Racial Trauma in the School System

Naming the Pain

Connesia Handford, Ariel D. Marrero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367139964
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639135
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

Racial Trauma in the School System provides foundational and clinical information for school-based mental health professionals to better understand and address the nuanced experience of racial trauma in their school.

The book focuses on conceptualizing racial trauma and the impact it has on a child's development and academic functioning, providing information on how to look at racially based experiences through a trauma-informed lens. Examining a wide range of racial and ethnic identities, chapters explore critical issues such as ethno-racial identity development and diagnostic classifications to help readers develop a conceptual lens to guide their approach. The clinical application of theory to practice is emphasized using complex case studies and the explanation of practical interventions. This text is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on discussing the impact of racial trauma on children and to discuss the intersection between identity and racism in the school system.

Geared toward school-based professionals, this book considers racial trauma across a wide range of contexts and clinical presentations for other mental health professionals to adapt and apply the content to their clinical practice.

Part One

Conceptual Foundations

1

What Is Racial Trauma?

Introduction

Imagine you’re an 11-year-old sitting in math class when you feel a tap on your shoulder. You turn around and your friend asks if you’ve heard about the woman who was found dead in jail after a routine traffic stop. You say no, so they hand you their phone and you read the story of Sandra Bland. Later in the day, while in the locker room, your gym class gathers around a cellphone to watch the footage of the traffic stop that has been leaked to the media. The kids around you laugh and make comments about how she “should have” acted. You can’t take your eyes off the screen; your stomach starts to hurt.

On the bus ride home, you start to think about how much Sandra Bland looks like your mom and your aunt. You start to think about the last time you and your mom were pulled over by police and remember the way her hand shook as she grabbed her license from her purse and told you not to move. Your thoughts are interrupted by the bus driver telling you to get off at your stop. When you get home, you head to your mom's bedroom to talk about the video you saw, but notice she's already left for work. You try to call her, but her phone goes straight to voicemail; your heart starts to beat fast as you imagine what could happen on her way to work. As you transition to doing your homework, you notice you’re having trouble focusing and can’t remember the lesson from class. When she finally gets home, you feel a mixture of relief and anger. As she starts to check your homework, you start yelling at her about not answering the phone. You’re sent to bed where you toss and turn all night. The next morning you’re exhausted and fall asleep in math class.

The scenario described above is a reality for many children of color in the United States. Traumatic race-related crimes of the last 10 years have brought the issues of racism and privilege to public awareness. Seeing pictures and videos of racially motivated shootings, immigration raids, and overt hate speech in the media has become the norm. While this widespread exposure to incidents of racism is new, the experience of racism and racial injury is not. Many families of color continue to experience traumatic experiences of racial slurs, hate crimes, physical assaults, and daily microaggressions. While adults have the capacity to make sense of their experiences of race and racism, children often have difficulty processing and articulating negative racial experiences. The explicit and subtle messages from media, family, and peers have the potential to impact a child's identity and behavior before they have the ability to conceptualize what racism is. These negative experiences leave hidden wounds which can scar the psyche and impact a child's journey into adulthood if left unaddressed.

Children typically spend most of their day in an educational setting. On average, children in the United States spend 6.8 hours a day at school, totaling 180 days per year (Education Commission of the States, 2018). As children navigate through K-12 education, they meet countless administrators, nurses, school mental health professionals, teachers, security, custodial staff, paraprofessionals, peers, and parents. Each of these interactions has the potential to imprint a supportive, ambivalent, or oppressive experience in a child's life. For many students, school is a place of safety and security; however, for many students of color, the school setting can be a source of distressing race-based incidents. Racially traumatic experiences at school can add new scars, exacerbate old wounds, and add an additional layer of complexity to a child's experience of the world.

Despite the growing research on racial trauma, many children do not receive clinical treatment that is tailored to healing these hidden wounds. Issues of racism are often kept outside the therapy room, which means that many youth suffer in silence. Due to the nuanced nature of this distress, school-based conceptualizations and interventions should be intentional and reflect an understanding of the student's needs. This can be done across the school system with trauma-informed approaches being adopted by administrators, teachers, school counselors, and school psychologists. This book hopes to provide a pathway for understanding racial trauma from a psychological perspective for school-based mental health professionals. Specifically, this chapter will provide an overview of race-related distress, including definitions, supporting research, and a framework for conceptualizing the spectrum of experiences.

Naming the Pain

What exactly is racial trauma? Before introducing racial trauma, it's important to explore the concepts that lie at its core. When discussing issues related to identity, it's important to acknowledge the power of language. Because language can be used as both a tool of inclusion and a tool of oppression, we want to be clear about the terms being used in this book. First, while this book uses the term race, it does not represent the rigid Black/white dichotomy that is often used in discussions about race in the United States. Race and ethnicity are different concepts, with race referring to shared physical qualities and ethnicity denoting geographic qualities. However, despite their distinct definitions, race and ethnicity are intertwined when conceptualizing cultural impact on identity development, exposure to negative events, and areas of growth when creating a culturally informed school system. As a result, when this book refers to the impact of an individual's racial identity, it is referring to the impact of the wide range of ethnic and racial identities that can make up an individual's sense of self.

When conceptualizing the outcomes of negative ethno-racial experiences and helping others understand how they may be contributing, one must have an understanding of the terms used to describe the initial triggering stimuli. These experiences, known as negative racial experiences, are the real or perceived interpersonal slights, discrimination, humiliating or shaming events, and threats of harm or injury focused on one's ethno-racial identity (Comas-Diaz, 2016). Negative experiences can come in various forms ranging from covert bias to overt hate crimes. Discrimination, prejudice, and bias are often used interchangeably when discussing interpersonal dynamics. We posit that this is problematic as it denies the inherent power that these terms carry. By interchanging words, one semantically denies the reality of that individual's experience. By understanding the difference between each concept, one will be more equipped to identify, understand, and empathize with the experience of the impacted individual. Bias is the proclivity toward a certain idea. This can influence prejudice, or an unjustified attitude toward or judgment of others. One's prejudice can then manifest as discrimination, which is the unjust or unfair treatment of people of a certain group related to one's bias and prejudice.

Microaggressions, or the everyday behavioral and verbal injustices that send hostile, derogatory, and/or invalidating messages to people of color, are another type of negative racial experience that is seen across environments and amongst all ages (Comas-Diaz, 2016). Microaggressions are often the result of underlying or unconscious bias, which means the perpetrator may be unaware of the hurtful messages that they are sending. However, an incident being identified or treated as a microaggression is not contingent upon the intention of the perpetrator but rather the impact experienced by the victim. For example, while the statement “you are pretty for a dark-skinned girl” may be stated with intent to compliment, the impact of it is likely to be hurtful and reinforce the stereotype that darker skin is ordinarily not attractive. Despite the intent, actions that demonstrate microaggressions, prejudice, and discrimination are imbedded in the context of racism.

Now that we have discussed the language that helps identify negative racial encounters, we must explore the language that helps describe the potential impact of the aforementioned concepts. Again, we come to the question, what is racial trauma? We argue that the psychological impact of negative racial encounters exists on a spectrum, ranging from racial injury to racial trauma. On one end lies an individual's internal and/or external distress to the event, known as racial injury. At the other end is racial trauma, or the experience of being psychologically traumatized by the event. It's important to note that because these terms exist on a spectrum, there is no rigid categorical line that separates the two experiences. Nor should one's experience on it be thought of as stagnant for any one event or a series of events. Racial injury and racial trauma can result from encounters experienced directly or vicariously, as an individual or as a collective. As we mentioned earlier, language is important and has the power to alter an individual's narrative of an experience. As such, because the line between racial injury and racial trauma is fluid, we will use the term racial trauma to encompass the entire spectrum of potential psychological experiences of negative racial situations. Mental health professionals should in turn use both a cultural and trauma-informed clinical lens to determine where a child's presentation falls on the spectrum and respond accordingly.

Racial trauma can exist at multiple levels: the individual level, group level, community level, and cultural level. Within these levels, the trauma can be experienced directly or indirectly. Indirect racial trauma can be present in the form of cultural or community trauma. This occurs when a trauma is endured within familial, historical, or sociopolitical contexts that elicit discriminatory or violent behavior toward one's racial group membership (Helms et al., 2012). For example, in 2014, when Eric Garner was murdered by the police, the impact was felt throughout Black communities in the United States. At the community level, anger, pain, and confusion fueled discussions and protests as individuals addressed the racial trauma that stemmed from the incident and subsequent trial. On the individual level, many struggled with feelings of hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, and avoidance. These trauma symptoms are still experienced today as people of color grapple with how their racial identity intersects with safety, cultural worth, and well-being.

As the frequency of negative racial events increases, so does the intensity of the trauma felt. This can then lead to insidious trauma, which people of color may experience as a result of the cumulative and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART ONE Conceptual Foundations
• 1 What Is Racial Trauma?
• 2 The Impact of Racial Trauma on Identity Development
• 3 Culture in the School System
• 4 Adjusting Your Clinical Lens
• PART TWO Clinical Application
• 5 General Guidelines for Addressing Racial Trauma
• 6 Racial Trauma and the Mental Health Professional
• 7 How to Assess for Racial Trauma
• 8 Racial Trauma and Consultation
• 9 Advocacy in the School System
• PART THREE Special Topics
• 10 Guidance for Caregivers
• 11 Social Media and Racial Trauma
• 12 Racial Trauma and Police Brutality
• 13 Racial Trauma in Immigrant and Refugee Families
• 14 Racial Trauma and Play Therapy
• 15 Racial Trauma and Bibliotherapy
• Index