Robert Seymour Wright is a queer, African Nova Scotian Social Worker and Sociologist whose 35year career has spanned the fields of education, child welfare, forensic mental health, trauma, sexual violence, and cultural competence. Robert was recently a keynote speaker and panelist at the Justice as Trauma 2024 conference in Vancouver and left an insightful and inspirational impact. Listen now to hear how racial trauma informs the Black experience, the Indigenous experience and the racialized experience - and how stress (namely caused by racism) cannot just be resolved or remedied in one lifetime. For more on Robert and his work, please visit: http://www.robertswright.ca/ AND remember you can see him at our next Justice as Trauma Conference 2025 in Vancouver from March 17-19. See www.myrnamccallum.co for updates or subscribe to email notifications so you can grab an early bird rate when registration opens!
Exploring Racial Trauma and Transforming Justice with Robert Seymour Wright. Join Myrna McCallum, a Métis Cree lawyer and passionate advocate for trauma-informed lawyering, in this compelling episode of The Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast. Myrna sits down with Robert Seymour Wright, a queer, African Nova Scotian social worker and sociologist, to discuss the profound impact of racial trauma and the importance of integrating trauma-informed practices within the legal profession.
Robert shares his remarkable journey and insights, shedding light on the systemic challenges faced by Black and Indigenous communities. He delves into the significance of Impact of Race and Culture Assessments (IRCAs) in the justice system, highlighting their role in addressing systemic racism and promoting fair sentencing. Robert's candid reflections on his personal experiences and professional mission provide a powerful narrative on resilience, advocacy, and the transformative potential of trauma-informed approaches.
Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the intersectionality of racial trauma, the importance of community, and the need for holistic support systems. Robert's engaging storytelling, combined with his profound knowledge and humor, makes this episode a must-listen for anyone committed to fostering a more equitable and compassionate legal system.
Myrna McCallum: I'm Myrna McCallum, Metis Cree lawyer, and passionate promoter of trauma informed lawyering. Welcome back to the Trauma informed lawyer podcast, folks. Season two. I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum. Trauma informed lawyering. Becoming a trauma informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs, and biases, call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy, guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others, and ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career. Your education starts right here, right now.
Myrna McCallum: I got a treat for you today. This episode is a conversation between myself and Robert Seymour Wright, who is a queer, African Nova Scotian social worker and sociologist. Robert came to present on racial trauma and a number of other things at the Justice Is Trauma conference that we just had here in Vancouver back in April at the convention center. Anyway, that conference was such a hit. Robert in particular was just so impactful and engaging, insightful, funny, all the things that make for a brilliant, amazing, captivating public speaker. And I knew immediately after listening to him that I wanted to have him on my podcast. And I'm incredibly grateful that when I invited him to do so, he said yes. And not only that, as soon as we decided, we're going to have another Justice Trauma Conference, this time running March 17 to the 19th, 2025, also at the Vancouver Convention Center. I knew right away I wanted Robert to come back and be a key speaker for that event, and he agreed to do so. If after listening to this awesome conversation, you're like, whoa, I want to hear more. I want to hang out with this person. Well, you're going to have that opportunity if you decide to come to the Justice Is Trauma conference 2025. Check my website, myrnamccallum.co, for updates. Better yet, subscribe to getting the emails and you'll be notified when registration opens, sometime in September. And yeah, you're gonna love this conversation, so stick around for the whole thing.
Myrna McCallum: Welcome to the trauma informed Lawyer podcast. I'm so happy to see you again.
Robert Seymour Wright: Well, I'm so happy to see you. we had such a good time in Vancouver. It was great.
Myrna McCallum: We had such an awesome time in Vancouver. I have to admit, you know, as a lawyer who's been working mostly in the prairies and on the west coast, I didn't know a lot about you. And it was one of my team members, Joleen, that told me about you and said, oh, you know, if you can, you need to convince Robert Wright to come to the justice trauma conference and come and present. And I said, well, tell me a little bit about Robert. And Joleen told me about IRCAs and your work in IRCAs, and that's how she knew of your work, because she worked with Legal Aid BC for a long time. And so I was like, what is an IRCA? Because on the prairies and here on the west coast, we talk, of course, a lot about Gladue reports. And then, so I got a bit of an education in IRCAs, and then at the conference, you talked more about it. So I want to talk about IRCAs, but before we talk about IRCAs, let's talk a little bit about you.
Robert Seymour Wright: I always say, well, I'm a social worker. That's my academic training background. I sometimes describe myself as a clinical forensic child, youth and family specialist. Clinical, just that clinical piece, you know, that social workers can sometimes be like community development people or into the clinical assessment therapy stuff. That's more me, forensic, just that I work around the law. So that's the assessment and treatment of people who have committed crimes or who have been victims of crimes, including, violence and sexual violence and intimate partner violence. I've worked a lot in child welfare, which is also a forensic environment, because child welfare, of course, is governed by the law and it is the application of the law and child and family. I come from a background where I did a lot of youth work and worked a lot with children, young children, even infants, and their parents and families. But that's my professional background. About me, I'm an African Nova Scotian with deep roots here in Nova Scotia. My father's people go back about seven generations here in Nova Scotia, probably part of the Black loyalist wave of Black immigration from the US. And my mother's people are more recent, going back to the civil, war period. So about five generations back on my mother's side, I grew up in a largely single parent home. My mom had six children, by different fathers who kind of stayed long enough to contribute more children to the family situation. But my mother raised us all alone, six children, five of us living. My oldest sister had a bit of a wayward life and was murdered when I was in high school and I'm the second youngest. I have a younger brother, six years younger than me, and my other four siblings were all older. So we grew up poor in the inner city of Halifax in the north end, and were moved in the early seventies to, public housing outside of the core of the city in Spryfield, where I was raised in public housing. And, the five living siblings, I think three of us are exceptionally close. Another one of us has, I, guess I would say a complicated mixture of mental illness and substance use that's caused him trouble. And we have another brother who has, I'd say, distanced by virtue of some of the difficulties he's experienced in his own family. I think that that's just. But, the three of us are still very tight. My nieces and nephews from all of my children, my siblings are still integrated in the family and my brother just hosted, my younger brother just hosted a family barbecue. So we're all still quite tight and we're all here in Nova Scotia, which is quite beautiful. I've tried to stay and live mostly here in Halifax or Nova Scotia. I've studied away. I did my undergraduate work in Massachusetts, my graduate work in Washington State. I did my clinical training at the Washington State Penitentiary and worked in the shoe there, that housed mentally disordered offenders, protective custody and death row inmates. So I went there to get a deeply forensic experience because I thought that those guys had something to teach us about how we treated them when they were children that resulted in them finding their way to the Washington State Penitentiary. So still I took a child, youth and family lens into my work at the shoe at Washington State, Penn. And, yeah, so I was married to a woman for twelve years. I separated and divorced, and I often will describe it as after my divorce, I switched teams and have dated mostly men or male identified persons for the last, oh, my goodness gracious, 22 years or so. And I have two children, one a child from my marriage and the other a child who is, biologically my nephew. One of my brothers, who I said was troubled, one of his children came into care when he was five months old and he came to live with me, after spending two days in a foster home. And he's been with me ever since and he's 21. And my kids live together in a home that I own. And I am currently living and have for the last four years been living in a home that was owned by my godparents. I moved into that home to look after my godparents when they were in their final years of life. But my mother, who lived in that home, so I could look after all the old people under one little roof. And, they died in my godfather in 2020, my mother in 2022, and my godmother in 2023. So that was an intense family journey of looking after those folk. But I had watched my mother look after her dying father, her dying aunt, her dying uncle, her best friend, her last partner. So I guess they say you do what you see. So, I watched my mother do that and I just did it. It's kind of like raising children, when you're done with it, you don't know how you did it, but you did it. Yeah. So that's a bit about me. And, I say, professionally, I've spent the last 35 years in a very diverse career. I've worked in education, as a counselor, as a race relations coordinator. I've worked in child welfare as a frontline person, as a supervisor, as a clinical assessor, and as an executive director of a child welfare jurisdiction here in Nova Scotia. And I've worked, at the children's hospital here in the child protection unit and worked for government as the director of the child and youth strategy. But I knew at the time I was not going to be a career civil servant. I went for a worthy project, and when the project was complete, I peaced out. And then for the last, I don't know how long it's been now, but over ten years, I guess, I left government, noodled around in some postgraduate studies while expanding my private practice and eventually establishing a community based nonprofit mental health clinic called the People's Counseling Clinic. And, that clinic is where I continue to work now. I'm no longer the Executive Director. I recently stepped down and I'm now the director emeritus. But they keep me on salary here to do bits and pieces of things. And any work that I do that brings income directly, that income goes to the nonprofit. So for the entire time that I've worked in that nonprofit, I've been subsidizing its operations because I often earn, more than my salary in the run of a year, consulting and doing those sorts of things. So it's happy, it's a very happy thing to have a nonprofit that is expanding the mission that is my life. And we, have now, in addition to myself, five full time, clinicians and a full time and a part time administrative assistant support. It's a forensic mental health clinic. We work a lot with people who are victims or perpetrators of violence or at risk of using or being victims of violence. So it's a lot of trauma work, a lot of work with marginalized folk. We have a lot of clients who are Black or otherwise racialized or Indigenous, and a lot of 2SLGBTQI+ clients. And, as you know, I also was a founder of the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute. and it's there that we've placed all of the work related to IRCAs that I do. Yeah.
Myrna McCallum: You are so interesting, Robert.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yeah, well, it's long winded, but, that's the whole arc.
Myrna McCallum: The whole, like, your life is so interesting to me and, there's definitely a lot of points that you shared that I can totally see myself. I think probably a lot of, like, I think the Indigenous experience and the Black experience, there's a lot of parallels. And, you know, being raised by a single mom, I'm a single mom. I've got three kids from three different baby daddies. And when people are, like, giving me a look about it, I'm just like, I like diversity. Okay.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yeah.
Myrna McCallum: I don't want all my kids to look the same. And that's using my explanation for that. But I'm curious about a lot of things that you mentioned. Hopefully, I'm going to be able to weave all of those kind of curiosities into our conversation today, but I think you might answer some of those questions with some of these broad questions I'm going to ask, beginning with, why did you choose to become a counselor? Why social work? Why counseling? Why working with traumatized people? What was the draw for you?
Robert Seymour Wright: Oh, that's a good question. I think that from very, very early age, like six, I knew I was going to be a helper and a people helper, like, not a fireman, not a police officer, a person who worked with people to help people with people problems. And I don't know why. I think as poor as we were and as chaotic as our family was, I mean, our life was touched by violence and substance abuse. And my mother was still the woman on the block who fed all the children, right. She was the person who. She was like a neighborhood mom. We lived in the one place in the north end from the time I was born until I was maybe four. And then we moved to another place, not far away, just maybe five blocks away. And I woke up the following day in that house, having lost several siblings, because I thought that all of the children that ate with us and slept with us were all my siblings. But no, they were the children who lived in that tenement house that my mother cared for because their parents were either working or had problems. And so my mother just allowed those children to sleep with us and eat with us. So I said, where's Aaron? Where's this one? Where's that? Oh, mom had to explain to me, Aaron is actually Aunt Peggy's son. Oh, I didn't know that before we moved to. So I think that I knew, and I was leaning in towards caring for people because of my mother's example. And that, I think, was further cemented because as an inner city kid, my salvation was YMCA day camps. And I went to day camps when I was very young. And I say I was raised by the YMCA, and then I became a camp counselor in day camps and then a camp counselor in residential camps. And I think then my fate was sealed. Like, I'm a child and youth guy work with young people. So I think that's what it is, my family influence and then that early recruitment into caring for other children. And even though I was the youngest, the second youngest of my mother's six children, I had a lot of nieces and nephews that lived with us. So, I was changing diapers not long after I got out of them and loved it. I just loved, caring for and being with kids.
Myrna McCallum: That's such an awesome story. You know, you mentioned earlier in your introduction you talked a little bit about, like, your mission. And I get a lot of people asking questions about mission and purpose, and I don't know that I offer good advice when people ask that question, like, how do you find your mission? How do you find your purpose? There are people in their sixties, who asked me this question because they are still feeling purposeless or confused or whatever it might be. Do you have any advice for those folks?
Robert Seymour Wright: I don't remember ever sitting down and kind of deciding on a mission, but I would say that I have been the target or the subject of other people's missions. Right. You know, I've got two degrees. I've did all my grade school education in the public school system. I've done some postgraduate work. I have been nurtured and taught by some of the most wonderful educators on the face of the planet. And when I was in their classroom and under their influence, it was clear that they had a mission, and I was the target of that mission. When I went away to school, I did my undergraduate degree in a place called Atlantic Union College, it's in Massachusetts. It's since given up its charter and it doesn't exist anymore. But it was an institution there, and the Director of the social work program there was a woman by the name of doctor Susan M. M. Fenton Willoughby. She was from the Virgin Islands, a diminutive little Black woman who always wore three inch heels. And, her first degrees were in chemistry, and she worked in Massachusetts and worked with the team of scientists that developed oral contraception. And then during the civil rights movement, she said, my people need teachers so she went back to school to become a teacher, and she started teaching at the university. And after a while, she said, after the civil rights movement and that kind of development period, after the civil rights movement, she said, my people need social workers. So, this woman who had a PhD in education, went back to school to take a master's degree in social work so she could start a social work department at the university. And then, when I met her, she was studying public health because she wanted to do more research in public health. That woman had a mission. She was, a Black woman who understood her place in the world, and the mission to tool other Black folk and young people. The university was very diverse. Not only 30% of the population was Black, and another almost 20%, were Latino. I studied under a person whose mission in life was palpable, and I think it infected me. And I understood that being trained as a social worker and even just living your life cannot be undertaken as a selfish endeavor that so many people have poured into me, that if I weren't pouring into others, I would have to apologize to a pantheon of mentors that, frankly, I do not want to confront them. You know, if I were living a selfish life, my mother and Dr. Willoughby and several others would conspire from the grave to come back and slap me back into alignment.
Myrna McCallum: That is awesome. That is awesome. I love this story that you told, and it gets me thinking about, well, I lately, I've been thinking a lot about what are the questions? Like, what is the question I need to ask? As opposed to thinking about all the things that I think are missing or all the things that are needed. I'm trying to figure out what are the questions to ask? And I think that for anyone who is struggling with mission or purpose, maybe the question to ask is exactly what you said. One is either, what do my people need? Or how can I be of service?
Robert Seymour Wright: Yes. We have a saying in our family. My godparents used to say, the realization of a need is the call to service. So, if you can see it, there is a reason why Creator opened your eyes to it, and it's not to passively give up your thoughts and prayers. Right?
Myrna McCallum: Yeah.
Robert Seymour Wright: Because, you know, I don't see everything. In fact, I've had to manage my life. Like, kind of. I manage my news intake. Because, not that I want to be ignorant of what's happening in the world, but I do not need to be and I can't actually cope with daily bombardment of images of horrific occurrences that are happening a world away from me, when I have no capacity to influence there directly. So the things that I see, I engage with. Now, don't get me wrong, I engage in activism in terms of political activism and social activism, and trying to spread the word about what kinds of government dispositions we need here so that Canada can take its proper role in the world. But unless I'm suiting up to go to Ukraine and I don't have a responsibility there. My responsibility to the Ukraine is to support people here understanding how Canada should show up there. And I do that work, but that work does not require me to bombard myself with images. What I do see on my commute every day is the increasing homelessness here in Halifax. What I do see in the course of my work is, as a clinician, you get to see how individuals lives are being impacted by things like intimate partner violence, sexual violence, gun violence, poverty and the like. So seeing those things, I am then called to make some contribution to solving those problems.
Myrna McCallum: I agree with you. You know, the genocide that's happening now, particularly in Palestine. I know the images that were coming out, like a few months ago were pretty graphic and disturbing. I intentionally was not viewing any of those images, but some folks on social media really were. And then they were reposting, and I was, like, starting to unfollow, unfollow and unfollow. Not because I don't support the you know, the life and the justice and the liberty for the Palestinian people. I do, definitely. But I, like you, feel that I have a responsibility to myself and my own spirit, my own wellness, and my own community here to ensure that I'm well enough to do what I can with what I do here, so that I'm not allowing all of that to come in. Because if I'm witnessing particularly violence happening against children or, the murder of children, like that could break me easily, and then I become immobilized. And so I love what you're saying, because part of it, some people might say, oh, that's self care. But I also. I think it's a little more than that. It's being really intentional about what you are taking in and what you are exposing yourself to. Right. It's so important. People need to be conscious of what they're witnessing.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yes. Well, you know, it's interesting because from a trauma perspective, right, a dramatic event is not automatically traumatizing to us. A dramatic event is traumatizing to us if the event overwhelms our coping capacity. And, part of coping is engagement, right? So, we've all seen this. We're driving along the highway and a car goes down over the bank in a dramatic car crash. And there are people who will pull over and jump down the bank with a blanket to try to do what they can to help the person who's been harmed. And then there are people who will stand on the bank and watch. The after effects of having participated in that dramatic event, the people who got down and tried to help actually will experience less trauma than the people who stood on the banks and only watched. Bystander trauma is in some ways, more problematic than participant trauma because the people who got down on the bank, they were engaged. And so they saw the traumatic thing, they had a flight fight response, and they engaged out of that response. Whereas the people standing on the bank just stood there and allowed this trauma to absorb into them without doing anything with it. So I think that we can harm ourselves by being passive bystanders to trauma, to dramatic and tragic things. We can be traumatized by them by standing by. So if you're going to observe stuff, don't do it passively. You've got to turn it into a project of action, or else you're at risk of more harm than if you just watched it.
Myrna McCallum: Absolutely. And what you're explaining makes total sense to me as somebody who, like, I adjudicated Indian residential school claims for, a number of years. And one of the interesting things that I found is somebody who's a lawyer. I don't have a social work background. I don't have a counseling background. But one of the things that I saw that I thought was really curious and what you just said kind of ties it all together, is that when children were being abused, particularly in the presence of others, I would meet those adults who were those children who were being abused, and they would talk about it in a way where they seem to have cleared that wound or dealt with it or, you know, the impact just didn't appear to be so impactful, at least not anymore. But then I would sometimes interview the witness to what happened. That individual was completely devastated. Their life took a whole different thing, and it was something they could never, ever get over what they witnessed. This makes sense. This bystander trauma is probably what was happening.
Robert Seymour Wright: I know that, when they were doing those documenting of residential school survivor stories, they had to be very intentional, not only to provide the survivors support, but think about the room full of people, including the people staffing the audio equipment and the video equipment. You know, they needed, they all needed support, definitely.
Myrna McCallum: I hear this from judges, particularly when they are hearing cases involving child pornography, including lawyers like the prosecutors, defense lawyers. They become, they don't think about it, I think at the time, but it's only now in retrospect, you know, especially the older senior folks who are thinking back on their careers are now recognizing how they have been witnesses to other people's trauma and they didn't recognize at the time that they were more than a judge, more than a lawyer. They were actually witnesses. And they weren't just vicariously traumatized, they were directly traumatized. People don't really fully understand the psychological impact or risk that comes with doing particular work.
Robert Seymour Wright: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think we need to recognize that this is very human work. You are a human engaging with other humans about human experiences. we're not robots. We're going to have feelings there. We're going to have emotional consequences to doing this work. If you're in that work and you say, well, I should get some clinical support too, yeah, but you don't start with the stories of the people that you saw in court yesterday. That's not where you start your work. You start with your own trauma. People say, well, I didn't have any trauma. Oh, well, then you're not human. We all have trauma. Most of us, I would say, carry that trauma for our lifetime, but it only negatively affects us in marginal ways. It makes us less of a good partner, less of a good father, less of a good employee. But we still stumble around and manage along and we get by. But if we're doing this work, we have to really heal from our own traumas, to strengthen our capacity to work in the field, to help other people with their traumas. So we have to start by healing our own traumas before we get into healing from the exposure of other people's traumas. And I think that that's something that few of us understand. It's kind of like if you're working in a warehouse lifting things every day, yeah, it's okay to wear protective equipment, but you really should go look after that high school knee injury that you had, because you're lifting boxes every day now. And maybe you didn't need to heal that old high school injury if you were going to be a sedentary worker for the rest of your life, but you're living and working in a warehouse now, so it's time to heal the old wound.
Myrna McCallum: Yes, I love that it's time to heal the old wound. And I think what you're saying is so important to so many listeners because particularly those who are working in justice systems like lawyers and, judges, one of the things that I think law school historically has taught, but I think it's finally shifting now, is that, first off, emotion is the death of reason. And if you were to take that even one step further, some people would even consider themselves devoid of their own humanity or that they need to be in order to do that job effectively. And so that is why you sometimes get these lawyers and these judges who sit there. Totally expressionless trying to be, I don't know, like, AI, just deal with the facts only and that is so problematic on so many levels.
Robert Seymour Wright: I would say this. If emotion is the death of reason, ignorance of emotion is the death of insight. So much that happens in a courtroom is happening below the facts. You've got the facts of the matter and we can take a Joe Friday approach to life. You know that. Just the facts, ma'am. If all we deal with is facts, then we're not really understanding the humanity below the facts. So emotion may be the death of reason, the ability to string facts together and make cold determinations, but if we ignore emotions, then we are devoid of having any deep human insight. What are the facts of this case? The facts of this case is that this person punched this person in the nose, and then this person stabbed this person in the chest, and they died. And this is a manslaughter case. Okay? Those are the facts. What are the backgrounds of those two people? Do they have a shared history? Have they been victims of violence in other times in their life? That would explain why someone threw a punch in the first place and someone responded dramatically with a knife. Now, you may want to keep the adjudication process neat and tidy by ignoring all of that, but then you're no longer connected to a human system, you're in an actuarial equation, and you're no longer adjudicating people, and you're certainly not doing so with any kind of humanity. So if emotion is the death of reason, ignorance of emotion is the death of insight.
Myrna McCallum: Absolutely. I think this is a really good segue into talking now about the Impact of Race and Culture Assessment. Those reports, IRCAs, you said this funny thing at the Justice is Trauma conference that we had here in April about how if people were to Google IRCAs, you probably get orcas, because they're just so. A lot of people don't know about them. So can you tell me a little bit about this background, how you've come to do this work, and what your view is of the importance of IRCAs?
Robert Seymour Wright: Sure. Well, I guess it goes way back. Of course, I told you a little bit about my trajectory. I'm Black. I've been poor in the inner city. I've seen lots of real Black experiences. The reality is, in this country, no matter how wealthy you are, if you're Black or Indigenous, you're not even a single degree separated from the tragedy of our histories. That's just the reality. So I've been a guy who's working in the justice field, in the mental health field, and I've been doing a lot of that work. And in 2012, lawyers started coming to me to say, Robert, I need some help, I've got this person, they're about to be sentenced, I got the pre sentence report. The pre sentence report doesn't express at all anything about the lived experience of this person. Can you help me out? I've got a prosecutor who's just gunning for a heavy sentence, and the pre sentence report doesn't help me. So I would talk with them, and eventually I started writing reports that were a type of presentence report that is designed to help the court understand the impact of the person's race and culture on their life. And that talks about systemic racism, talks about what their race has meant in terms of the communities they're connected to, and perhaps even sometimes the dysfunctions that occur in that community. Right. Residential, displacement and lack of stability, early experiences with violence, and all of those things that I say often typical of the Black experience in Canada, although, you know, there's regional differences and certainly immigration differences, but, to be Black in Canada is to have a Black experience. And, so I started writing these reports, and the first reports never saw the light of day in court. They were used as tools by defense attorneys to then have dialogues with prosecutors to see if the prosecutor could then work with the defense attorney to arrive at more or fair joint sentencing recommendations. So the first several reports I wrote, nobody ever saw, other than the lawyers and the client. And I called them Impact of Race and Cultural Assessments, because that's what they were. That was the part of this person's history that they were designed to shine a light on. And then, of course, we had the R v X case in 2014, which the prosecutor didn't play ball. And so the report actually had to be tabled as evidence and I testified on it. So it really came out of this recognition that there is systemic racism in sentencing in Canada, that Black and Indigenous and other marginalized people are overrepresented. Their sentences are higher than their White counterparts. And this is a tool to help judges understand that and try in their sentencing to avoid doubling down on the systemic racism that people have already experienced. So, I guess that's where they came from. And I point it out all the time, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a clinician. But there would be no Impact of Race and Culture Assessments if conscientious lawyers didn't go looking for the tool to help their clients. So I give a lot of credit to lawyers for motivating the creation of this tool.
Myrna McCallum: How commonly used are they and what is court's response to these IRCAs reports now?
Robert Seymour Wright: Well, I think initially, prosecutors were afraid of them because they were unknown and judges were unsure how to respond to them as evidence. But that the first one to go to court was in 2014, and now it's 2024. We've had an entire decade in Nova Scotia for getting our hands and our arms and our minds around this. And I would say that they are largely being embraced here as an essential tool to help courts in their process of sentencing Black folk. In fact, there are two cases currently involving IRCAs that have been decided at provincial appeal court levels. Here in Nova Scotia, there's the Anderson case, and in Ontario, there's the Morris case. Anderson is the better judgment, in our view. In my view, certainly. But essentially, our appeal court said it's absolutely essential that judges take into consideration the location of a person when sentencing. And that for African Nova Scotians and people of African descent in Nova Scotia who have this unique and particular history, to sentence someone without an IRCA might actually be an error in law.
Myrna McCallum: Wow.
Robert Seymour Wright: So the appeal court essentially has said if you're a sentencing judge and you don't have an IRCA and you don't pay attention to the racial issues, you're going to be appealable. Right.
Myrna McCallum: Wow.
Robert Seymour Wright: And so even though here, some, you know, clients have the right to waive the production of an IRCA, because it does take time, judges are still required to take note that the person they're about to sentence is an African Nova Scotian or a person of Black African ancestry, and that they have considered this in their decision around sentencing. And Anderson also said that not only do you say that you considered it, it's kind of like a kid taking a math test. Don't give us the answers. Show us your work. Right. And so the courts here are requiring judges to show them the work of how they've applied their considerations of race when making a decision. So that's where we are now after ten years of IRCAs.
Myrna McCallum: And where do you want to see it go? Like, where do you want to be ten years from now? How do you want to see the courts treating these reports?
Robert Seymour Wright: Let me ask. Let me answer first where I would like to see us go eventually.
Myrna McCallum: Yeah.
Robert Seymour Wright: I would like to imagine a world, a Canada, in which there are no Gladue reports, there are no IRCAs, because there is no evidence of fair and unequal treatment of Indigenous people and Black people in our, system of justice, and that we have a transformed system that is about caring for the people, for all of the people in all of the communities that are attached to a matter of harm. That's my pie in the sky dream. and when you think about that in that world, that system doesn't look like an oppositional, Eurocentric person with persons with wigs and robes adjudicating over people's lives. I don't know what it looks like, but it doesn't look like that. Having said that, on the path to that journey over the next five and ten years, I would like to see IRCAs be universal. I would like to see in every jurisdiction, capable clinicians, writing these reports regularly informing the court of the needs of the people who are in front of the court. I would like to see the needs that are expressed in those reports powerfully reflected in the recommendations for community sentences that are adjoined to community sentences, so that people are being directed to the services to address the concerns that are seen in those reports. I'd like to see a more robust and culturally responsive sector of service providers. And I would like to see within CSC, Correctional Service Canada, and provincial facilities, I would like to see, on the inside, similar services. I would like to see us using the information that we're gaining through this practice, having more powerful crime prevention and public safety initiatives that are addressing the concerns that we see in these reports. I would like to see us have post adjudication re-entry programming that is much more reflective of and attentive to the needs. Yeah, there's just. Yeah, I'd like, to see the tentacles of this knowledge permeate all elements of the justice system in Canada.
Myrna McCallum: Tell me a little bit about your perspective of the adverse childhood experiences study and whether racial trauma, intergenerational trauma, historical trauma, like, what the relationship is to that particular study. Because everyone talks about ACES Roberts so, like, I want to hear about aces from a Black man, from, a queer Black man. Like, yeah, let's have that conversation.
Robert Seymour Wright: You know, it's. It's one of those things where it doesn't exist until science tells us it exists. The bottom line of aces is this. If bad things happen to you in childhood, it's going to affect your life outcome. Did the elders in your community know that? The elders in my community knew that, and that's why they were attentive to caring for children, right?
Myrna McCallum: Until the children were taken from them.
Robert Seymour Wright: Absolutely. I'm talking, you know, it is ancient knowledge in our peoples, right?
Myrna McCallum: Yeah.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yes. I mean, until the children were systematically taken out of community and the love of extended family and all of that. And, you know, for my people after, you know, when our we were taken from our homeland and weren't allowed legally to have families because they were just bodies that were owned by someone who could dispatch those bodies in any way they liked, regardless of how people were connected. So but I say that that's the first thing that it's kind of duh. Yes, it’s the things that happened to us in childhood follow us for a lifetime, clearly. So that's the first thing I say. But then I would say that the ACES study has simply given the formal systems that decide how and where resources are distributed and applied to have a rationale for that, a reason. So it's obvious, I think, that what the study didn't do so much is understand that for some people, living is traumatic, right? So we are now kind of articulating, did this happen to you? Did that happen to you? Did this happen to you? Did that happen to you? You've got an ACE score. The number of things that happened to you line up and. But for some people, and I'll say, particularly racialized people, living in a racist society, watching television is an adverse childhood experience. But we haven't. The ACES didn't know how to account for counting the erasure of your presence as a trauma, right. The fact that you are living disconnected from your spirit as a trauma, right? Because nothing happened to you. And it's why people say to you, oh, Indigenous people, Black people, can't you get over it. That happened so long ago, as if that didn't happen to you. It's not an ACE that you have suffered. You were not traumatized, you were not sent to residential school. And so I think that the ACES really do not speak to the impact of intergenerational trauma, but are helpful to people who want to look at their own lives and to, I don't want to say look at their own lives, look at their contemporary life, and count the bad things that happened to them. So I think that the ACES doesn't really help us understand these things.
Myrna McCallum: Yeah. And if I understand ACES correctly, it seems to take, like, the view of, like, not just the individual experience, but the individual experience that occurred in your own home. So did you see your parents fight? Did your parents get divorced? Did anyone go to jail? Like, things like this. And it's like, whoa, first off, like, how many of us had a home and how many of us had parents? And. Right, like, so it was very individual focused in your home, whereas it didn't, if I understand it correctly, doesn't really contemplate how the world treats you, how exactly you meet the world, and not just you as an individual, but you as a member of a people or a Black community. You know, can we talk a little bit about, say something that I think that happened, for the whole world to see, being the murder of George Floyd? What kind of impact do you think that has had on communities across Canada and the US?
Robert Seymour Wright: I've always said that White people do not understand racial trauma, and they do not understand the experience of cumulative and affiliated trauma. So when I wake up in the morning, if when a White person wakes up in the morning and they hear that Donald Trump was there was an attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the young white boy, blah, blah, blah, they go, oh, that's interesting news. And then they put on their clothes and they go home, they go on about their business. It doesn't stick to them or resonate with them or disturb them deeply. But when I wake up in the morning and I hear a Black man was killed in the da da da da, right now, I'm thoroughly engaged, right? Because I've been raised in a culture that first of all, makes, it is cohesive. I am joined to other Black peoples. And not only do I have that cultural affiliation, you know, this thing that racialized people have, certainly Black people have it. That within our home, before we leave the house, that is almost the sense of okay, we're both to be under the surveillance of White people. So we got to be clean. We've got to be a certain way, because we're now going to be subjected to the. Ah. And so when we hear the news about those things, we're on edge because we're saying, okay, White people are waking up hearing that news. How are they going to treat me today? it's almost like not only do we feel for that person who was injured or who committed a crime or whatever, not only are we connected to that tragedy, but we're also hyper-vigilant about how the society is going to react to us. And that is very real for us. We feel that very keenly, very innovative, and people don't understand it. And someone will come up to you casually and ask you about the thing that happened, not understanding that it is already resonating with you, and you're already experiencing dramatic stress over it. Because they don't feel that it's just a casual conversation for them, but they don't know that your historical racial trauma, your personal racial trauma, your hyper vigilance of being under the surveillance of White people is on full alert. And them asking you that question over the water cooler at work is just another, mountain of burden that you have to carry. And White people do not walk through life with that degree of tension and stress. And ACES doesn't speak to that at all. That is the thing that is completely invisible to them. Now, when I talk about the racial trauma of Black folk, of White folk, rather, then I'm getting into recognizing that there is a psychological impact that they have. It doesn't look like our trauma. It looks like White supremacist acculturation. A confident belief that their understanding of history is the correct understanding of history, that the people that they recognize as heroes are universally recognized as heroes. The things that they take for granted in terms of the presence of certain institutions is, of course, objectively how society should be organized and what institutions should exist. Right? So when I ask a question, for example, I'll sometimes ask a question of people. How many people here own their own homes? And people will raise their hands and I'll say it was a trick question. The real question is how many people here think they own their own homes because the deed to the property that you think you own came to you through a long succession of transactions that began with a theft? And when I say that to people, that's when I see their trauma triggered. Oh, no, no. I own my house. What are you talking about? That's ridiculous, right? Oh, no, no. You see, you believe that that deed you have is the expression of the objective reality. And when I suggest that there's an alternative way of looking at the world that does not recognize that, you own that. Now, I've triggered your trauma. How do I know I've triggered your trauma? I can tell by how red your face is getting in this conversation and about how much energy you're throwing into resisting my fantasy. Right? That's when we see your racial trauma.
Myrna McCallum: You use this language at the Justices trauma conference I'd never heard before, and I hope I have it right. But if I don't, you'll correct me. You referenced something, I think it was the post master slave syndrome.
Robert Seymour Wright: So we have this thing that we call post traumatic slave syndrome that Dr. Joy Degruy spoke of as, kind of that intergenerational expression of racial trauma that Black people have. And I said, well, if White people have something that's similar to post traumatic slave syndrome, then it must be post traumatic slave master syndrome. And, I've seen it in the literature a couple of times, people using that expression. I only use it because it's interesting to watch White people's reaction to it. Right. But look at me. I'm a Black man. If I can get comfortable thinking about the idea that I carry post traumatic slave syndrome and acknowledge that slavery is a part of my generational lineage, and the shame of that is something I must cope with in my day to day experience, why can't you accept that what you have is the lineage of holding the role of having been the person who enslaved other people. Right. My trauma is associated to the deprivations that my people experienced as a result of being a descendant of slaves. Your trauma is created and representative of you being the person from the lineage of those who had to destroy their own human spirits by being masters of slaves. You cannot own other people and be righteous and whole. There is a part of your humanity you must destroy in order to be in that role. Have you inherited the traits of the denial of those aspects of your humanity? The research hasn't been done yet, but I get an inclination to think that there is something to post traumatic slave master syndrome.
Myrna McCallum: Yeah, absolutely. And I, right now, as we're talking about this, I can immediately hear what's going on in some of our listeners minds. I could hear them going, oh, my family never owned slaves. Oh, slavery is something like the United States did, although that's not entirely true. But I can already see people disconnecting from that narrative that, no, that's not me, that's them.
Robert Seymour Wright: And you remember, one of the indicators of suffering from White supremacist acculturation is what I call the race to innocence. That when confronted with these ideas, a person immediately tries to find a way for them to stand in the place of innocence. Right? So I watched a documentary recently called Descendants, and it's an interesting documentary about the descendants of, individuals who were on the last slave vessel to come to American shores. And it's in the southern United States there. I won't get into the details, but anyway, in the documentary, these descendants of slaves, of these slaves were meeting, and one of the descendants of the captain of the slave ship who brought them, who, of course, then enslaved them, joined the reunion. They were there together. And it was really interesting because here the descendants of slaves meeting with the descendant of the slave owner. And so they're talking about that. And the guy says, well, when I was reading the accounts of Cujo, this guy who was the last living person who had come off that ship, he had said that my ancestor, captain so and so, he was a good man. Was a good man. So, I mean, even though he enslaved people, he was a good man. He was a good man, right? I'm saying, like, how deep is your need to claim some innocence and righteousness that you are going to suggest that your ancestor might have been a slave owner, but he was a good slave owner. It's kind of like a gentle rapist, you know what I'm saying? It's like, let's just pump the brakes on that rush to innocence stuff, would you? And think before you speak. You're talking to the descendants of the enslaved. They're not interested in how good a slave master your ancestor was.
Myrna McCallum: Yeah, absolutely. All of the subject matter. I know, sitting in that room with 300 people who were listening to you, in Vancouver in April, like, everyone was dialed in, leaned in, eyes open, and it was so awesome to watch Robert. And you I love the way when you present similar to me, you'll find ways to bring in not just storytelling, which people really connect to, but humor into what it is that you're saying. And as I was listening to you earlier, talking about what I would say when these things happen to our people, like the George Floyd, you're not just witnessing it, you're re experiencing it, and it's happening in the body that sends you into a state of dysregulation. I think when we talked a little bit about like that. What's happening in the Black or the Brown body? You shared a story about your doctor and high blood pressure, and I can't remember what he said, but if you can, would you reshare that right now?
Robert Seymour Wright: Oh, well, yes. Well, one of my mentors is Dr. Ed Nichols, who is the guy who created a philosophical model for understanding cultural difference, and he's a pioneer in the cultural competence stuff. And, you know, he said, you know, he's in his nineties now. And I called him just the other day and I got his answering machine, of course, because even though he's in his nineties, he's too busy to answer his phone. And I said to him the last time I talked to him, well, Dr. Nichols, how are you doing? How's your health? And he said, he says, well, Robert, he says, I'm in pretty good health. He says, you know, I'm in pretty good health except for the blood pressure. I manage my blood pressure. My blood pressure is a little high, he says, but he says, you know what that is, Robert? White people are trying to kill us. And, you know, I think of myself as an easy going, kind of happy go lucky guy who doesn't really feel a lot of the stress that you would think would accompany this work. But I am managing my blood pressure now. I have to be on. So apparently my body knows something that my mind doesn't acknowledge. And that is that there is a consequence to being in this particular body doing this particular work at this particular time.
Myrna McCallum: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I just turned 51 a couple of weeks ago and I now have to manage my blood pressure. And my doctor had said to me, a beautiful young White woman said, to me, like, Myrna, what has got you so stressed? I think maybe you need to stop, like, whatever you're doing, because now you're having, like, your blood pressure is a little high. And I was like, life, life is stressful. And I think I'm going to come back to her the next time we check in to do my blood pressure. To say, I'm an Indigenous woman living in Canada, I think I'm probably going to need whatever that blood pressure medication is for the rest of this existence. It's not that easy to be saying, oh, don't be so stressed.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yeah, well, I don't. I'm a person. I go to see my doctor every year whether I need to or not. And we were monitoring this over a period of time, and I finally said, give me the meds, give me the meds? She said, well, Robert, I said, look, the thing I really need to change to get this underground. I'm not going to be able to change in this lifetime. Deep breathing and yoga is not going to solve the problems that my body is subjected to on a daily basis.
Myrna McCallum: Yes. And I, similar to you, I came to that conclusion because I was doing the hiking and I changed my diet and I was breathing and it was still not coming down. And I'd even amped up my level of physical activity, and I've even committed more to my better diet. It's still not coming down. And so I'm with you. I'm like, I think that this is something, you know. This life is not going to ever bring me to a place where I feel entirely safe in this body, living in this particular world. So I'm going to need all the help I can get.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, you know, for us to be Indigenous and Black and in our fifties, and honestly, in relatively privileged locations professionally, we're doing phenomenally well compared to the majority of our brothers and sisters.
Myrna McCallum: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I have to say, Robert, I released podcast episode a, couple of days ago when I was in California, because, like, I'm deeply in a state of grief right now. My younger brother died of a drug overdose on the street on the downtown east side. He died in February, but the police only bothered to notify me just maybe a month ago. And, I think part of it is, you know, they saw this Indigenous man and thought, well, nobody loves him. Like, he's just a homeless native man. So didn't prioritize trying to find his family. And it was only because a compassionate foreigner decided to do a bait. Like they had information. My brother, I guess, often talked to the guy he was using with that he had a sister named Myrna McCallum, who's from Saskatchewan, and she's a lawyer. You put all those three things together into any internet search, you get me, and that's exactly what the coroner did. And in April, probably at the time, we're doing justice, this trauma, he sent that info to the Vancouver police and said, hey, I think this is this fellow sister. you should, like, notify her. And they still sat on that until the end of June. And so, you know, before I took off to California, I had to go and identify his body. And, you know, he's been decomposed, like, you know. Yeah, he's been decomposing. And I wasn't expecting that because I think I've watched too much crime shows thinking, oh, you put a body in a cooler and it stays good. That's not actually what happens. Bodies still decompose, albeit slowly. So what I, what I viewed was what looked to be an 80 year old man, and so whose skin was slipping off of his body and all of the things. The hair is gone. And it was traumatizing and it was incredibly painful to be denied the opportunity to see my brother as I knew him in life. And I'm so angry at the police and I'm so angry at addiction. And I'm also, I've got some degree of survivor guilt because, you know, I went to residential school, but I ran away after a year because that's four years older than him. So being twelve years old, I had some degree of, I could hitchhike, I could do. But at eight years old, he couldn’t do some of the things I could do. And, you know, these days I've been thinking, like, why didn't I just join him? Yet I know how important it is for those of us who take a different path to be seen having taken a different path, although right now, in my head, it makes no sense, like, you know, do you know what I mean? So I hear you when you say we're privileged to live the lives that we have because many of our brothers and sisters don't.
Robert Seymour Wright: I think that survival guilt is normal. I mean, when I look, I grew up in the inner city in public housing in Halifax. If I look at my grade six picture, we were all poor kids, Black and White and other ethnicities. There were probably 27 or 28 kids in my grade six class. Two of us graduated from high school on time, and a few others of us graduated from high school. I could go through the list of the numbers that are dead, the numbers that have been incarcerated, the numbers that have had poor, marginal, horrendous lives. But whenever we have been, whenever our peoples have been besieged, enslaved, imprisoned, the community celebrates ever blames those who escaped, because the community lives vicariously through those who escape and depend on those who escape to tell our stories and to keep us alive, to keep even those of us who have died alive. So that in our genes and in our stories and in our lives and in our actions, we are not just living for ourselves, but in a surrogate way, we're living for all of those who did not survive the enslavement, the genocide, the stealing away, the abuse that we have suffered as a people. And it's for that reason that we have an obligation to live good lives but not in a selfish way, because the joy I experience is for my people. You know? It's in our capacity to have joy despite this history and the contemporary experiences that we have today is again a testament to the spirit of our people. So, yes, in a quiet moment when we're reminiscing and we're grieving our loved ones, we will have a pang of guilt, but we dare not stay in that space. We need to stay in the space of joy. We need to stay in the space of activism, we need to stay in the space of resistance. We need to stay in the space of exuberant life because we do this for them.
Myrna McCallum: Yes, absolutely. 100%. I'm going to remember that. When I'm feeling like those low lows, that come and go. I love the way you articulate these, these things. It's just, you're wonderful. And this is why we ask you to come back. We've committed after the resounding positive feedback of the Justice as Trauma conference that took place in Vancouver in April. Like, people were saying things, Robert, like, first off, you were such a star of the whole event. People just kept talking about you. So I want you to know that things, that you said, your energy, your attitude, your stories, they resonated for so many, and you were like a massive highlight of that event. Secondly, people said something that really took me by surprise, which was they found the experience to be incredibly co-regulating. Everyone felt is what I was hearing. We felt safe, we felt connected, we felt dialed in, we felt good. And that blew my mind, because 300 people to achieve that at what, “justice or trauma conference”. I wasn't expecting it. But what was your experience? I know you weren't sure initially about coming because you didn't really know me, but you came. Thank you for doing that. What was your experience of the justice, this trauma conference?
Robert Seymour Wright: Well, I think that you voiced when you said. When you said that the people found it co regulating, I just felt inside me of resounding, Yes, that's what it was. And I think that there's that kinship. Like I said to you here at the justice institute, when we travel about and we are interacting with lawyers and prosecutors and judges and we're traveling and we're teaching, and, every once in a while, you know, we'll be in a space or we'll encounter in people and we look at each other and we go, okay, they're one of us. Like and that's what I felt like. I felt like there was a room full of people who are connected to in some way, serving in or responding to or having been involved with the justice system. But we were of the same spirit, right. Now we didn't share every single idea. I, always say, if you show me two people who agree on all the same things, I'll show you at least one idiot, you know? So we are an intelligent, dynamic, diverse group of people. But there was a shared, resonating spirit that, yes, it was a co-regulating function. My goodness, it was phenomenal. I was so glad. I was. I was so glad I went.
Myrna McCallum: I'm so happy to hear that. And I'm so, so excited and happy to know that you're coming back and coming back for the next one, which we're holding in March, also at the Vancouver Convention center, because part of what I think created that co regulating experience, I think, was the view. The view of the north shore mountains, the sky, the water. Like, I think anytime anyone felt any kind of whatever, you could just look and see the nature. And immediate, like, nature is such a healer, right? And so I think the view brought its healing to our space. And so we're going to do it again at that venue. We're going to do it a little differently this time in that we're going to have fewer speakers and we're going to do more workshops because people wanted more opportunity to network, to connect, to engage with the speaker, to do some workshopy kind of things. And so. So, yeah, so that's what we're going to do next time. And you're definitely going to be a central figure at the next event, so don't let that freak you out, but it's going to be great, and I'm looking forward to seeing you and having you back.
Robert Seymour Wright: Yeah, it doesn't freak me out. It just makes me feel very honored and privileged. Like I said, I considered the people that I encountered there and everybody from presenters to participants as being part of a kinship movement of transforming justice. And so I'll come with bells on. I've blocked all that time in my calendar in red.
Myrna McCallum: Oh, this is so wonderful, Robert, this was such a great conversation. Thank you for taking the time to be on my podcast, for agreeing to be on this podcast. I really appreciate you, and I look forward to seeing you here in Vancouver in March for the next Justice as Trauma conference.
Robert Seymour Wright: Well, I'll be there with bells on. Thanks for everything, Myrna. It's been just a treat to be with.