Three Black Women’s Reflections on COVID-19 and Creative Arts Therapies

Abstract

<jats:p>COVID-19 has revealed underlying social inequities that disproportionately impact Black communities. This commentary offers three different reflections by creative arts therapists on this critical moment of widespread protest, organizing and demands for justice led by Black activists worldwide. </jats:p>

The Limits of Resilience and the Need for Resistance: Articulating the Role of Music Therapy With Young People Within a Shifting Trauma Paradigm

“…The impact of structural racism on health and education outcomes has been demonstrated not only in public health research ( Paradies, 2016 ) but also in recent social and political uprisings against racial injustice taking place globally ( Cave et al, 2020 ). Gipson et al (2020) write, “Racialized violence and multi-contextual disparities are not new; however, they are swelled and this swelling has led to the current eruption of uprising.” Several music therapy scholars have emphasized that without a conscious and active view and understanding of ourselves as racialized people within historical, sociocultural, pedagogical, and academic contexts that have centered whiteness, we will perpetrate racism ( Norris, 2019 ; Leonard, 2020 ; Thomas, 2020 ). Such a position calls into question whether we can simply move “past cultural stereotypes and biases” from within trauma-informed practice ( Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014 , p. 11).…”

Book Review: Jessica Collier and Corrina Eastwood (eds); foreword by Savneet K. Talwar, Intersectionality in the Arts Psychotherapies

“…The impact of this tendency upon practice has begun to be challenged widely over the past two decades, and in recent years especially in music therapy literature published in North America therapy by therapists of colour. However, it must be acknowledged that change towards a widespread consciousness and acknowledgement of the impact of colour and class privilege upon the directions our profession have taken, and who this concerns, has been slow (Coombes and Tsiris, 2020; Gipson et al, 2020; Langford et al, 2020; Norris, 2020a, 2020b; Sajnani et al, 2017; Silveira, 2020; Webb, 2019).…”