Radical Unlearning - by Lewis Raven Wallace (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An accessible exploration into how we can use trauma psychology to unravel and transform our harmful beliefs

In Radical Unlearning, journalist and transgender antiracist activist Lewis Raven Wallace argues that breaking out of the frameworks of thought and behavior we've been taught in our formative years is possible. But what does it take to let go of our most deeply held beliefs and ideologies?

Radical Unlearning explores the many pathways by which people free themselves from feedback loops in their daily lives that are dangerous, supremacist, or simply no longer serve them. Focusing on the stories of people who have unlearned harmful paths of self-reflection, each chapter approaches an interviewee about what conditions made their own transformations possible. Many interviewees refer to practices rooted in the concept of neuroplasticity--the ability to change what and how we think, enabling us to build new capacities and behaviors throughout our lives. Wallace unpacks the latest developments in neuropsychology as they relate to responding to trauma, politicized somatics, and social justice and community organizing.

He learns about his grandmother's struggle to unlearn racism and transphobia late in life; his colleagues and collaborators in organizing and journalism; his comrades in prison; and people with extreme stories of unlearning, including a former white nationalist who is now a trans antiracist, and a former Israeli soldier who now a radical antizionist. Interspersed with these testimonies are discussion questions and exercises to guide readers on their own journey of radical unlearning.

Wallace ultimately discovers the key to unlearning lies in community. In order to fight for collective liberation, we must embrace unlearning as a collective practice available to all.

About the Author

Lewis Raven Wallace (they/ze/he) is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina. He's the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. Lewis was the 2022-2024 Abolition Journalism Fellow with Interrupting Criminalization, a 2021 Ford Global Fellow, and a 2020 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. In 2019 he cofounded Press On, a southern movement journalism collective, and he was also a proud cofounder of Black and Pink Southwest Ohio in 2014, the Chicago Childcare Collective in 2007, and Riot Youth, Michigan's first youth-run space for queer teens, in 1999. When he's not working, he plays the accordion, writes poetry, and spends time with his pitbull named Frankie and his potbellied pig, Dogwood Daffodil.