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Racially traumatic events – such as police violence and brutality toward Blacks – affect individuals in and outside of work. Black employees may “call in Black” to avoid interacting with coworkers in organizations that lack resources and perceived identity and psychological safety. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper integrates event system theory (EST), resourcing, and psychological safety frameworks to understand how external, racially traumatic events impact Black employees and organizations. As racially traumatic events are linked to experienced racial identity threat, the authors discuss the importance of both the availability and creation of resources to help employees to maintain effective workplace functioning, despite such difficult circumstances.

Organizational and social-identity resourcing may cultivate social, material, and cognitive resources for black employees to cope with threats to their racial identity after racially traumatic events occur. The integration of organizational and social-identity resourcing may foster identity and psychologically safe workplaces where black employees may feel valued and reduce feelings of racial identity threats.

Implications for both employees’ social-identity resourcing practice and organizational resource readiness and response options are discussed.

The authors present a novel perspective for managing diversity and inclusion through EST. Further, the authors identify the interaction of individual agency and organizational resources to support Black employees.

On June 21, 2021, a motion was introduced to the Australian Senate calling on the federal government to reject critical race theory (CRT) from the national curriculum, claiming that CRT is divisive and racist. This was allegedly sparked by revisions to the national school curriculum, which included a more accurate reflection of the historical record of First Nations peoples’ experiences of colonisation and the framing of British arrival onto the continent as an invasion. This paper aims to overview the omnipresence of Western thought systems in the academy and critiques how knowledge production as a disciplinary practice positions race as a “marginalised knowledge”.

This paper is conceptual and it theorises the morphology and functions of racism within the Australian education system specifically, and across the board. This theorisation offers an invaluable starting point in rethinking how we advocate for and preserve Blac/k scholarship in academia. It examines how the political economy of racism in education offers a transformative position from which scholars can contribute to potential systemic change that promotes racial literacy and racial dignity, and the conditions necessary to foster these changes.

The paper confirms what studies by Blac/k scholars already highlight: that racialised knowledges are marked – as an aesthetic addition or as disruptive – or unnecessary – and how these patterns of colonial desires are manifested in the classroom or in race discourse.

Specifically, the arguments made in this paper examine two undertheorised concepts, namely, “racial dignity” and “trauma porn” to foreground the reimagination of practices that inform racial literacy in education. This offers a helpful starting place to consider how this form of education facilitates ongoing settler colonialism in Australia. The authors then propose an anti-racist pedagogical practice in social work education entailing three core crucial and transformative elements: self- reflexivity, storytelling and collaboration with Blac/k people.

The goal of this review is to conduct an exploratory literature review on trauma-informed approaches in libraries to understand how librarians are discussing trauma-informed approaches and their integration into professional practice.

The author reviewed materials indexed in selected EBSCOHost databases. Included materials from selected EBSCOHost databases were available to the author in full text, in the English language and about trauma-informed approaches in libraries. Items were excluded from this review if they were a review of another work, a thesis or dissertation, or letters to or from the editor.

Twenty-five publications were included in this analysis. Publications included described approaches in school libraries, academic libraries and public libraries. Key topics are racial trauma-informed practices, trauma-informed teaching, resisting re-traumatization, social work and the effects of workplace trauma on the library workforce.

Trauma-informed approaches are gaining popularity in a variety of disciplines as the world copes with the turbulent events of recent years. The practical implications of this review are to explore the emergence of trauma-informed approaches in libraries to understand the current publishing landscape on this topic.

While librarians are writing about this approach and some are incorporating it into their practice, an analysis in the form of an exploratory literature review to summarize this work has not been done. Understanding how libraries are incorporating this trauma-awareness and trauma-informed principles into the work is crucial for identifying the future approach to library services.

The authors describe an original unit plan that draws from local and national concerns for truthful history education about the history of racial violence in the United States. The unit plan contextualizes one impetus for truth and reconciliation in a community with a history of anti-Black violence.

The participants partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative to pilot the unit in their district’s new African American History course. The unit drew on historical research and cultural memory to situate local history within a broader context of racism and violence.

The teachers identified eight goals for the unit so that students could understand racialized violence, acknowledge racism as the lived experience of many of their students, and participate in a collaborative learning environment with productive discussions. Speaking from their own experiences with racism, and creating opportunities for students to do the same, the teachers aided the community in voicing long-silenced memories.

Besides bridging some of the gaps between local, regional, and national histories, more research is needed to further examine historical trauma and its implications for both the past and present, in order to amplify and humanize experiences of racism. Additional research is a critical step in developing more thoughtful, empathic and holistic discussions of history and racism at the local level.

In the wake of the recent past, the authors have learned that teaching about the history of racial violence can be enhanced and empowered by reference to relevant current events. The resurgence of racially charged language and violence over the past few years makes this goal more urgent than ever. This unit gives practical guidance to teachers who face this challenge.

The sociopolitical reality of historical trauma and racism must be confronted, and proximity to key events is important in conveying the urgency of racial violence and the need for history education that addresses it. Teachers are making difficult decisions about their options for teaching about race, and they are understandably concerned about any perceived missteps. Nonetheless, inclusive, truthful history education is an appropriate and essential response to narratives of exclusion and silence as the authors help students to develop deliberative skills concerning difficult topics such as racial violence. Teachers and students, together, can do the crucial work of remembering.

The stripping away of narrative agency, identity and history can cover up stories about the stripping away of life and dignity. In the unit plan, the authors recognize truth and reconciliation—especially in the education of people who have relatively little exposure to topics of race and racism—as elemental to a restorative stance against racism.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept of racial capitalism in the context of academic libraries.

This paper draws on Leong's (2013) extended theory of racial capitalism and identifies how neoliberalism and racial capitalism are tied as well as how it is manifested in academic libraries through tokenism, racialized tasks, consuming racial trauma, cultural performance demands, workload demands and pay inequity.

The article ends with some suggestions in how to address these problematic practices though dismantling meritocratic systems, critical race theory in LIS education and training, and funding EDI work.

The article explores a concept in the academic library context and points to practices and structures that may commodify racialized identities.

The murders of Black people at the hands of police in 2020 have led to global protests that have called on public officials to defund or abolish the police. What has been drowned out in these conversations, however, is the traumatizing aftereffects of anti-Black police violence as a public health crisis. In this paper, I argue that the racial terrorism of anti-Black police violence is a deeply felt wound in Black communities that extends beyond the individuals who directly experience it and that this type of collective trauma must be understood as an urgent public health crisis.

Using published studies and online commentaries on anti-Black police violence and its mental health impacts in Canada and the United States, this paper examines the mental health impacts of anti-Black police violence at both the individual and community levels.

A public health response to the traumatizing aftereffects of anti-Black police violence and other forms of state violence must highlight important policy imperatives, such as policies of action focused on improving the public health system. It must also encompass a recognition that the public health crisis of anti-Black police violence is not solvable solely by public health agencies alone. Rather, strategic opportunities to address this crisis arise at every level of governmental interaction, including law enforcement, health care, employment, business, education and the media.

While the impact of anti-Black police violence on the mental health of Black individuals has been emerging in the literature over the last several years, what has been less focused on and what I address in this paper is how the threat of that violence lingers in Black communities long after the protestors have packed up their megaphones, resulting in collective trauma in Black communities.