From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter:
Tracing the Impacts of Racial Trauma in Black Communities from the Colonial Era to the Present.
New book by Dr. Ingrid Waldron
I am excited to share the cover and description of my forthcoming book From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: Tracing the Impacts of Racial Trauma in Black Communities from the Colonial Era to the Present.
The book will be published on November 25, 2024.
You can pre-order the book at Emerald Publishing starting on October 26, 2024 here:: https://bookstore.emerald.com/from-the-enlightenment-to-black-lives-matter-hb-9781803824420.html
You can also pre0order the book at Amazon here:
Ingrid Waldron has done something truly remarkable: authored a definitive exploration of the effects of racism on Black mental health.’
– Jonathan M. Metzl, Author of What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms
Since the Age of Enlightenment, Black bodies have been sites of trauma. Drawing on anti-colonial theory, From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter interrogates how this has shaped understandings of Black life, Black trauma and Black responses to trauma within psychiatry and other mental health professions.
Focusing on the impact of racism on the mental health of Black communities in Canada, the UK and the US, author Ingrid R.G. Waldron examines the structural inequities that have contributed to the legacy of racial trauma in Black communities. Drawing on existing literature, as well as the voices of Black Canadians who participated in recent studies conducted by the author, Waldron uses an intersectional analysis to pinpoint how the intersections of race, culture, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age and citizenship status shape experiences of racial trauma, mental illness and help-seeking in Black communities. Tracing the ideological representations of Black people within psychiatric and other mental health institutions that influence the diagnoses applied to them, chapters also highlight the beliefs and perceptions Black communities hold about mental health and help-seeking.
A timely challenge to the colonial and imperial legacy of psychiatry, From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter demonstrates how the politics of race and psychiatric diagnosis collide when diagnosing Black people and what this means for our current public health crisis.
Ingrid R.G. Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
In There’s Something in The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, Dr. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities. Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova Scotia and Canada, Waldron opens a space for a more critical dialogue on how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context.
The book received the 2020 Society for Socialist Studies Errol Sharpe Book Prize and the 2019 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing.
You can purchase Dr. Waldron’s book here:
https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/there8217s-something-in-the-water