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Navigating Racial Landscapes: Wholeness and Wounds

Author(s) : Aileen Alleyne

Reviews and Endorsements

‘Aileen Alleyne writes from the wound. She doesn't write about it or around it. Her insider–outsider stance is not a methodology but a way of being: the body that is simultaneously inside the therapeutic institution and beside it, reading the accommodation from within its own sedimentation. What she calls “listening in colour” is a refusal of the greyscale neutrality that modern care demands of its practitioners. And her unflinching examination of “you make me whole” – the phrase that sounds like love and operates like governance – is one of the sharpest interrogations of the thesis of completion I have encountered. This book asks what it costs to navigate landscapes that were never drawn for your body. It does so with the fierce tenderness of someone who has been paying that cost for decades and has decided, at last, to name the invoice.’
Báyò Akómoláfé, Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Macalester College, USA; Founder, The Emergence Network

‘Passion, politics, and justice frame this thoughtful book. Clear clinical examples enable the therapist to understand dimensions that need addressing in the consulting room and inside of their own – perhaps unrecognised – biases.’
Susie Orbach, co-founder, Women’s Therapy Centre, London and WTCI, NYC

‘Dr Aileen Alleyne’s Navigating Racial Landscapes offers a compelling and embodied exploration of racial experience, drawing on polyvagal theory to illuminate how our nervous systems shape connection, safety, and engagement. Extending these principles through domains shaped by her personal, clinical, and cultural experiences, she brings insight and originality to complex questions, contributing to our understanding of how biobehavioral state influences social engagement in contexts shaped by race.’
Stephen W. Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist, Indiana University; originator of polyvagal theory

‘This brilliant book tells a deeply personal story that speaks to universal truths, written in a voice of liberation, with the heart of a poet and the mind of a highly skilled clinician. It is a must-read for all psychotherapists of Colour who want to understand the torment of racialised labour and its consequences if left unprocessed. It is also a necessary study for White psychotherapists, empowering them towards self-healing through deeper recognition of their “implicated subject” position.’
Kirkland C. Vaughans, PhD, Senior Adjunct Professor, Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University; co-editor, The Psychology of Black Boys and Adolescence