Reading List
We all begin this journey somewhere. For me, the very first book I read that brought clarity and a depth of understanding to learning about Intergenerational trauma was Dr Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She uses language that is accessible and easy to understand. Of all the books listed I would start there.
Not all of the books are therapy based, (J A Rogers's Nature Knows No Color Lines and Trish Cooke's Tales From The Caribbean.) However, most are psychological in nature. Rogers explores colour prejudices and generally how they evolved from issues of domination and power between two physiologically different groups. How these colour prejudices were then used as a rationale for domination, subjugation and warfare.
There are brilliant black psychiatrists, psychotherapists, therapists and counsellors who have written some excellent work! We hope our small introduction helps you delve deeper into our collective unconscious through a culturally appropriate lens!
Ann-marie
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The Burden of Heritage: Hauntings of Generational Trauma on Black Lives (eBook) - Aileen Alleyne
In The Burden of Heritage: Hauntings of Generational Trauma on Black Lives, Aileen Alleyne explores the unheeded dimensions of individual and collective identity trauma. She expands on her striking concept, the 'internal oppressor', that inhibits self-belief, full agency, and potential.
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Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing - Dr. Joy DeGruy
Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome helps to lay the necessary foundation to ensure the well-being and sustained health of future generations and provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of society's beliefs, feelings, attitudes and behavior concerning race in America.
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Nature Knows No Color-Line: Research into the Negro Ancestry in the White Race (eBook) - J. A. Rogers
In Nature Knows No Color-Line, historian Joel Augustus Rogers examines the origins of racial hierarchy and the colour problem. Rogers was a humanist who believed that there were no scientifically evident racial divisions—all humans belong to one “race.”
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Black Skin, White Masks (eBook) - Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices, eventually emulating the 'white masks' of their oppressors, it established Fanon as a revolutionary anti-colonialist thinker.
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Book TitleThe Wretched of the Earth (eBook) - Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of postindependence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other.
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Tales from the Caribbean - Trish Cooke
A collection of favourite tales gathered from the many different islands of the Caribbean, one of the world's richest sources of traditional storytelling. From the very first Kingfisher to Anansi the Spider Man, these lively retellings full of humour and pathos, are beautifully retold by Trish Cooke.