Dr. Mindy Fullilove, renowned scholar and social psychiatrist, provides us with an understanding of what has seemed to be a mystery. Why are blacks getting eased out of projects, low and middle income housing, formerly stable neighborhoods where we thrived, educated our children, formed generational relationships and established our identities? And how? Fullilove illuminates the present and the past. Through that light we can perhaps see into the future. Her books are instructive: ” Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It” is one of her six books and many articles on this phenomenon. The most recent, “Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy In America’s Sorted-Out Cities” goes further to provide simple steps that we can take to repair the psychological damage that uprooting causes.
The psychological impact of displacement trauma is identifield in Root Shock with a pattern of “sorting out” shown to be the result of moving people into tighter, more finely discriminated groups – much akin to segregation – but determined by race, class, income, education and perhaps violence. In Urban Alchemy, this sorting out is examined through the lens of what to do about it:a solutions that each of us can employ to help protect those places we care about or ease the effects of displacement so that in addition to losing our more immediate heritage, we are able to repair broken ties and create new ones. In doing this we can enrich our communities despite the clear patterns of disruption of urban areas.
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