Responding to Racism – Resources
Racism is a public health crisis.
At UNC Refugee Wellness, we are working to foster and empower equitable access to mental health care for resettled refugees living in the Triangle area of NC. Through the work we do, we bear witness to the resourcefulness, faith, and strength that our refugee clients embody despite barriers of language, culture, transportation, resources, and past/current trauma.
- Our focus is on helping improve mental health access for refugees in our region, supporting their resilience to barriers faced in our very own communities, and actively advocating for their overall wellbeing and equitable access to happiness. However, in order to do this authentically and effectively, we must consistently acknowledge the ways in which racism, sexism, queer phobia, xenophobia, and other prevalent forms of oppression intersect within our clients’ lives. We must humble ourselves to really hear and see the damage being done to our clients, ourselves, our communities, our country, and the world at large. We must open our eyes to the daily struggle for survival faced by our own fellow citizens as well as the migrant communities we serve. Most urgently, we must actively seek to dismantle racist and oppressive ideologies embedded within the systems we interact with, within our own practices and policies, and, most importantly, within ourselves.
- To this end, UNC Refugee Wellness acknowledges that we have serious progress to make. Some of the ways we have engaged anti-oppressive advocacy are in training our student interns in culturally sensitive, socially just, racially equitable, and anti-oppressive practice. We understand that refugees and immigrants are often forced to flee oppressive regimes within their home communities, only to find that racism and other intersecting forms of discrimination are very much a part of U.S. history, culture, and current policy. Within group support and one-on-one therapeutic practice settings, we hold space for refugees to talk about their experiences and ideas about racism and oppression. Our aim is to listen and, within our capacity, help guide our clients towards creating a meaningful narrative of the injustices they have faced and see in the world today. We also strive to engage our clients in culturally specific spaces through our Community Adjustment Support Groups. These groups aim to encourage our clients to conscientiously take charge of their own concepts of race and discrimination, and, in doing so, we aim to help clients to identify, celebrate, and share their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities.
- Apart from the clients we serve, we also seek to engage with community partners that also serve the refugee community to confront the racism and oppression their clients are facing. To this end, we seek to form partnerships – whether formal or informal – with organizations such as the Movement to End Racism and Islamophobia (MERI), the Tilde Language Justice Cooperative, the Orange County Immigrant and Refugee Health Coalition, and the Jordan Institute for Families in order to build solidarity and accountability in calling out and dismantling White supremacy. We also provide platforms for refugees to share their experiences of racism and oppression in the form of public presentations and publications. We responsibly strive to share these stories with funders and other stakeholders that are important decision makers on what programs get funded and what policies are in place that affect our clients. Most importantly, we partner with refugee-led and other community–based organizations to centralize the refugee experience in our communities and institutions.
- While we do strive to act in solidarity against racism and oppression with the work we do both with clients and community stakeholders, we acknowledge that there is still a severe need for continuing to build our capacity for anti-oppressive practice. For BIPOC citizens, long term residents, refugees, and other immigrant communities, racist policies continue to control who has access to health insurance, housing, quality health (and mental health) care, financial resources – who lives, who dies. The trauma and brutality that continues to be experienced daily by Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color within the United States is not acceptable. Amidst global crises, refugees have fled to the U.S. as a last resort to seek safety and stability. However, no one is safe until racism, particularly anti-Black and Brown racism, is dismantled.
- Racism is woven into the structure of mental health service systems as well – including the way social workers are trained, which modalities are privileged, who is able to access care, and who is providing the care. Since the inception of the UNC Refugee Mental Health and Wellness Initiative in 2013, staff and students have wrestled with such questions as: What are ways our program participates in White supremacy and marginalizing policies? How do we center voices of refugee community members most impacted by inequity without placing undue burden on them?
- Refugee Wellness was developed to help fill gaps in our local mental health system as a way to create opportunity for survivors of torture and trauma to immediately access care that is otherwise seldom available to them. For true wellness and healing, we need more community work and initiatives led by immigrants and former refugees, such as Raleigh Immigrant Community. The Triangle desperately needs more multi-cultural social workers and mental health providers who speak the 27+ languages spoken by current Refugee Wellness service users. Our goal is to see the widespread removal of barriers, an increase in mental health care availability, surges in culturally specific community-developed wellness resources, and language justice. In the meantime, we are committed to listening to and following the leadership of Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, and international experts in mental health to re-envision anti-racist mental health and wellness (especially the folx we engage in therapy, who we know are experts in their own healing journey).
- Sometimes, as individuals and as a program, we fall short. Acknowledging these shortcomings, we are committed to long term anti-racist work, recreating a nation and world where ALL Black and Brown lives are afforded the opportunities and protections that today are sadly reserved for privileged White, Eurocentric, heteronormative male identities. As Refugee Wellness continues to grow and change, accountability and feedback are welcome from all – partners, colleagues, service users, interpreters, interns, and, most importantly, our community members.
Resources for Responding to Racism as a Public Health Crisis:
Below is a (growing) list of resources, centering those developed by Black, Brown, Indigenous, and allied experts:
Trauma Symptoms of Discrimination Scale
Racial Trauma and PTSD Reading List (by Dr. Monnica Williams)