Decolonizing Wellness by dietitian Dalia Kinsey aims to help QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folks reject diet culture and restrictive ideas about bodies and food in order to achieve greater self-love and self-acceptance. The author, who identifies as a genderqueer, pansexual person of colour, wrote this book to fill a gap in …
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, whose background is education and who is white herself, looks at racism and why she believes white people don’t want to talk about it. I went into the book knowing that it was popular but having doubts about the effectiveness of the title at accomplishing the intended effect. White fragility …
Blackness Interrupted: Black Psychology Matters by Nicól Osborne and Tamera Gittens is a passionate call for greater recognition of Black psychology, which pertains specifically to the experiences and culture of African American people. The authors explain the multiple barriers that face African Americans contemplating higher education in fields like psychology. They explain the impact of …
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In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the euphemism treadmill. Psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill in a 1994 article in the New York Times. It refers to a process by which words that are used as a euphemism for …
Lately, white privilege has been a hot topic. The people I’ve come across who take a stance against the idea of white privilege seem to have in common the line of thinking that they haven’t been handed anything, so how can they have social privilege? Wikipedia describes social privilege as: “a special, unearned advantage or …
Social Privileges as a Counterpoint to Social Burdens Read More »
Through our shared humanity, all lives matter. So why is it important to say Black lives matter? When lives don’t matter All lives should matter equally. That is the ideal, and probably most of us would agree that it’s the “right” thing. Unfortunately, though, in practice, not all lives are given equal value. An obvious …
To be clear right from the start, as a white chick, I’m not the intended audience of The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health by Rheeda Walker. It’s not that it’s not relevant, but the author is clear that I’m not who she’s trying to speak to. This book is written by a Black woman …
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Not long ago, a photo was forwarded to Time.com from a 2001 yearbook of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who was a teacher at the time, dressed in an Aladdin costume that included brownface/blackface makeup. It caused quite a stir, with some people criticizing him as being racist. Since it’s Halloween, it seems like a …
Halloween, Blackface, and Cultural Appropriation Read More »
Black feminist researcher Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw first proposed the concept of intersectionality in 1989 to represent the many different layers of social stratification that can combine to disadvantage people. This includes factors like race, sexual orientation, social class, age, disability, and gender. Expanding on this concept, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins described the intersectional points as the matrix …
Intersectionality and What it Means for Mental Health Read More »
