The intersection of trauma

Race Reflections AT WORK

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on a question that was posed to her recently:
"When it comes to racial trauma, don't we bring some baggage that may make us more vulnerable than others, and if so should we address that baggage?"
Building on the work she has done around the intersection of trauma in her book Living While Black and other work by her and others in terms of empirical studies and wider theory, and then applying that to the workplace.
Living While Black: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436
She considers how racial trauma, social trauma or oppression related trauma taking place in the workplace intersects with early life experiences and trauma, or as it's often framed: adverse childhood experiences.
After thinking around the complex factors that surround and underpin these issues she thinks about the ways that we can increase our self awareness and insight, and understand that even if we have had difficult experiences we can build our capacity to remain intact in the face of racism. But that there will always be an impact regardless of the work we do personally.
She councils employers and colleagues not to speculate about people's personal histories and instead to start from a point of compassion and to assume that there's nearly always a reason for the way people respond.
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