The International Handbook of Black Community Mental Health

“This Handbook is a landmark in our understanding of the mental health issues which challenge African-heritage populations in Europe (particularly in the UK and the Netherlands) and in North America – countries which imposed slavery on African populations. The racism which survives today is a perpetuation of the values which supported slavery: issues of labelling and victim-blaming continue, and take their toll on minority populations. The 40 activists, clinicians and scholars who contribute chapters to this handbook are well qualified and experienced...."

—Audre Lorde

This well-known and revered quote still gives me goose bumps every time I read it. Audre Lorde captures Black women’s long and arduous history of navigating marginalization and invisibility: to do it all, bear it all, often in silence. Black women’s political acts of resisting and rejecting negative stereotypes, sexism, and racism bear a heavy price.

African-Americans are being urged, not only by the traditional bastions of American power, but by many “successful” blacks as well, to forget slavery, to forget Jim Crow, to forget about all that Africa was prior to the advent of trans-Atlantic slavery. In this far-sighted and thoughtful book, Joy DeGruy adds her voice to those who are telling black Americans to pay no attention to such disastrous advice. Inasmuch as African-Americans are the only Americans whose forebears were

dragooned to America against their will....