Racial Trauma
The Cumulative Impact of Everyday Racism
Trauma from racism comes in many forms, from the sudden shock of overt violence, to the cumulative effect of smaller slights. I’m going to focus on the latter for this post.
These slights can be microaggressive questions like “where are you from? No, like originally?” or “your English is so good!” They can be a vague sense of being ignored, or somehow treated differently than others. This can come in a lack of representation in movies, government, or even in your career field. These can be obnoxious jokes and stereotypes, or on the “positive” side, being seemingly given more respect or authority based purely on race.
How do you respond to these? Some of us ignore these, say we’re not really bothered, while quietly seething with resentment. Some are filled with doubt about our own perceptions - did they really mean it that way? Am I being too sensitive? Some of us combat every instance directly and with intensity. Options abound, but all require a person to respond in some way, and just having to respond can create a burden that has longlasting impacts.
How Racialized Experiences Shape Our Sense of Self
It’s important to remember that trauma is really about the affect on your mind and body more so than what the traumatic event or events are. When we’re talking about trauma from racism or racially charged experiences, we’re considering the impact on you - your emotions, your thoughts, your sense of self, your relationships with others. Trauma therapy in this context requires a deep and careful account of your lived experience, along with attending to your nervous system responses.
The reason it is so crucial to emphasize your thoughts and feelings is that racism erases subjectivity. It covers over the uniqueness and nuance of who you are, replacing it with stereotypes and tropes. The point is less about labeling things as racist, and instead about recovering your sense of self.
Over time, these experiences can shape our personalities, our predominant ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in the world. Maybe we become increasingly docile, people-pleasing. Maybe we become depressed and shut down. Maybe we are filled with consistent anxiety, perceiving threats at every turn. Maybe we lash out with bitterness and hostility.
The broader public discourse about race tends to flatten race and racism into simplistic understandings, binary splits, like black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, racist or antiracist. The irony is that this is precisely what racism itself does - simplify people into stereotypes, objects, enemies.
When these incidents, experiences, and dominant modes of thinking are the norm, we can’t help but be influenced by it. This is one of the most insidious aspects of racism - that it affects how we view ourselves. When we internalize these stereotypes and rigid ways of thinking, we can get stuck in them, limiting our view of ourselves and others. This often comes in the form of seeing ourselves as oversimplified, reduced to a stereotype, a particular way of acting and behaving, a lack of mental flexibility and capacity. We may even perpetuate this by generalizing our own race or culture in reductionistic ways. This can be especially maddening, as it generally happens outside our conscious awareness.
Making Space for the Complexity of Your Experience
The goal of therapy for racialized experiences is not to prescribe a “correct” way to respond, but rather to create the room to actually consider all of this. I think we all need a great deal of space and nonjudgmental listening to explore how we have been impacted by racial categories. We may feel rage, grief, apathy. We may feel numb or bewildered, contemptuous or confused. The reality is, everyone has different experience. There may be broad strokes that are shared by people of a particular race, ethnicity, or culture, but every individual has a different relationship with these experiences, different ideas about their impact, different approaches to responding. And it can be terribly lonely to navigate this without sufficient space to express the complexity of your own thoughts and feelings.
Moving Beyond Fixed Identities Toward a Fuller Sense of Self
You have a dynamic identity, not a fixed one. We often endure so much internal conflict when we feel ourselves to be out of step with the role we believe we’re supposed to play. But what if that role isn’t fixed? What if there’s room to be smart and high achieving in some ways, and average or even unskilled in others? Or ways to be quiet and humble, but also fierce and aggressive? Or strong and stable, but also tender? A helper, but also in need of help? A victim, but also a perpetrator? Being minoritized and underprivileged in some ways, and highly privileged in others?
A more expansive, nuanced view of self is a freer one. Not conflict free, not having somehow rid oneself of anxiety, but getting to be more than others see, and that we sometimes see in ourselves.