Race-Based Traumatic Stress

Prevalence and Impact

Hope Landrine, Elizabeth Klonoff, Robert Carter, Jessica Forsyth, and their colleagues have indicated that racism-induced trauma is widespread, with reports of 89% to 91% of racial minorities experiencing this. It has been noted that these encounters engender feelings of disrespect, anger, insult, disappointment, frustration, outrage, hurt, and shock and contribute to long-term emotional distress.

Historically, PTSD classifications were restricted to veterans serving in periods of war and women and children who suffered from sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. Increasingly, there has been the recognition that trauma can affect persons of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds across racial, ethnic, and cultural groups and that racism is a specific and intergenerational risk factor for PTSD. It is especially important to study the impact of this trauma on minorities given the heavy baggage of disparities that many face with respect to health and health care, education, salaries, and criminal justice.

But PTSD definitions are too limiting to adequately diagnose the trauma of racism. All too often, these definitions exclude individual subjective reactions and focus on events where the triggering stimulus must be life threatening, be physical, and cause mental disturbance. Eve Carlson has proposed an alternative model with three elements: the appraisal of an event as negative, its occurrence as sudden, and the event experienced as uncontrollable. According to David Crenshaw and Kenneth Hardy, it is not entirely clear, however, if racism functions as a hidden trauma or—as noted by A. J. Franklin, Nancy Boyd-Franklin, and Shalonda Kelly—as an invisible trauma and how the emotional and physical violence may be transmitted intergenerationally.

Racism is a potential predictor of emotional abu-siveness and trauma that is levied by those in society with more power against those with less power. Definitions of racism tend to rob ethnic minorities of their dignity and access to resources but these definitions note the systemic and structural nature of racism that has a sociohistorical context and changes over time. Unfortunately, racially based affective trauma can impose long-term psychological injury on children before they are fully able to understand the social implications of racism.

Because such racism is so prevalent on institutional and individual levels, complaints have garnered denials, minimizations, or the projective operation of accusing racial minorities of showing “hypersensitivity.” This oppressive racism is interpersonal, cultural, and structural because it operates economically and politically through the normal processes of daily social reality, which can make it difficult to discern. Perhaps the most insidious quality of this racism is its internalization by racial populations and the acceptance of negative societal beliefs and stereotypes. The dominant culture is imposed and seen as normal while the culture of racial minorities is viewed as “other” and “inferior.” The internalization of racism produces a stigma consciousness that is not readily discernible but has been adopted and resides in the psyche of targets.

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