Race-Based Trauma: A Child Destined for Greatness

Race-based trauma is classified as the cumulative traumatizing impact of racism on a racialized individual. These include individual acts of racial discrimination combined with systematic race systems including historical, cultural, and community trauma. This trauma mostly affects individuals of color and has been known to affect physical and mental health and over time lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. Racial trauma can be a result of many different experiences throughout life including hate crimes; environments with discriminatory practices, and smaller incidents of everyday discrimination, which are known as microaggressions. Race-based trauma falls into four main categories: Structural, intergenerational, historical and cultural, and intersectionality. Structural racism affects multiple systems such as policy procedures and laws that sustain racial discrimination and reinforce racial biases in housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, and criminal justice. These systems reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources. Intergenerational trauma affects the descendants of a person who has experienced distressing events. These descendants exhibit adverse behavioral, psychological, and emotional reactions to events that resemble the circumstances that originally traumatized their older family members. Slavery, the Holocaust, and other genocidal events have resulted in intergenerational trauma, for example. Historical trauma includes the distress of the descendants of a particular community that has experienced major oppression. Examples include Holocaust survivors and African Americans, who were victims of the Tuskegee experiments. Cultural trauma occurs when a horrendous event imprint’s itself on a particular ethnic group’s consciousness and changes their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. Cultural trauma stems from micro-aggressions, stereotypes, hurtful comments, or structural barriers to advancement. Lastly, intersectional trauma, is a unique experience of marginalization that affects African American women who face gender and racial discrimination. Sadly, these experiences are greater than the sum of racism and sexism. Analysis of this trauma is considered to sufficient to address the manner in how African American women are subordinated.