The Dangerous Impact Of Racial Trauma On The Black Community.

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.

What Is Racial Trauma?

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.

Microaggressions that cause racial trauma include direct individual interactions and experiences of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and nationalism, such as when someone clutches their purse when they walk past a group of young Black men. Having intrusive thoughts, feeling a lowered sense of self-worth or self-esteem, socially withdrawing, or having heightened feelings of anxiety can all be symptoms of racial trauma.

But, it’s important to keep in mind that each person reacts somewhat differently to racial trauma and stress, and will have a different tolerance or threshold to withstand the weight of it.

Structural Racism Structural racism as the multiple ways systems, policies, procedures, and laws perpetuate racial discrimination by mutually reinforcing racial bias in systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, healthcare, and criminal justice. These patterns and practices reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources.

Historical Trauma Like intergenerational trauma, historical trauma is the distress descendants of a particular community, racial or ethnic group, or other group experience because of major oppression that group previously faced. The Holocaust, other genocides, and the intentional maltreatment of Black Americans who were part of the Tuskegee experiments are all examples of events that could cause historical trauma for people in subsequent generations of the affected communities.

Today, the term “intersectionality” is widely used to describe how our various cultural identities, such as biological sex, gender identification, sexuality, class, ability, and race interact with one another to perpetuate various systems of injustice and inequality. Addressing these intersections simultaneously is needed to prevent one form of inequality from reinforcing others.

Coping With Race-Based Trauma and Eliminating Its Sources
Experts say that solutions for coping with race-based trauma must happen on a societal, as well as individual, level.

There’s a structural and cultural environment that allows racism to continue, along with its insidious effects. That’s when safety and healing can occur. Changing the culture and changing the environment depends on people in positions of power at companies and other organizations.

It will require making sure the voices and experiences of Black people and other marginalized racial groups who experience racial trauma are part of the conversation to review and revise policies, practices, and workplace cultural norms that either reinforce or challenge structural racism or bias (such as when it comes to hiring and promotions within organizations).

Racism and the Church: How Should We Respond? - Racism in Christianity.

Jesus said, and the apostles confirmed, that the truth of Christianity was to be preached to all people of every nation. The earliest Christians were mostly Near Easterners and Africans. There is no evidence of racial discrimination against blacks or any other racial groups in early Christianity. The apostle Paul was firm: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28) The New Testament does not mention the color of people’s skin.

The bizarre idea that the Bible curses black people derives from tortured readings of Old Testament texts such as Genesis 9:18-27, in which Noah curses his son Ham and Ham’s son Canaan, decreeing their slavery to Ham’s brothers. In the 19th century, Christian racists made the connection Ham = slave = black, even though the Bible makes no mention of Ham’s color. Racists conflated this passage with Genesis 4: 15, where the mark put on Cain by the Lord was believed, again without any evidence, to be black skin.

Such readings were nothing more than rationalizations for racism. Christianity lacks reference to race: It regards Adam as the common ancestor of all humans and Christ the Savior of all humans. The idea that Christianity is white man’s religion made sense for a limited time in particular regions, such as the West Indies or the U.S. South, where misery was inflicted on millions for the wealth of a few, and where slaves were encouraged to seek release in another world, rather than liberty in this one. Even then, the growth of African-American churches was impressive.

During the 19th century, pseudo-Christian racism was eclipsed by pseudo-scientific racism. The bizarre term “Caucasian” for white people was introduced by the German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) in about 1800. He was followed by William Lawrence, who wrote Short System of Comparative Anatomy, published in 1807; South Carolinian Josiah Clarke Nott, On the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races, 1844; and Robert Thomas Hulme, Elements of Medical Zoology, 1861. There were allegedly three principal varieties of race: Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian. This is why the current knowledge that all races sprang from the same African roots (monogenism) is so socially important: It affirms the unity of the human race and refutes previous scientific belief that different races had different origins (polygenism).

In the mid-19th century, pictures showing the “evolution” from ape to Anglo-Saxon were common. Such ideas became common in America, providing an excuse to condone the exploitation of African-Americans. Even the celebrated moderate Stephen Douglas proclaimed in an 1858 debate with Abraham Lincoln that “I positively deny that he [the Negro] is my brother or any kin to me whatever.” So prevalent were such unchristian ideas in American society that they leached into Christianity. Two rationalizations — the pseudo-Christian and the pseudo-scientific — reinforced one another. The failure of Christians to recognize the full humanity of all races preceded the failure of scientists to do so.

Together, they allowed the enslavement of Africans as well as the subjugation, exile, degradation, and near extermination of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines.

After abolition, the next great struggle against racism began in the late 1950s: the civil rights movement. Enlightenment ideas surrounding the rights of man had a role in the movement, and so did Christianity. Most of the civil rights leaders were Christians and based their opposition to racism on Christian grounds. There were more Christian marches for civil rights in the 1960s than secular ones.

It’s a belief on college campuses today that Christianity is opposed to multiculturalism. This is understandable when college “multicultural” programs exclude only one culture: Christianity. For centuries Christians have debated the degree to which European cultural religious practices should be exported to other regions. Such exports have had limited success, and most Christian missionaries now adapt the religion to the culture whenever central doctrinal matters do not arise. Of course, a few Christians still haven’t realized that racism is totally contrary to Christianity.