Trauma and Repair: Confronting Segregation and Violence in America

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Trauma and Repair: Confronting segregation and violence in America is an interview-based interdisciplinary exploration of complex trauma in low-income communities and neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland; Oakland, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Elaine, Arkansas. Moving fluidly between the respondents life narratives and clinical and academic perspectives on trauma and inequality, Stopford depicts multidimensional and intergenerational trauma, including prolonged economic injustice and repeated exposure to community violence. Written in an accessible and engaging style that draws on insights from sociology, public health, history, legal studies, and clinical psychoanalysis, this original study is a vital addition to the literature on inequality and poverty in the United States.

Reviews

Trauma and Repair: Confronting Segregation and Violence in America is not an easy readnor should it be. A consummate interviewer, antiracist activist, interdisciplinary scholar, and psychoanalytic clinician, Annie Stopford gets proximate with the people whose stories are told in these extraordinary chapters. Boldly confronting the collective disavowals and denials of those of us who live more privileged lives, Stopfords chapters make painfully clear that the conditions that pass for normal in our segregated and deeply racist society are worse than abnormal: they are immoral and pathological. Still, we are awed by the people we meet here, who have all somehow managed creatively to sustain their humanity and love of community while living and working in traumatizing conditions of historical, structural, and community violence. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares to know what it takes to repair our broken social world. -- Lynne Layton, Harvard Medical School; author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Character, Culture and Normative Unconscious Processes
Annie Stopford's work, Trauma and Repair, is profoundly moving, informative, and honest. She refuses to appease America's appetite for euphemistic portrayals of those trapped through the generational legacy of historical trauma by giving voice to those who live on the other side of the privileged wall of society. Instead of more intellectual discourse explaining their situation, Stopford uses her clinical sensibilities to engage those trapped on the lesser side of that wall to express their own life narrative in the hope of building blocks to address the issue of racial injustice. -- Kirkland C. Vaughans, Adelphi University; author of Psychology of Black Boys and Adolescents
Annie Stopford is notable for the clear voice she brings to speaking about subjects many others have turned away from knowing. In this latest work, Dr. Stopford once again leans into the meanings within the stories her interlocutors relatein her hands, these lived histories of marginalization and trauma become painfully vivid. Her telling joins skillful listening with multiple disciplines as historian, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and analyst of class, race and economics. We are offered a rare opportunity to learn the lessons from past injustices that continue to play out in contemporary life. Were we to learn them we might potentiate the opportunity for healing from centuries of racial injury and economic betrayal. -- Nina K. Thomas, New York University

Author Bio

Annie Stopford, Ph.D., is independent scholar.