Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience

“With honesty, truth, wisdom, and grace, Sheila Wise Rowe brings a fresh and distinct perspective in our conversation on race. The reality of trauma on a social psychological level has been missed in this dialogue, and Sheila is the necessary corrective voice, offering heartbreaking and gut-wrenching stories that still manage to offer hope and healing. I have had the personal gift of sitting under Sheila's teaching, and now you also have that opportunity. Please embrace the opportunity to learn from this much-needed perspective.”

“With a Christian's worldview, a counselor's expertise, and a survivor's personal perspective, Sheila Wise Rowe weaves together her personal memoir with history, social science, and a biblical framework to offer a pathway for healing to those who have experienced racial trauma. She also brings a Galatians 6:2–like advocacy for all who pray for healing and restoration of our brothers and sisters.”

“Sheila Wise Rowe taught me much in this well-written, vulnerable, and heart-shaping book. As the pastor of Sheila's multiethnic church, I've too often wanted to rush my Black and Brown brothers and sisters to forgiveness, ignorant of the process of healing that must surround and support them. Her work here helped me understand something that hadn't clicked for far too long, and I'm grateful. Shining a light without shaming, I read this book and learned from an author who loves her readers, whoever they happen to be. Pick up this needed addition to an all-too-often acrimonious conversation and learn to heal, hear, and walk together as the diverse disciples that Jesus our savior calls his church to be. I want my whole staff to read this, and I recommend that you read it too.”

“As a bicultural Indian American woman, I felt like this book was written for me. For far too long anti-Asian racism and racial trauma among Asian Americans like me have been dismissed as trivial and not worthy of serious address. But in Sheila Wise Rowe's Healing Racial Trauma, every person's story matters, and every racial wound is given equal attention. There is room here for people of every culture, ethnicity, and skin color to learn how to heal from racial trauma and navigate ongoing racism and systemic oppression in ways that can make us more resilient. I felt seen, understood, and empowered, and I know you will too.”

“Healing Racial Trauma is a magisterial gift for those who have suffered harm as persons of color, and it is also a revelation for those whose whiteness has served as a pair of blinders from racial trauma. Sheila Wise Rowe brilliantly exposes, narrates, honors, and calls forth from Scripture, clients, and her own life, the stories of violation and the power of hope. There are few books I have read where I wept and raged and was humbled and offered a vision of what it might be like to fulfill the Lord's prayer: 'Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' This is a must-read for all who hunger for righteousness.”

“I am excited to recommend people of faith pay close attention to the work of Sheila Wise Rowe in her much-needed book, Healing Racial Trauma. The road to resilience is long and lonely. Black people in the United States are often required to believe that we can sprint to strength and that we need not heal from what happened in our history. Sheila's careful surveys of interpersonal, systemic, historical, and transgenerational issues inspire and remind us that there is deep work to do, not simply for resolve and survival but for the sake of future generations. I was especially pleased to note the author's strivings for First Nations solidarity. I appreciated the boldness of each chapter focus and the spiritual connections employed with psychology and critical race theory, not against. This is fearless and much too rare in faith-rooted trauma counseling. I hope that Black Christians, all Christians of color, and their families will use this book as an inspiration, affirmation, and a guide to addressing the bitter pieces of our stories. I expect White Christians to find a resource of patient assistance on their own road to resilience and deliverance from the vestiges of whiteness and its demonic grip on the global household of God.”