This workshop invites participants to explore the concept of the racial load/burden—the daily cognitive and emotional labour of navigating society as a racialised minority. Drawing on her book La Charge Raciale (The Racial Burden), Dibondo will open the session with a poetic reading that sheds light on how this burden is lived and felt by Black bodies in Europe.
The racial load describes the strategies of survival, avoidance, and accommodation that racialised people develop in response to everyday and institutional racism. It places individuals in a state of tension between how they see themselves and how they are seen by others, an experience akin to the double consciousness described by W. E. B. Du Bois. This burden is not only socio-economic, but also deeply embodied and psychological, and it is rarely named or openly discussed.
Through both poetic and political writing, her work seeks to break these silences and imagine forms of collective emancipation and reappropriation. Her writing draws on Black, Afrofeminist, and radical queer perspectives to reclaim language as a space of resistance, expression, and political imagination.
The workshop will continue with a discussion with Anna Doumbia on the mechanisms that shape the racial load, followed by a collective exchange with participants. Together, the group will reflect on how this burden can be addressed and on practical ways individuals and institutions can act to challenge and destabilise it.
Blending theory, poetry, and dialogue, this workshop offers a space to reflect, share experiences, and imagine more just and hopeful futures.
Douce Dibondo is an essayist, poet, and journalist. She is the author of La Charge Raciale (The Racial Burden) and several poetry collections, exploring Blackness, racialisation, afroeminism, and queerness thought in France and Europe.
Anna Doumbia is a PhD researcher in law at the Université de Nanterre. She has studied at Queen Mary University in London as a visiting PhD researcher. She now works as lecturer in international law at the Institut Catholique de Lille and Université Catholique de Paris (Reims campus). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international law, human rights, social justice, and Transnational legal theory.
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