Racial Trauma Research Articles

The contribution of social media toward racial trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder in Black Americans: a forensic perspective

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been a barrage of social media posts about police brutality toward Black Americans. While the posting of police brutality videos on social media can certainly have a positive impact on legal cases and public policies, what effect does the exposure have on the mental health of Black Americans? This article uses a review of the literature to investigate the reasons why Black Americans can be significantly impacted by exposure to police brutality videos. It also includes a case study of a Black American male who developed posttraumatic stress disorder in response to such videos in the context of a forensic evaluation.

The recruitment and retention of teachers of colour in Wales. An ongoing conundrum?

AbstractThere are a disproportionate number of teachers of colour (ToC) in Wales in comparison to pupils of colour. Teachers are less ethnically diverse than the pupils they are teaching with only 1.3% of teachers categorising themselves as being from a non‐White background. This paper sets out findings from research investigating recruitment into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and the career progression of ToC in Wales. Through a qualitative case study approach, employing participant voice, it gives participants a platform to articulate their experiences. Sixty‐eight semi‐structured interviews took place and participants were a mixture of 14+ learners and serving teachers/leaders, all from diverse backgrounds. As a multi‐ethnic research team ourselves, we were aware of issues that participants faced within the Welsh school system, either as pupils or teachers, and were committed to carrying out the research, employing an empathetic lens. This was especially relevant as participants were relaying incidents of racism and racial trauma suffered, as well as sharing their achievements. This provided us with rich data, detailing lived experience and gave an insight into the unique experiences of teachers of colour, within a predominantly White school system in Wales and as a result, suggests what needs to change.

The Impact of Racial Trauma on Black Students’ College and Career Outcomes: An Antiracist Approach

Black students experience a unique form of pervasive trauma based on their racial identity. Discrimination—a social determinant of health (Social determinants of health)—results in racial trauma that negatively affects students’ college and career outcomes, such as career adaptability, career thoughts, career decision making, and postsecondary attainment. We share recommendations for school counselors to adopt an antiracist and trauma-informed approach to implementing career development interventions that address SDOH-related challenges for Black students.

A confusion of tongues: Trauma, fantasy, and dissociation in Lacanian theory and the imperative for social change

Discussions of treatment and recovery from child sexual abuse often focus on the therapeutic aspects of speech and witness. Using concepts from Lacanian theory and from Sandor Ferenczi’s account of child sexual trauma, this article argues that speech and witness are not, in themselves, sufficient to facilitate recovery. While misogyny and violence are embedded within the available symbolic contexts within which survivors must attempt to recover, social and political change is needed to enable recovery for survivors of sexual abuse. Implications for recovery from other socially sanctioned traumas, such as racial trauma, are explored.

Reimagining Education

In this paper, a Principal and two lead teachers describe the ways their school community has reimagined the learning environment at their NYC urban, public, K-5 elementary school throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020 they were forced to immediately switch to fully remote learning, a platform they had never previously experienced. Since then, they have engaged in hybrid and now fully in person learning through a worldwide pandemic. The school community, whose focus before the pandemic was on social emotional learning and culturally responsive pedagogy, utilized those practices and the strong relationships between staff, students and families in order to persevere. The pandemic disporportionately impacted communities of color, like the one this school community is located in. Other inequalities such as food insecurity, job loss, sickness, financial strain and death impacted the community. Racial trauma and political unrest that was exacerbated during the pandemic also placed a toll on the school community. The staff, families and children of the community joined together with a mission to support one another, strengthen relationships, practice self care, address trauma and crisis, tackle unfinished learning, and focus on celebrating the community wherever possible as a way to find joy, survive and thrive.

Creating a Sense of Belonging in the Context of Racial Discrimination and Racial Trauma

Creating a Sense of Belonging in the Context of Racial Discrimination and Racial Trauma

On Structural Racism and Mental Illness

On Structural Racism and Mental Illness

Using Community-Based System Dynamics to Address Structural Racism in Community Health Improvement.

Structural racism is a profound determinant of health resulting in pervasive health inequities for people of color. Despite the recognition of structural racism as a complex, dynamic system, we lack a shared vision of the system that would enable identification of solutions for equitable systems transformation. Through a public health-led community health improvement planning process, a cross-sector consortium implemented community-based system dynamics to provide a systems science lens to guide efforts to eliminate structural racism. In group model building sessions involving diverse stakeholders, community-based system dynamics was used to bring together cross-sector stakeholders to create causal loop diagrams of the system of structural racism. Participants identified potential leverage points for actionable focus to eliminate structural racism. Causal loop diagrams of structural racism generated through group model building demonstrate complex dynamics in the areas of criminal justice, education and economic opportunity, health and health care, quality of life, racial trauma and healing, and a promising system transformative solution through perspective transformation. Community-based system dynamics, employed in the context of local community health improvement planning, engages stakeholders in systems thinking through sharing lived experience to create system maps of structural racism and identify leverage points and transportable solutions that foster health equity. These informal maps serve as the foundation for formal computer simulation models that will guide systemic action on high-yield, community-driven solutions to eliminate structural racism.

The Skin of Our Teeth, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i>, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

The Impact of Racial Trauma: A Crucial Conversation in Rural Education

The Impact of Racial Trauma: A Crucial Conversation in Rural Education

Human and Professor: Using Trauma-Informed Pedagogy to Reimagine Teaching in the Wake of COVID-19

In recent years, trauma-informed pedagogy has begun to grapple with the ways in which structural oppressions such as racism and colonialism are themselves reproduced through the neoliberal university, greatly impacting student learning. Through this lens, the denigration of Black Language within discourses of standardized English or the absence of Black academics on a syllabus are shown to be much more than mere symptoms of bias or oversight. Alvarez and colleagues explain that such factors actively reproduce an environment in which racial trauma risks being triggered for students of color, who may then find it much more difficult to learn. In my own field of composition, this situation has long been recognized by anti-racist academics calling for the celebration of Black Language as a matter of both racial justice and pedagogical necessity

Compulsory interracial intimacy: Why does removing the ethnicity filter on dating apps not benefit racial minorities?

This paper reflects on the impact of dating apps’ removal of ethnicity filters on racial minority users. Many scholars, mass media, and dating app users believe that ethnicity filters mark an institutional endorsement of racism which is embedded in digital infrastructure. Accordingly, they have called for the removal of these filters. This advocacy is based on the assumption that expressions of racial preference are inherently racist. In the summer of 2020, many dating apps removed ethnicity filters to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, I argue that racial minorities often express intra-racial desires through ethnicity filters to valorize their own sexual capital, evade discrimination or fetishization, and gain sexual opportunities. Consequently, removing the ethnicity filter makes it harder for racial minorities to connect. Even worse, it creates a culture of compulsory interracial intimacy, exposing minority users to more vulnerability and racial trauma. Moreover, the lack of discussion on whether to remove filters other than ethnicity reveals the negligence of intersecting oppressions on dating apps. Thus, this paper highlights the need to be more attentive to racial minorities’ alternative uses of filters for self-empowerment, and to intersectional oppressions that should be tackled in designing inclusive dating apps.

The Struggle Is Real: Employee Reactions to Indirect Trauma from Anti-Black Policing.

Despite increased media coverage of police using lethal force against Black civilians, little research aims to understand how such events affect employees, particularly Black employees, at work. We draw on spillover—transferring emotions and/or behaviors from one domain to another—to examine how collective, indirect trauma, or trauma experienced by a large group of people not directly involved in an event, affected employees at work. Across two studies, we investigated Black and White employees’ differential cognitive (Study 1), emotional, and interpersonal reactions (Studies 1 & 2) to hearing about police officers’ use of lethal force against Black civilians (i.e., collective, indirect racial trauma). Results from a survey with open- and close-ended questions (Study 1) supported our predictions that Black (vs. White) employees would be more upset about police shootings and would think about, talk about, and be more distracted by these incidents while at work. Open-ended responses revealed social support, seeking advice and comfort from our social networks, as a strategy Black and White employees may use to cope with collective, indirect racial trauma at work. Importantly, support communicating mutual understanding—or shared perspective—was particularly important for Black employees. An experiment (Study 2) further probed the emotional and relational consequences of interactions with coworkers and, counter to predictions, found coworkers who expressed pro-police attitudes (i.e., not communicating mutual understanding) in the aftermath of a racially biased shooting were negatively evaluated by Black and White employees. Our findings provide implications for research on spillover and understanding coworker/team dynamics in organizations.

To be young, conscious and Black: The cumulative witnessing of racial violence for Black youth and families

AbstractThis article identifies the increased exposure of racialized violence against Black Americans directly and via the media as potentially posing a deleterious threat to the emotional health and well‐being of Black youth. We consider this process of cumulative witnessing to be a form of racial trauma that is deserving of adequate attention in family science. Drawing on previous race‐related trauma scholarship, we present a conceptualization of cumulative witnessing that is particularly salient for Black youth and families. We identify both the potential negative effects of increased exposure to racial violence, but also acknowledge the potential for critical consciousness‐raising through the familial process of racial socialization. Racial socialization efforts can also be augmented by clinicians who recognize the stress, emotional injury, and trauma related to racism and seek to address these offenses in a clinical context.

Structural Racism and Suicide Prevention for Ethnoracially Minoritized Youth: A Conceptual Framework and Illustration Across Systems.

Suicide rates among ethnoracially minoritized youth (i.e., youth of color) peak before the age of 30, and striking disparities in access to mental health services have been identified in this age group. However, suicide prevention strategies have yet to fully address structural racism as a mechanism in producing disparities in risk, protective factors, and access to quality effective intervention for youth of color. Such an approach is critical to provide more culturally responsive mental health care. Through an adapted socio-ecological model, the authors propose the Structural Racism and Suicide Prevention Systems Framework and illustrate pathways through which structural racism impacts suicide prevention and intervention for youth of color in the United States. The authors contextualize the impact of structural racism in three key settings where youth suicide prevention occurs: mental health services, schools, and the interface between crisis care and law enforcement. The authors posit that critical attention must be paid to the intersection of mutually reinforcing, interdependent systems rather than to systems in isolation. The authors then propose recommendations to address structural racism in suicide prevention, including macro-level interventions to improve societal conditions, research strategies to inform structural solutions, training approaches to address institutional racism, and clinical approaches to address the impact of racism and racial trauma on youths and families.

Challenging Anti-Black Racism in HBSE: Using Critical Race Theory to Interrogate Traditional Developmental Paradigms

ABSTRACT How do we challenge anti-Black racism within the social work curriculum? As a requirement of all BSW and MSW programs, Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) coursework provides students with foundational knowledge about human development that is essential to theory-driven social work practice. Traditionally, conceptions of human development center the experiences of white, heterosexual, cis-gender young people and label other identities as “divergent” or “diverse,” thereby devaluing the lived experiences of marginalized populations and reducing disparities to a misjudged application of “equal opportunity.” Centering the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) within HBSE course curricula enables us to examine the impact of race and racism upon human development and to challenge anti-Black racism. This article will expand commonly used frameworks (e.g., ecological systems theory, life course theory) to consider how CRT helps us understand the impact of race and racism on human development, and specifically on the development of Black youth. We explore recent frameworks that center Black youth’s experiences and highlight the impact of racial stress and trauma on development from infancy to adolescence. Five social work educators of an MSW HBSE course offer examples of class activities and assignments that enabled students to apply CRT to HBSE topics.

By Any Means Necessary: A Brief Educational History of Black Women and Girls in the United States

The intersection of race and gender can cause the intricacies of some stories to be obscured. This phenomenon is evident in the case of Black woman and their educational history in the United States. This essay seeks to outline a brief overview of educational history in the United States in comparison with the education of Black women at three time periods: The Colonial Era and Slavery, Jim Crow and Segregation, and the Modern Era. It will briefly highlight the differences in educational opportunities during these times. It additionally seeks to present a counternarrative to the whitewashed stories presented within the context of educational history, while highlighting the role of racial trauma in the history and education of Black women and girls. It will simultaneously celebrate the resilience of Black women and girls while acknowledging the unjust system that aided in creating the necessity for this resilience. Finally, this essay will suggest potential future directions for policy and research so that Black women may realize educational equity in the present and the future, despite the injustices of the past.

An Intersectional-Contextual Approach to Racial Trauma Exposure Risk and Coping Among Black Youth.

Black youth experience racial discrimination at higher rates than other racial/ethnic groups in the United States. To identify how racism can simultaneously serve as a risk factor for adverse childhood experience (ACE) exposure, a discrete type of ACE, and a post‐ACE mental health risk factor among Black youth, Bernard and colleagues (2021) proposed the culturally informed ACEs (C‐ACE) model. While an important addition to the literature, the C‐ACE model is framed around a single axis of race‐based oppression. This paper extends the model by incorporating an intersectional and ecodevelopmental lens that elucidates how gendered racism framed by historical trauma, as well as gender‐based socialization experiences, may have implications for negative mental health outcomes among Black youth. Clinical and research implications are discussed.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill

Reviewed by: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill Hollie A. Teague The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History. By Karlos K. Hill. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. 290. Illustrations, bibliography.) In May and June 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt each signed a bill, part of a spate of similar legislation being passed around the country, attempting to control the ways racial issues are discussed in the classroom. Such bills were of particular concern due to their timing, centered around the one-hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. The history of the massacre, in which White people took the lives of approximately three hundred African American men, women, and children, has undergone extraordinary levels of overt erasure and as a result has been largely removed from Americans' collective historical memory. In The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, Oklahoma professor, state senator, and activist Karlos K. Hill challenges that erasure by providing graphic evidence from the scene and in doing so adds meaningfully to the body of scholarship concerned with the horrific events of May 31 and June 1, 1921. Continuing trends attempting to restrict an open and brave acknowledgement of historical traumas, which are becoming ever more entrenched in both Oklahoma and Texas, demonstrate why a book like Hill's is important. In the text, the voices and experiences of survivors are centered and honored rather than dismissed. In the photographs, a heartbreaking and enraging narrative unfolds that leaves little question [End Page 526] that the Black population of Tulsa has been doubly victimized, once by their violently aggressive neighbors set on maintaining White supremacy and again by the gatekeepers of history who have created a false narrative of America's racial past. Quoted in the book, massacre survivor Ruth Dean Nash said, "I was so traumatized by that riot, I don't remember much about anything, except for my terror. I'll never forget that" (224). Indeed, none of us should ever forget what was done in Tulsa in 1921 or what has been done since to cover it up. Stories of what happened when the most economically successful Black community in the United States was destroyed by its White neighbors and a variety of law enforcement personnel may be difficult for many students to process. Viewing the horrific photographs, which make up the major focus of the book, may be exponentially more difficult. Only a teacher or professor sensitive to the realities of racial trauma should assign this book in its entirety, but no educator should ignore it. This work is clearly an inspired and personal endeavor for Hill, who writes in the forward, "As a community and state leader—the only African-American male in the State Senate—I have made recognizing the significance of and honoring the lives, homes, and businesses lost in the most horrific massacre of Americans by Americans a major priority" (x). This book is an important addition to Hill's body of work and to the larger collection of scholarship on race relations in America. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre would be a meaningful inclusion in any undergraduate- or graduate-level syllabus dedicated to American history, a history of the Southwest, race relations, and social memory. It will work best as a supplementary piece, either paired with a text that provides more narrative explanation or alongside a skillful professor's lectures. A reader unfamiliar with 1921 Tulsa will likely not come away from the book with a strong understanding of how events actually unfolded over those twenty-four terrible hours. That reader would, however, be unable to deny the horror of it. For those with some knowledge of the massacre, The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is an invaluable contribution to expanding our understanding, knowledge, and compassion. Hollie A. Teague Dover-Foxcroft, Maine Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

The Traumatizing Impact of Racism in Canadians of Colour.

Purpose of ReviewWhile research has identified racial trauma in other contexts, it is often overlooked amongst Canadian society. Racial trauma occurs as a result of an event of racism or cumulative events over time whereby an individual experiences stress and consequent mental health sequelae. Given that the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and/or Person of Colour) population in Canada is increasing, it is imperative to identify racial discrimination and the subsequent stress and trauma associated with being racialized in Canada, which subjects BIPOC Canadians to various forms of racism, including microaggressions.Recent FindingsThis paper reviews the published literature on racism and racial discrimination that identifies or infers racial trauma as the source of the mental health implications for various groups (e.g., Indigenous people, Black Canadians, Asian Canadians, immigrants, and refugees). In addition, intersectionality of racialized persons is prominent to their psychological well-being as their psychosocial and socioeconomic position are complex. Therefore, this paper both provides insight into the Canadian experience as a person of colour and signifies the need for further research on racial trauma in a Canadian context.SummaryDespite Canada’s emphasis on multiculturalism, racialized individuals are at risk for racial trauma due to prejudice and discrimination. The politicization of multiculturalism has permitted Canada to deny claims of racism, yet the historical basis of established institutions results in irrefutable systemic and systematic barriers for Canadian people of colour.