On Racial Trauma and Healing

Wed, 02/10/21

KU Staff Senate D&I Committee

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

What is Trauma?

“Emotional and psychological trauma is an emotional response to a distressing event or situation that breaks your sense of security. Traumatic experiences often involve a direct threat to life or safety, but anything that leaves you feeling overwhelmed or isolated can result in trauma.” -- Mental Health America

What is Racial Trauma?

“Racial trauma, also known as race-based traumatic stress, refers to the stressful impact or emotional pain of one’s experience with racism and discrimination. Common traumatic stress reactions that reflect racial trauma include increased vigilance and suspicion, increased sensitivity to threat, sense of a foreshortened future, and maladaptive responses to stress such as aggression or substance use. Further, racial trauma can have a negative impact on individuals’ physical and mental health, including negative mood and depressive symptoms, and hypertension and coronary heart disease.” -- The Family & Children’s Trust Fund of Virginia

How Does Race-Based Traumatic Stress Affect the Body?

“When an individual hears or sees a threat, the brain’s limbic system, or “survival brain”, sends out a red alert signal that releases stress hormones. … Because of the prevalence of racial discrimination, being a racial minority generally leads to greater stress. … Systemic racism, everyday racial discrimination, and the fear of racist events can cause people of color to live in a constant state of red alert. This toxic stress increases wear and tear on the body--the sustained release of stress hormones can lead to multiple health issues including high blood pressure, high glucose levels, and a weakened heart and circulatory system.” -- The Family & Children’s Trust Fund of Virginia

Where Does Racial Trauma Come From?

Stressors can come from many angles:

The daily accumulation of microaggressions.
Experiencing individual racist actions.
The experiences of living under larger systems that perpetuate racism.
Being the direct target of racism and discrimination.
Witnessing racist actions that are targeted at others of the same racialized group.

Consuming media that displays racism and violence, such as the various videos portraying police brutality against Black people, is potentially as psychologically damaging as witnessing those events in person. The accumulated stress and trauma caused by these experiences can end up being transferred to others socially and epigenetically over generations.

How Does Racial Trauma Transmit through Generations?

As Rachel Yehuda, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist studying the lives of Holocaust and 9/11 survivors suffering from trauma and PTSD, summarizes:

There is now converging evidence supporting the idea that offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception. On the simplest level, the concept of intergenerational trauma acknowledges that exposure to extremely adverse events impacts individuals to such a great extent that their offspring find themselves grappling with their parents’ post‐traumatic state. A more recent and provocative claim is that the experience of trauma – or more accurately the effect of that experience – is “passed” somehow from one generation to the next through non‐genomic, possibly epigenetic mechanisms affecting DNA function or gene transcription.

-- Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms

Healing from Trauma

Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of trauma, focuses on how traumatic experiences can lead the body to become “stuck” in unhealthy states. He argues that the path to healing involves practices that free the body from those states:

Trauma is much more than a story about the past that explains why people are frightened, angry or out of control. Trauma is re-experienced in the present, not as a story, but as profoundly disturbing physical sensations and emotions that may not be consciously associated with memories of past trauma. Terror, rage and helplessness are manifested as bodily reactions, like a pounding heart, nausea, gut-wrenching sensations and characteristic body movements that signify collapse, rigidity or rage…. The challenge in recovering from trauma is to learn to tolerate feeling what you feel and knowing what you know without becoming overwhelmed. There are many ways to achieve this, but all involve establishing a sense of safety and the regulation of physiological arousal.

-- Bessel van der Kolk on Trauma, Development and Healing

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

Resmaa Menakem is a psychotherapist and former student of Bessel van der Kolk who applies many of the same body work practices in his therapy. Menakem’s 2017 book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts examines racial trauma through the lens of history, the theory of epigenetics (drawing on the work of Rachel Yehuda), and treatment through mindfulness and body work.

In an interview with Psychology Today, the author says his book is “about our human bodies; about how trauma affects them; about how that trauma is passed down through the generations; and about how resilience and trauma interact. The same bodily forces that make us resilient can also encourage us to harm one another.” […] “What I did was put together pieces—especially in terms of race, trauma, and biology—that are already widely accepted but that others hadn’t put together before. What’s new are some of the practical strategies that individuals and groups can use to address their trauma, day by day.” 

My Grandmother’s Hands is available for free at the Lawrence Public Library in eBook format via the Hoopla app.

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