Trauma Survival & Anti-Racism

Anti-racism work and trauma work are not self help, self improvement, or self care, these are vital processes that require long-term investments of time, patience, and action.

Who do you want to be?

I have been thinking a lot about trauma and how we can repress or relive it during periods of stress. I wanted to write something to encourage non-black people who are feeling intimidated by anti-racism work, especially people with cognitive disabilities or neurodivergence that can make stressful or violent topics really overwhelming. I am not writing this to promote myself as an exemplary anti-racist or advocate. I am rather trying to honestly convey the things I have learned in my personal anti-racism, privilege, and trauma work. Most importantly, that the learning is never done, and coming to terms with how one benefits from white supremacy and anti-black racism requires the same type of critical honesty and personal accountability as trauma work. Developing and practicing skills for one set of issues can benefit the other, and in some cases they are intertwined.

As I am writing this, the U.S. is undergoing a cultural shift and people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds are in the streets demanding that cultural, educational, social, and government institutions consider, and dramatically change, their role in perpetuating anti-black racism and oppression. A lot of my friends who are black or people of color are incredibly triggered, depressed, disappointed, and angry as with every new news story they have to relive every racist aggression they have experienced. A lot of my white friends are either in the streets and learning every day, confused on how to engage, or ignoring the issue completely.

The premise of engaging with one’s privilege, including the role one may have played in perpetuating racism, racist practices, and/or the ways in which one benefits from white supremacy can be terrifying and uncomfortable. However, ignoring the issue does not mean it goes away. What would you rather be? Uncomfortable for a few weeks or months as you process the gravity of systemic white supremacy or that person who receives eye rolls and loses the respect of their community as they cling to outdated language, practices, and customs?

Come to Terms with History

Many young adults have some kind of experience such as going away to college, or moving out on their own, which offers an opportunity to differentiate themselves from their parents, communities, and high school friends. I started reading about race and gender in college, and it brought into focus so many brutal and uncomfortable facts with which I had to come to terms. Nothing I had been offered by popular culture, mainstream news, or history books was correct, or it offered a version of events that was criminally devoid of realities. For example, in fifth grade we visited Mission Sonoma, where Spanish missionaries had enslaved the Ohlone, Miwok, and other Coastal peoples. However, enslavement and genocide was never mentioned. The history was presented as Spanish and Native people working together to build towns and farm the land. Why do the Spanish get to have their version of the story told, and not the Ohlone and Miwok people? Would it have been too traumatic for fifth graders to learn about the brutality of colonization? Does it infantilize US students? How does this affect the legacy of Ohlone and Miwok people?

I am pretty empathetic, so the hardest part of my anti-racism work has always been understanding the full scope of centuries of physical violence against black and indigenous people. African people were stolen from their homelands with many dying en route to an unfamiliar continent. They were stripped of their culture, language, and families, and forced to build a country which continuously maneuvers to disenfranchise them and their children. Indigenous people of the Americas were systematically murdered, intentionally infected with disease, sterilized without their knowledge or consent, and forced onto reservations with little access to education, health care, or even running water. Maybe you have already considered the depths of this violence and how it resonates through the centuries; or maybe you are still under the spell of white supremacist delusion that it really wasn’t that bad. Whatever the case, it is imperative to get uncomfortable, in whatever way that is. If something makes you cringe or cry, move toward it, there is something to unpack. This goes for trauma work, too. Growth does not happen when we are comfortable, growth happens when we step out of our conventional bubbles of knowledge, and when we question what we have been offered.

I would also like to offer that not all history is tragic. While U.S. society has persecuted so many people outside of white straight married cis male hegemony, these people were and continue to love their families and contribute countless innovations and creations to art, science, music, food, politics, literature and on and on and on… There are rarely any truly binary experiences. Joy, humor, laughter, love, and inspiration can exist with sadness, pain, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. As I become better at understanding and articulating my own feelings and experience, I am better able to let more than one feeling or experience exist at the same time. While there are horrific and oppressive forces of institutionalized racism at work in the world, art and creation still flourishes. I think a part of anti-racist work, for white people especially, is learning to make space for Black, Indigenous, African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Chicanx, and Latinx achievement and excellence. Uplifting and sharing out underrepresented art, culture, and innovation is important because representation matters.

Creating a process

In grad school the stress of deadlines and the existential weight of manifesting a career of importance became too much and I had several mental breaks. I was diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), and started therapy with a great practitioner who guided me through dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and cognitive processing therapy (CPT) over the course of two years. I learned how to identify my feelings, communicate them, and most importantly become radically honest with myself. In the therapeutic process I came to terms with the damaging ways family, community, and society conditioned me to think and act. I had to confront and process the different types and levels of abuse and neglect I had endured as a child, teenager, and young adult. And of course there are, and continue to be, ways in which I have to hold myself accountable for my choices and actions. If I was going to grow into the person I wanted to be, I had to sit with my discomfort. If I had not committed to the trauma work, I likely would have continued to cope in the only ways I had known — dissociation, drinking, drugs, or running into codependent relationships. I feel very lucky to have been able to find a framework within which to learn, unlearn, and grow.

The educational, criminal justice, carceral, medical, financial, and political (and on and on and on…) systems have failed the majority of the people living in the U.S. for a long time. In the U.S. we have normalized student debt, medical bankruptcy, homelessness, high maternal mortality, mass incarceration, unpaid parental leave, a poverty-level minimum wage, expensive childcare, voter suppression, and of course police murder of Black and brown people. I think similarly about the ways in which I have been gaslit by my family and partners as I do the gaslighting from society and the public education system. It took me a long time to realize I did not have to bend to my mother’s every will, and neither did I have to believe or internalize everything she said to me. The same could be said about how the 1960s civil rights movement was presented in high school textbooks, or the way I was introduced to the lives of enslaved Ohlone and Miwok people in Spanish missions.

I remember the moment when I realized I had been abused and neglected by my parents. I wrote it in my journal and stared at the words, the moment is vivid, and I can recall it as if it were still happening. There were decades of discomfort, fighting, and disappointment as I set expectations and boundaries around how I wanted to be treated and was consistently disrespected and abused. I realized a few months later that I needed to distance myself from my mother if I was going to be able to work on the effects of the abuse and become healthy. As I distanced myself from my parents, I became more confident in who I am because I did not have an indoctrinating force telling me I am not worthy. I was able to find the thought patterns that contributed to my low self esteem, mania, panic attacks, and anxiety and to root them out with DBT and CPT exercises.

In my experience, unlearning white supremacy has felt like a similar process. I had to take control of my own future at some point and figure out what I did not know. In order to create distance with white supremacist delusion it needed to be named. I had to identify thought patterns that contribute to complicity, and root out those beliefs through education, unlearning racist customs and language, and engaging in action to create a healthy future. Naming the issues takes radical honesty. The radical honesty needed to call out how one benefits from white supremacy means there is space for self-reflection and self-awareness. Many non-black people live without a full awareness of institutionalized white supremacy and anti-black racism because they choose to. It takes a bit of confidence and strength to step outside a box you have been pushed into, and if you consider yourself a cognitively disabled or neurodivergent person, you may feel you do not have enough. I offer you this — Anti-racism work and trauma work are not self help, self improvement, or self care, these are vital processes that require long-term investments of time, patience, and action. The skills gained from trauma work and anti-racism work are compatible and complementary, if you feel activated or triggered by starting anti-racism work, that means you are alive. Learning to reflect, self-soothe, name, and process emotions constructively are all parts of the work. Doing real work to untangle ourselves from the ways that the culture of the U.S. harbors, and exports, white supremacist delusions requires practice, and the work is never done. As a collective society we have the ability to imagine a different future, and black and indigenous writers, poets, and activists have been imagining and working towards a more healthy future for literally centuries.

Resources

There are so many resources available from so many incredible thinkers and writers. A quick internet search of abolition syllabus or antiracism syllabus will likely yield plenty of results. A great place to start is this Google Doc of free resources compiled by Cyclista Zine which includes blogs, zines, speeches, free literature, petitions, and letter templates for contacting your political representatives.

Black-owned bookstores that stock a wide array of anti-racist literature and books from black authors:

Loyalty Bookstores, Silver Spring, MD, they also host an antiracist book club the third Wednesday of each month via Zoom.

Mahogany Books, Los Angeles

Reparations Club, Los Angeles

Sankofa, Washington D.C.

Some books and media that have moved me:

Black Sexual Politics by Dr. Patricia Hill Collins

Ain’t I A Woman by bell hooks

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

brown also keeps an incredible blog on her website and hosts the podcast Octavia’s Parables, which discusses Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Butler is a major influence in brown’s work.

Yo Is This Racist, podcast hosted by Tawny Newsome and Andrew Ti

Code Switch, podcast hosted by Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji