The Little Book of Racial Healing: Coming to the Table for Truth-Telling, Liberation, and Transformation

"Drawing upon history, lived experience, and the conceptual frameworks of trauma healing and restorative justice, the authors provide concrete suggestions for how individuals and groups can undertake this healing journey. What a timely, much needed and practical book!" --Howard Zehr, author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice and Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice; Director Emeritus, Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice

"Unhealed historical harms embedded in the founding of this nation continue to splinter communities across the United States. Tackling a big topic in a little book, Jodie Geddes and Tom DeWolf offer no easy answers on the difficult topic of racism. But they create a pathway for healing justice that is rooted in the decade-long experience of Coming to the Table--uncovering history (truth-telling), making connections across racial lines, working together to heal, and taking action for justice that restores. For a deeply divided nation, The Little Book of Racial Healing offers a timely and hopeful framework for conversation and action." --J. Daryl Byler, Executive Director, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding

"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

"That the authors have created clarity and coherency about so diffuse yet tangled a subject is amazing--and to do that in a Little Book is doubly amazing! This book speaks truth without condemning, offers hope without denying reality, and honors the core dignity in everyone. They have lived in their writing the path they describe." --Kay Pranis, author of The Little Book of Circle Processes and co-author of Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community

"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