evening thoughts: anti-racism & trauma healing

We can do all the inner work in the world and still be collectively unwell if we keep sidestepping racism.

We speak fluently about personal healing. Therapy, regulation, self-awareness. It’s a serious investment, and anyone willing to sit with their own pain deserves respect.

Trauma is not just personal. It moves through systems, through power, through the quiet norms of universities, workplaces, communities. It leaks out. Sometimes subtly, sometimes loud. Sometimes it just plops itself right in the middle of the room like something no one wants to admit came out of our collective arse.

I notice something in myself when I’m in shared spaces and call in a white peer on a microaggression. Not discomfort exactly. More a kind of clarity. A seeing. How quickly things get minimised. How fast the conversation shifts away from the weight of racial trauma and toward protecting comfort.

And those familiar lines show up.

“My partner is brown.”
“My child is Black.”

But we both know that’s not the point. Proximity is not accountability. It doesn’t mean we are engaging with harm, or willing to be changed by what we see.

If healing is real, it asks more of us than self-reflection that stops at the skin. It asks for honesty that unsettles us a bit. That stretches us beyond the version of ourselves we prefer to believe in.

Because how can any of our inner wounds feel truly met, held, and seen, while we keep turning away from one of the deepest, ongoing traumas woven into this country?