This volume comprehensively addresses racial trauma from a clinical lens, equipping mental health professionals across all disciplines to be culturally responsive when serving Black men.
Written using a transdisciplinary approach, Yamonte Cooper presents a Unified Theory of Racism (UTR), Integrated Model of Racial Trauma (IMRT), Transgenerational Trauma Points (TTP), Plantation Politics, Black Male Negation (BMN), and Race-Based Shame (RBS) to fill a critical and urgent void in the mental health field and emerging scholarship on racial trauma. Chapters begin with specific definitions of racism before exploring specific challenges that Black men face, such as racial discrimination and health, trauma, criminalization, economic deprivation, anti-Black misandry, and culturally-specific stressors, emotions, such as shame and anger, and coping mechanisms that these men utilize. After articulating the racial trauma of Black men in a comprehensive manner, the book provides insight into what responsive care looks like as well as clinical interventions that can inform treatment approaches.
This book is invaluable reading for all established and training mental health clinicians that work with Black men, such as psychologists, marriage and family therapists, social workers, counselors, and psychiatrists.
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Reviews & Endorsements
“This highly illuminating book offers an encyclopedic examination of the conditions that confront Black boys and men in the 21st Century. Cooper writes in a very understandable and comprehensible way that presents the everyday reader an opportunity to have a complicated topic within their reach. Black Men and Racial Trauma forces us to confront complex realities that many researchers have attempted to downplay as a rosier picture than the data in this book provides.”
“This is a book like no other that I have read. It informs and horrifies about the pervasive effects of racism. We find definitions of racism and are educated about all the different kinds ranging from prejudice to systemic racism and anti-Black racism to white supremacy all embedded in a historical context. The effect of racism on mental and physical health, and on trauma, crime and mortality are all documented. Reading all this solidifies an understanding of the devastating effect of racism, based on empirically-based knowledge rather than on opinion. To add to all this, we are provided with a clinical understanding of racism on Black emotions, especially, shame and anger and helpful suggestions for interventions both psychotherapeutic and social. This is a book for the times.”
“Yamonte Cooper examines the unique ways in which structural racism harms Black men, particularly with respect to exposure to deadly violence and disproportionate downward mobility across generations. Marshalling the best available evidence from social science research, Cooper has produced an unparalleled study of the social injuries inflicted upon Black men and what steps should be taken to prevent continued damage.”
“The challenges of being a male of African descent in America continue to exert a profoundly negative impact on the experiences of Black people generally, but specifically Black males themselves. And yet, if those adversities are only understood at the level of the surface structure, then that analysis fails to capture the deep structured intricacies that impact Black men not only physically, but also psychologically. This text on Black Men and Racial Trauma expertly chronicles the fact that the disruption of Black Men’s intellectual, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual sensibilities is not mere racial inconvenience or bias, but rather a more insidious form of traumatic psychic debilitation and dehumanization. Dr. Cooper doesn’t leave the reader there but expands his narrative to include coping mechanisms Black men employ, and intervention strategies that clinicians, counselors, therapists, and others can use to help Black men not only cope but thrive. This text is a necessary addition to the arsenal on treating African descent people, and I would encourage and recommend that you absorb its content and consider implementing its recommendations.”
“Cooper’s text is probably the most important statement on the connection between race, gender, and stress since the appearance of Alvin Poussaint and Amy Anderson’s 2001 study on the biological, medical and mental health correlates of race-related stress.”
