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Book Review: Black Fatigue

Editor's Note: This review was originally published in San Francisco Review of Books.

Mary-Frances Winters

Anyone who’s serious about making real and lasting change toward a more racially just and equitable future should read Mary-Frances Winters’s latest book, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body and Spirit.

Racism is real in America. Black American communities have endured and thrived through persistent struggle against systemic racism on many fronts. Intergenerational trauma has caused “repeated variations of stress,” contributing to Black fatigue, the collective exhaustion over the ongoing need to assert the dignity and value of Black lives.

Winters illustrates the many ways that “sublime ignorance” props up white supremacist attitudes that impact Black Americans’ access to educational, economic, workplace, leadership and other opportunities. She combines key learnings from social sciences research with personal narratives that showcase her expertise in diversity and inclusion. Winters offers volumes of evidence of race-based trauma while highlighting awareness about intersectionality, noting the damaging effects of overlapping systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. Winters leverages her deep background in advising top leaders to focus on solutions as she gifts the reader with actionable ways for white people and non-Black people of color to acknowledge and understand their privilege in order to interrogate and change racist systems.



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