? - Does it speak to the impact of code switching and assimilation pressures on Black health and wellbeing? - Does it make visible intergenerational stories around wealth, power & associated conflicts around community loyalty/ betrayal? These are just a few of the issues a targeted Black Leadership Programme needs to delve into but which are still not mainstream and yet can influence career trajectories and workplace engagement. Drawing on the RACE Matrix™, the Black Leadership Programme equips participants with greater clarity, confidence and practical strategies to lead effectively while Black within complex organisational systems. Ultimately, the programme aims to support Black leaders in strengthening their leadership, expanding their influence and safeguarding their wellbeing, while creating the conditions for sustainable professional growth. We’ll be planning an open day later in the week. You can already read more about the programme here; racereflections.co.uk/the-bl…

A few thoughts on the relevance of the gospel to knowing, the body and social transformation I have been following this critical Christian theorist on TikTok and came across an idea and links I make that I think are worth sharing (I will link the post below). The popular understanding that when we die, the soul survives, is separated from our decaying body and floats off to heaven is not biblical. It is found in Greek mythology (likely popularised by Pluto? But he does not say so in his video). The Gospel version is that we die and enter a period of rest. Then, at the end of times, heaven comes to earth and we are resurrected from the dead. In summary, there is no great escapism from the body as corruption, the body as cage, or the body as ephemeral; the theorist said ‘we are created to have a body and will always have a body’ (Dr SC Williams). Heaven comes down to earth, and a new heaven and a new earth are created. According to the Gospel, God come to earth as Jesus, and God will come again in the Second Coming. There is no ascent of the soul from the body into eternal time. The body and mind are one — always. The death of the body marks a temporal break from the course of history. I thought this was fascinating epistemically. I have always implicitly linked Cartesian dualism to that body–soul split thus imaginatively to the bible. This is my own connection I must say, no one has ever taught me there was a link, and I have not read others on the matter, though I’m sure this connection must have been made, seems intuitive? The correct Christian rendering of the relationship between the body and the mind changes how we understand not only death and heaven, if only symbolically for the non christian or non-religious, but also embodiment, knowledge and social transformation. And this matters potentially given how much Christian beliefs or beliefs formed as Christian rather, have shaped theories of knowledge and scholarly hegemonies in the West. If the body is not merely something we must escape to reach God, then perhaps this also implicitly challenges how we have come to understand intelligence, reason and our greater faculties in the Western, modern sense. If the the body is not discarded or subordinated to reach a higher state of being, there are important cultural counter-messages, in terms of knowledge and social transformation. 1) The centrality of the aliveness of the body and vitality. 2) The body existing not merely a vessel to be transcended or discarded, but a fundamental part of human existence. 3) Human existence is necessarily embodied. 4) The need for the body and soul, and by extension, the body and mind, to be connected to reach social transformation, transcendance and higher state of being. 5) the argument I make in White Minds that dualism was a socio-political instrument that functioned as collective dissociation, when it came to the brutality of modernism … is sustained. Of course scholars across disciplines and outside Western intellectual traditions have made these very arguments using different justifications. So I am not claiming these challenges are new, but I am saying they can surprisingly, it seems, be sustained by an accurate reading of the gospel. Interesting, right? Or am I the only one who sees something here quite significant.

DECOLONIAL SPACE ON RACIAL TRAUMA My good people, the Decolonial Group on Racial Trauma is starting off this Monday. This space means a lot to me. It comes from years of engaging with critical ideas and trying to embody alternative ways of practising, of theorising what it means to be well in this broken world; of late, thinking about the idea of injustice as constitutive of traumatisation and African metaphysics, for example. I think many of us have been feeling uncomfortable with ideas ‘we’ take for granted, but have not been supported to understand, deconstruct, or think through what we were responding to. Whether as clinicians, patients, academics, community members. This was certainly my case, particularly when I studied psychology. It took me years to be able to articulate the epistemic violence I was responding to, largely through my body and via visceral apprehension. It took taking that embodied knowledge seriously, doing much solitary thinking, seeking external resources and establishing community within my practice, within Race Reflections and eventually through ancestral reconnection. We all need community to think and grow. This is particularly important to nurture these epistemic seeds; those nuggets of half-formed knowledge that I believe exist in us all but are rarely given form or shape. In fact, are often stomped within academia. And yes, sometimes I do mourn the time wasted, the needless debates, the brutality I experienced or witnessed because I could not formulate it in a way that fitted the frame. It’s tragic but it is the story of so many decolonial thinkers, certainly those I later found became the most influential. It’s also a story of survival and growth. I hope the decolonial space will provide that community to grow what already exists. To hear what speaks quietly, and what may not always speak in words*. To try when it may help to conceptualise. A small group of us are gathering — starting on Monday. I hope to keep the doors open for others, in case you can join next week or want to join later. There is no script. A lose structure. And an imagined destination: decolonisation in action. Let’s nurture and support the ideas that already exist within us, and use them for the liberation of all. If you are interested there is still plenty of time to come along. Online. On Monday. At 18h30. Details below racereflections.co.uk/new-re…

The countdown to the start of the DECOLONIAL NEW REFLECTIVE GROUPS ON RACIAL TRAUMA has started. This is a space for decolonising our ways of thinking and working, moving beyond narrow, individualised understandings of distress towards more relational, historical and structurally informed approaches to racial trauma and healing. A space to ask and reflect on questions such as: How may we talk about the impact of white supremacy without pathologising the wounds it causes? How do we get peers and systems to ‘see power’? Where is the hidden coloniality of mental health formations? In which ways is our own colonial history implicated in our liberatory work, and how may we maximise its power while also limiting any consequent vulnerability? How may we reframe and support resistance in the clinic? First group September 28th 18h30 online. Then every last Monday of the month. Details below; racereflections.co.uk/new-re……

Dear friends, colleagues and comrades. We’re really pleased to be opening the door for the next cohort on the certificate in working with racial trauma/foundation course in Group Analysis for the 2027 entry. And the exciting news is that for the next stage of the course development, we will be delivering the program hundred percent online!!! Offering this innovative course to people around the world, friendly option for regardless of their location. A set up which also likely support access needs. I’m very excited about this development because it means that we may have a much more diverse cohort of people so that these perspectives, the expertise, the lived experiences, the professional understanding of racial trauma and group functioning are going to greatly enrich the learning for all involved. We have an opening day that is scheduled on September 14 from 4 o’clock to 7 o’clock online. If you are at all interested in the programme, want to find out more, connect, apply, say hello share experience about the course and about your work with racial trauma would be delighted to have you. Places are limited. Request a place using the link below; racereflections.co.uk/events… To download the curriculum, please click here: racereflections.co.uk/wp-con…

I have no intention to debate on the clearly racist display below. But given a few of you from the ‘Latin world’, have entered my mentions with violent denial, arguing ‘it’s only tradition’, I will say this once and for all. Lynching was carried out a Latin America used to punish those Black people who activated collective anger often due to some perceived social transgression. I take you back here to the alleged reason for the effigy, the dodged handshake (I will not return to why the expectation of racial deference from a Black man and the contestation of his Frenchness are in and of themselves attempts to enforce the racial order). The hatred and hostility toward Mbappé is without a doubt race-based, in other words he is hated as a Black man or at least a man clearly racialised/read as African. A Black man who dares to hold his ground and talk back, will not lower his gaze …. But it is because he is a Black man nonetheless, objectively that he is read as arrogant, uppity, not knowing his place. This is what explains the extreme dehumanising response, a disproportionality that too is racialised. This disproportionate fury directed at him echoes that old pattern: Black people who are deemed to cross the racial line are treated as having committed an unforgivable transgression — for things that would barely be noticed or excused if done by anyone else, and need severe punishment. Consider even if you refuse to read the burning of Mbappé’s effigy as a symbolic act of lynching, the inexorable historical symbolism activated (whether intended or not) given the raging antiblack sentiments freely expressed in the country, this too is context. Consider that social rituals can carry multiple functions some intended consciously and some not and that they indeed rituals and traditions may be mobilised for racist purposes, even when they do not exist solely for that purpose — we often use what is at our disposal socially to act out, interval conflicts. Hence, well it is just tradition… is lazy thinking. Finally, consider what memories, may be activated for those of African descent (and many others). Remember that intent is rarely the primary consideration to harm assessment. Any alleged absence of racist motive, would not erase the undeniable racist weight here by way of impact, meaning, function, symbolic. Then pause and take it all in. I will not engage or develop this further. I consider this post already an act of generosity.

A few thoughts on mass confrontation I want to return to mass as terror, mass as in an undistinguishable mass of bodies, ‘the shapeless amalgamation of corpses’, to propose an important clinical and theoretical implication: What Afroanalytics makes clear is how what we take as inherently ‘terrifying’ is in large part produced and projected due to the formless shape of the object, rather than because of affect transfer or the unspeakability of experience or silence that surrounds it, as it is usually understood within the field. Although the issues are linked, Afroanalytics shifts the locus of terror towards the relationship between the structural conditions of visibility of the object and the internal impact of formlessness in descendants of survivors of mass atrocities. It is a nuance that changes how we may understand and work with haunting, intergenerational trauma, and ghostly matter. We are not simply inheriting suffering or overwhelming affect. Rather, what is shapeless, unidentifiable and ungraspable becomes ghostly matter through the projection of terror, and not necessarily or because it was inherently terrifying thus unspeakable. We generate ghosts because we cannot clearly identify the object; the object becomes mass. A slight extension/alternative use of Freud’s formation of melancholia, in the context of traumatisation? It is not that we cannot speak to the experience, or that it exceed our capacity to symbolise, it is more accurately because we cannot symbolise what is unidentifiable. It is this formlessness, the inaccessibility of the object which is at least partial, that lead to projections of terror… I think that marks a slight departure from current understandings of intergenerational trauma. I will add this somewhere in my work, but would really welcome comments on this distinction.

Reflections on assessing for racial trauma The workshop on assessing racial trauma is fast approaching, and bookings remain open, so if you haven’t yet secured a place, please feel free to request one below. In light of finalising the Afroanalytic model, I have been thinking more deeply about assessment itself, and the legacy that assessments can bring into the room in relation to colonialism, enslavement, and the racialisation. I’m not someone who is opposed to the use of standardised instruments or structured questionnaires; I want to be transparent about that. They have a place within clinical practice, and I do make use of them occasionally when I feel they may help illuminate something not immediately apparent, or help shape the clinical conversation. But I do think too few of us spend enough time reflecting on the act itself: the positioning of people who come to see us, often in states of distress as objects to measure/size/evaluate, and who may belong to communities that have historically been violated, pathologised and subjugated through some of the very tools; or at least the very processes, we are now attempting to repurpose for healing. A quote often comes to mind from a research project I was involved in years ago with young Black men in inner-city London, many of whom had experiences of psychiatric wards and coercive pathways into care. During one interview, in reference to psychoanalysis, one young man asked me: “Why do you want me to engage with this? Is Freud not the guy who thought Africans were subhuman?” I’m not writing here to rehearse the extensive literature on racism within psychoanalysis specifically, or within psychology and the mental health professions more broadly, though it is something I engage with. But I suppose I am pointing toward two connected issues. Firstly, even where people may not have been formally educated on the coloniality or racism embedded within these disciplines or lack the language, traces of those histories and ways of thinking remain within communities. There is often a collective or inherited memory of being measured, classified, observed, diagnosed, and interpreted through systems designed to inferiorised. This too forms part of the conversation around intergenerational and ancestral trauma. Secondly & linked to this, many of the standardised tools we continue to use were historically implicated in projects of racial classification, particularly around intelligence, cognition, and IQ. This history is entangled with attempts to legitimise racial hierarchy and colonialism. Standardisation has never been neutral. Beyond the neoliberal technocratic aspiration, there also exists a broader ideological project linked to the racial contract and the normalisation of whiteness. So the questions for me becomes: do we speak to that legacy? Do we consciously hold it in mind in supervision, formulation, and clinical reflection? Do we wait until brought up? How do we make space, where appropriate, to think with patients about what may be brought into the room by way of collective or community memory around assessment and evaluation? And what do we do with this knowledge in contexts where many of the systems within which we operate as mental health professionals and psychotherapists still, in many ways, reproduce aspects of those same discourses, even if in more subtle or institutional forms? These are not arguments against standardised assessments. Rather, they may be invitations to think more critically about what assessment can mean symbolically, relationally, and historically, depending on who is sitting in front of us, how we ourselves are positioned, and the context within which the assessment is taking place particularly when the issue we are working with is racial traumatisation. Please join us on May 25. Book here: racereflections.co.uk/events…

My good people, We have received a large number of booking requests for the community seminar on assessing for Racial Trauma on 25 May 2026 (18:30–20:00) Zoom We’ll ask ourselves: What it may mean to assess racial trauma in a system that produces and reproduces it and; explore; 
• systemic, cumulative & intergenerational trauma
• unconscious dynamics in the assessment (transference & countertransference)
• culturally, socially & power-aware approaches to care This is a space to think, reflect, and question practice, keen to get community members and those in non-clinical roles onboard. So far 90% bookings are from clinicians and we’re grateful but we know those exposed to racialised violence are rarely referred to therapy for this, and plenty of community members work therapeutically with racial trauma without formal knowledge or qualification… Rich experiences which rarely get airtime. We could all benefit from skills share and we all things to learn from one another. 
 This is a central ethos of the Certification programme. Remember Afroanalytic is based on scholarly work as much as informal conversations with community members & elders in my family. Please do not feel because you are not a clinician you have little to contribute. Join us! More info here: emea01.safelinks.protection.…