Circulating Racial Trauma: How Black College-Age Students Experience and Cope with Police Brutality on Social Media

Police brutality is a major opposing force to racial justice today. While police brutality in the United States is nothing new, the increase in accessibility to videos, images, headlines, and discussions that stem from police brutality has only risen due to the rise in social media usage and the speed at which information is shared. As the views rise, so does the likelihood that Black college students may experience an emotional and psychological response to the racial violence seen and develop symptoms of race-based traumatic stress. Black college-aged students who spend ample amounts of time on social media and engage with police brutality content are more likely to experience episodes of anger, exhaustion, guilt, irritability, avoidance, depression, and fear for their physical safety. These are symptoms of race-based traumatic stress (RBTS), an emotional and psychological reaction to a racial incident, which views racism as a potential traumatic stressor.The aim of this thesis was to use Dr. Robert Carter’s (2007) theory of race-based traumatic stress as a framework to explore the experiences Black college students have when engaging with police brutality content online and investigate the various mechanisms used to cope with the nonstop media coverage and viral nature of Black Death. The use of existing scholarship, including theories, other studies, and primary data gathered from focus groups, provides a fresh angle to the conversation of police brutality and the effects of widely sharing its content via various social media platforms. This study found that Black college-aged students experience’s online when engaging with police brutality content is overwhelmingly negative, the incident occurs suddenly, and the user has no control over the situation. In addition, participants experienced the core reactions of arousal (anxiety, anger, hypervigilance, and sleeplessness), avoidance (pushing the events out of mind and not using social media often), and intrusion (reoccurring thoughts about the incident). It is reasonable to conclude that witnessing police violence online can lead to the development of race-based traumatic stress, as all participants fit its criteria, as outlined by Carter (2007).