Racial Wellness

Informationen zum Autor Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah (she/her) is a racial wellness visionary and healing-informed designer. She has a Bachelor's degree in social welfare from UC Berkeley and a Master of Science in interaction design, where her focus was on creating healing environments for Black, Indigenous, and communities of color. Today, she is the founder of Making the Body a Home, where she designs offerings for the body and home that help people stimulate racial wellness. Klappentext "A guide and workbook centered on self-care, healing, and empowerment for Black, Indigenous, and people of color"-- Leseprobe Prelude My first memories of racism were with my white kindergarten teachers in France. At such a young age, I was unable to comprehend why my teachers treated my white peers with tenderness and me with callousness. And while I was not aware of what racism was at that age, I understood that the biggest difference between me and my peers was the color of our skin. As I grew older, I began to understand how pervasive antiBlackness was. I began to observe, recognize, and dissect the harm that I was facing. Still, I never felt like I had the space to fully express what I was experiencing. It wasn't until I moved to the United States in 2012 to start my undergraduate degree in social welfare that I began to find spaces that gave me the tools to talk not only about racism but also about how it impacts Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Years of research have explored the role of racism on our mental health. The work to highlight racial trauma was led by experts such as the psychologist Robert T. Carter, the psychologist Thema Bryant, and the researcher Joy DeGruy. I had the honor of serving as a consultant on Skindeep (2021), a film about race-based trauma, with Carter, whose work set in motion the conversation about racial trauma in the field of psychology. Carter first used the term race-based traumatic stress in his 2007 paper Racism and Psychological and Emotional Injury: Recognizing and Assessing Race-Based Traumatic Stress. I call racism the multifaceted abuser because it abuses our communities emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. When we practice reframing racism as abuse and racist as abusive, we get a clearer image of the impact racism has on people. Unfortunately, as a society and in psychology, we rarely frame racism as a form of abuse. The cognitive dissonance is so deep that people are often confused when they see the words racism and abuse woven together. This has resulted in a lack of care for Black, Indigenous, and people of color who experience racism. Take, for example, the therapists who know how to help people who have experienced other types of abuse but who are not equipped to help people of color navigate racial trauma. Or the employers who expect people of color to sit through the same antiracism workshops as white people, when, in any abusive dynamic, the person benefiting from the abuse and the person experiencing the abuse need vastly different things. Or even the white people who casually bring up racist events without thinking to use sensitivity warnings in the same ways they would with other forms of abuse. As someone who has always been passionate about using creativity as a portal to liberation, I was curious if there were ways for me to use design to stimulate healing for communities of color. In 2018, I began my graduate degree in interaction design. I spent time conducting research into how to design spaces that provide soft landings for those dealing with racial trauma. I tapped into theory from my social welfare degree, praxis from my design degree, and wisdom from my loving ancestors to reimagine the ways in which racial healing can take place. I concluded that these spaces need to be accessible, educational, and led by people with lived experience. <...

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Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah

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"A guide and workbook centered on self-care, healing, and empowerment for Black, Indigenous, and people of color"--