Race Reflections

Summary.

I want to talk about an experience I had in a research role in South London. It was about sixteen or seventeen years ago, where I was engaged in community development and community research. One piece of work involved interviewing people in psychiatric wards in South London, mainly Black men, who had accessed the mental health system through the justice system, a pathway where we know Black men are highly overrepresented. At the time I was quite junior in research, just starting my career in community engagement. I had this idea of asking questions about people’s histories, particularly around hospitalisation and offending. I was trying to understand the pathway they had taken. The research was conducted mostly in focus groups, with maybe ten to fifteen people in each, discussing journeys through the mental health system, secure units, prison services, or other provisions. Almost immediately, I realised that the conversations were not going in the direction I had intended. The participants wanted to talk about the police, unfair stop and search practices, discrimination they faced daily, the ways they were treated in the system. At the time, this was early in my work on racism and racial trauma, clinically speaking, I remember thinking that I would never be able to answer my research questions. I was trying to frame participants’ stories in a way that I thought was relevant to the study, and seriously felt being taken off course. But after maybe three or four meetings in different settings with different groups, I realised that there was a space that was desperately needed. People needed to talk about their experiences of racial violence on the way into the criminal justice system, within the mental health system, and in the community. I share this because I have been reflecting on the origins of my interest in racial trauma, and in many respects these experiences were not planned. At the time, there was little awareness of how coercive treatment or adverse pathways into the mental health system could trigger past trauma and intergenerational wounds. Even speaking about the impact of racism on people’s presentation or distress was heavily controversial. Racial trauma was not mainstream as a frame, and many of these stories had not been shared with clinical teams… The system often compounded Black service users’ experiences rather than alleviating them. On a particular ward, I was asked not to talk about racism by a few anxious Black nurses, while my own white supervisor was supportive. There is a lot to unpack here, not least the possible presence of racialised trauma, vicarious or otherwise in the Black staff. This is a note to myself and to other junior researchers. When you encounter that gap between the questions you want to answer and the stories people want to tell, it is worth pausing and asking whether you are asking the right questions. Often, the community already knows what matters most, and listening to this redirection is part of the research. This reflection also connects back to my later work in Afroanalytics in my thesis. I did not start out wanting to trace African ancestry or examine historical lineage in depth, but the data, the reflections, and the connections I made naturally took me there. These encounters forced me to pay attention to the weight of history, the intergenerational aspects of trauma and resistance embedded in communities. Last week, I presented in that same part of London on racial trauma to aspiring clinicians and students. To see that what I have been hearing and contending with already two decades ago remains a pressing issue was a little depressing. Being taken off course is not a distraction. Sometimes it is the direction you need. Allowing participants’ voices to shape the research, letting all communication shape empirical efforts should be part of any research. It can lead to insights that are deeply necessary for you and others.