The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing

A powerful and practical guide to help you navigate racism, challenge privilege, manage stress and trauma, and begin to heal.

Healing from racism is a journey that often involves reliving trauma and experiencing feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety. This journey can be a bumpy ride, and before we begin healing, we need to gain an understanding of the role history plays in racial/ethnic myths and stereotypes. In so many ways, to heal from racism, you must re-educate yourself and unlearn the processes of racism. This book can help guide you.

The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You’ll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you’ll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination.

This book is not just about ending racial harm—it is about racial liberation. This journey is one that we must take together. It promises the possibility of moving through this pain and grief to experience the hope, resilience, and freedom that helps you not only self-actualize, but also makes the world a better place.

Anneliese A. Singh, PhD, LPC, is a professor and associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the college of education at the University of Georgia. Singh is cofounder of the Georgia Safe Schools Coalition to work on reducing heterosexism, transprejudice, racism, and other oppressions in Georgia schools. She founded the Trans Resilience Project, where she translated her findings from nearly twenty years of research on trans people’s resilience to oppression into practice and advocacy efforts. She is author of The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook. She’s delivered widely viewed TEDx Talks, and recorded a podcast for the American Psychological Association on her research with transgender youth and resilience.

Foreword writer Tim Wise is among the nation’s most prominent antiracist essayists and educators. He has spent the past twenty-five years speaking to audiences in all fifty US states, at more than 1000 college and high school campuses, at hundreds of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the nation. He has lectured internationally in Canada and Bermuda, and has trained corporate, government, law enforcement, and medical industry professionals on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions.

Afterword writer Derald Wing Sue, PhD, is professor of psychology and education in the department of counseling and clinical psychology at Teachers College and the School of Social Work, Columbia University. He is a pioneer in the field of multicultural psychology, multicultural education, multicultural counseling and therapy, and the psychology of racism/antiracism.