Little Book or Racial healing: Coming to the Table for Truth-telling, Liberation, and Transformation
Tom DeWolf and Jodie Geddes
Our History
This book introduces Coming to the Table’s approach to a continuously evolving set of purposeful theories, ideas, experiments, guidelines, and intentions, all dedicated to facilitating racial healing and transformation.
People of color, relative to white people, fall on the negative side of virtually all measurable social indicators. The “living wound” is seen in the significant disparities in average household wealth, unemployment and poverty rates, infant mortality rates, access to healthcare and life expectancy, education, housing, and treatment within, and by, the criminal justice system.
“This rare jewel of practical wisdom shows us how to embody racial healing in truth and kinship. It reads with such ease and affinity that you will want to treasure it and share it with everyone you know.” “
—Ruth King, author of Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out
The contents of this little book are big, very big indeed. At this current political moment, we by necessity must struggle. That struggle is often organic. Jodie Geddes’s and Tom DeWolf’s well researched and practiced approach to racial healing asks us to stop and do more than reflect. Their book compels us to, in the words of Alice Walker, start “Healing . . . where the wound was made.” . . . The truth-telling that emerges from these pages brings into view a kind of praxis grounded in decolonial love. Given that restorative justice practitioners often leave out racial justice and racial justice activists often miss the healing parts of the work, this book brings the two together and acknowledges that one cannot exist without the other—meaning, without a racial justice lens, you are not doing restorative justice. In short, liberation requires healing—in particular, racial healing that makes it possible for us to continue the struggle and make steps toward reconciliation.”
—Dr. David Ragland, co-founder of the Truth-Telling Project of Ferguson and Senior Bayard Fellow at the Fellowship of Reconciliation