Ingrid Waldron traces the psychological scars & medical neglect of trauma in Black communities

Ingrid Waldron is the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, the co-founder and co-director of the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice (CCECJ), and currently a consultant for Canada's Environmental Justice Strategy.

Ingrid Waldron partners with equity demanding groups because their health depends on this thing called structural competency. There is a massive body of research on the impacts of racism and other forms of discrimination on the health of communities and plenty of political and legal force behind recognizing the ongoing lethal effects of environmental racism.

Back in 2020, Waldron collaborated with Elliot Page to turn her book There’s Something in the Water, a study of environmental racism in Nova Scotia, into a feature-length documentary. Her new book, From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: Tracing the Impacts of Racial Trauma in Black Communities from the Colonial Era to the Present, is what we mostly focus on here. The book traces the history of Black racial trauma in Canada, Britain, and the US, but it's also a kind of manifesto, demanding for a politics of structural transformation in biomedicine as a way of moving past the discipline’s resistance to advocating for changes at the root, structural level.

Waldron is saying that because racism places obvious restrictions on the ability of human beings to thrive in their social worlds, it also places an insurmountable burden on the equal distribution of health. I think there are moments in this discussion where it feels like Dr. Waldron might even be satisfied, or maybe just reassured, with the medical community if it could just recognize and respond to racism as a factor that has a huge impact on a person's health. Demanding an anti-racist politics in academia and medical practice, she says that we need to make it standard practice to care about radical structural change, and especially where the politics of race and psychiatry collide.