Racial Trauma
Racial trauma or race-based traumatic stress (RBTS) refers to the mental and emotional injury caused by encounters with racial bias, the harmful impact of race-related stress, racial harassment, racial violence (including witnessing such violence), racism, hate crimes, and discrimination on mental health functioning. Any individual that has experienced an emotionally painful, sudden, and uncontrollable racist encounter is at risk of suffering from a race-based traumatic stress injury. In the U.S., Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) are most vulnerable due to living under a system of white supremacy.
Like other trauma, like sexual assault, racial trauma shares similarities to PTSD. What's more, most BIPOC may experience not just single events of overt racism but continual and systemic incidents and exposure.
Racial trauma may result in symptoms of poor concentration, depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, irritability, and low self-esteem, and negative self-image (including internalized racial hatred).
Examples Of Individual Racism
Following the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., there were nearly 1,500 reported incidents of anti-Asian racism in just one month. Reports included incidents of physical and verbal attacks as well as reports of anti-Asian discrimination in private businesses.
In 2018, 38 percent of Latinx people were verbally attacked for speaking Spanish, were told to “go back to their countries,” called a racial slur, and/or treated unfairly by others.
Examples Of Systemic Racism
Black people make up 12 percent of the country’s population but make up around 33 percent of the total prison population. This overrepresentation reflects racist arrests and policing as well as racist sentencing practices in the criminal justice system.
Previous and current policies of racial displacement, exclusion, and segregation have left all BIPOC less likely than whites to own their homes regardless of the level of education, income, location, marital status, and age.
Historical occupation segregation has made Black people less likely than Whites to hold jobs that offer retirement savings prioritized by the U.S. tax code. This helps create a persistent wealth gap between White and Black communities where the median savings of blacks are on average just 21.4 percent of the median savings of whites.
Lack of cultural competency in therapy training, financial incentives, and geographical isolation have created barriers in providing appropriate mental health resources in Native American communities. Rates of suicide in these communities are 3.5x higher than racial/ethnic groups with the lowest rates of suicide.
Direct Traumatic Stressors
Direct traumatic stressors include all direct traumatic impacts of living within a society of structural racism or receiving personal racist attacks. A person experiencing an immediate traumatic stressor may be heavily policed or face barriers to homeownership due to inequitable policies. Additionally, a person experiencing a direct traumatic stressor may be the victim of personal physical and verbal attacks or face other microaggressions.
Vicarious Traumatic Stressors
Vicarious traumatic stressors are the indirect traumatic impacts of living with systemic racism and individual racist actions. Vicarious traumatic stressors can have an equally detrimental impact on BIPOC’s mental health as direct traumatic stressors.
For example, viewing videos of brutal police killings of Black people, such as the video associated with the murder of George Floyd, can cause traumatic stress reactions in the people who view them - especially in Black people.
Of Latinx youth that immigrate to the U.S., two-thirds report experiencing one traumatic event. The most common traumatic event reported during, and post-migration is witnessing a violent event or physical assault.
Many Native American children are vicariously traumatized by the high rates of societal homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury experienced in these communities.
Generational Trauma
Generational trauma refers to the traumatic stressors that are transferred from one generation to the next. These stressors can come from historically racist sources, or maybe personal traumas passed down through families and communities.
The chattel enslavement of Africans in the U.S. and other countries continues to serve as a source of traumatic stress for black people today. This sustained collective trauma makes Black people highly vulnerable to developing mental health disorders.
The descendants of Holocaust survivors display an increased vulnerability to developing psychological disturbances in addition to stressors related to Holocaust loss. This vulnerability is in direct relationship to the negative life experience of the previous generation.
Historical trauma shared by Native Americans, including boarding schools, massacres, and forced violent removal from their tribal lands, represents a severe communal loss and source of traumatic stress. Native Americans today continue to experience symptoms of depression, substance dependence, diabetes, and unemployment due to the psychological impact of the trauma.
How Can Therapy Help
Imagine being heard by someone who understands your world and rules. Therapy at Therapy for Women Beverly Hills is essentially the same way. We are competent and diverse in your presenting issues. However, it is a huge benefit not to have to explain or defend yourself overly.
Being you should be free and liberating! Living your purpose with your own drumbeat and sense of awareness can be powerful when you have learned what makes you, you!