Psychologists use the term trauma to describe an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster. Racial trauma, or race-based traumatic stress, refers to the specific mental and emotional harms linked to racism and discrimination. The high rate of people who experience racism, and subsequent racial trauma, highlights the need to address the heinous nature of systemic racism in the US. Race-based trauma is serious and can lead to severe effects, psychologically and medically.
Race-based trauma (or race-based traumatic stress) refers to the emotional and mental injuries that result from continued exposure to racism, ethnic discrimination, racial bias, and hate crimes. In the United States, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities tend to be most vulnerable to racial trauma because of the culture and history of racism in the country, but it’s worth noting that any individual who suffers emotionally because of a racist encounter can experience racial trauma. Racial trauma can happen on a micro or macro scale. Macroaggressions that can cause racial trauma include society-level events or policies that discriminate against Black people, such as examples of police brutality, like the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The effects of racial trauma on health and well-being are complex and well documented and can be severe.
For marginalized groups, like Black people and other BIPOC communities, continuous discrimination and racism become a form of chronic stress. Research shows this, as well as that the health consequences of racism and discrimination can be passed down from one generation to the next.
Data from the Jackson Heart Study (an ongoing study that started in 2000, following more than 5,000 African Americans to better understand disparities in cardiovascular disease) has revealed that higher levels of perceived discrimination among African Americans in the US are linked with poorer health behaviors, such as sleeping less and smoking, as well as worse health outcomes, such as higher incidence of obesity.
Part of what makes racial trauma so insidious is that many of the symptoms stem from the fear that similar traumas will happen again. There’s a fear of not just how a person of color may be treated or of an isolated event, but that their safety is at stake and that this can happen again. When you’re mentally and emotionally always on guard like that, it creates a physiological stress response — it produces cortisol, she explains. That’s normal and healthy if it happens on occasion in response to a stressor you need to deal with. But if it’s happening all the time it can cause all sorts of damage to the body and contribute to anxiety, heart disease, depression, and psychological or cognitive impairment.
Read more at Forbes.com.
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