Racial Variations in the Psychobiology of Trauma

Conceptualization of Racial Identity

As an important part of individuals' social identity (SI), race identity is intertwined with collective emotional experiences and behavioral reactions of certain racial groups. SI is a central part of personal identity, defined as a shared identity derived from membership with social groups, including those of race and ethnicity, as well as of age, gender, and religion. In this view, a personal identity stems partly from its social, cultural, and historical context, such as inherent group values and belief systems, and partly from a given individual's psychological experiences. In the United States, major race groups are identified with their ancestry origins and related heritages, including African, Asian, European, Latino, and Native American. However, there are considerable within-group ethnic and racial variations in all racial groups, such as White racial groups originally from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where most minority Americans come from.

With respect to what is dubbed as “bloodstream” as the chief racial account, historical differences exist in U.S. policy to define Black African Americans versus Native American races. There are also a considerable number of interracial marriages, both historically and increasingly today, in between all the previously mentioned subpopulations. These complexities have made the claim of any “pure” racial group very difficult to ascertain biologically. Therefore, racial identity may largely depend on an individual's self-claimed cultural identity, rather than on percentage of elements in one's genetic inheritance. One of the most important components in cultural variation lies in the individualist-collectivist dimension of the self-concept, compared with other dimensions (e.g., power distance, social structure, relational structure, intellectual autonomy, and social complexity). SI, including racial identity, is thus more apparent in collectivist cultures that have minority roots, based on shared experiences (e.g., appraisal and coping response to social traumatic stress), than in individualistic ones that date back to White Europeans.

For example, the current group identity of African Americans was forged after their enslaved ancestors were forcibly relocated to the Deep South during the slave trade from 1619 to 1865. Likewise, Native Americans' identity was largely shaped by their ancestral homeland but also by their traumatic experiences during forced relocation into Indian reservations. Many Asian and Latino Americans have also experienced various degrees of discrimination in their immigration experiences, as did many African Americans who have been traumatized by racism and poverty in their communities here. Despite such historical and contemporary group traumatization, race as a salient feature of culture was largely ignored in psychology until the advent of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1970s, theories of racial identity regarding visibly racial/ethnic and immigrant groups have emerged, with the earliest models being concerned with explanations of Black American racial identity.

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