Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow by Breeshia Wade

In Grieving While Black, Breeshia Wade recounts the histories of embodied trauma inflicted on Black women in America. Sharing insights into her spiritual practice grounded in Buddhism, combined with her lived experience as a Southern Baptist, Wade advocates for mindfulness as a tool for healing individual and collective trauma perpetuated by injustice, and for defining new narratives of self in relation to others — narratives grounded in self-love and compassion that fail to reproduce self-harm or inflict harm against others.

At Food Solutions New England, where I work as Policy Program Co-Director, we center anti-racism as an essential approach to all of our work. Key to this is for all of us to better understand the grief and trauma that has been inflicted on African Americans, Native Americans, and others as a result of white supremacy culture. As a white professional woman, I’ve found that this book illuminates new understandings about how to attend to grief/embodied trauma as we dismantle the root causes of systemic oppression. I recommend this book to all who wish to cultivate the conditions for spiritual healing and belonging in their own lives, work, and communities.

Recommended by Karen Nordstrom