Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. How Is It Different From PTSD? | AJ+ Opinion

0:00 Post-traumatic slave syndrome is an explanatory theory that really looks at multigenerational trauma. One of the things that's difficult for people is their first response is, "Oh my god, that happened so long ago." We're talking about people being captured, shipped, sold, beaten, raped, experimented on, and then, you have to ask the question, "Did the trauma continue?" Yes. So 300 years of trauma, no help, freed. No help, more trauma. If it's a sustained trauma, then the impact of that is also sustained. When we look at multigenerational trauma, we're looking at people who are maybe victims of natural disasters and their families and their children and generations of folks who have experienced war. And we know that there are residual

0:46 mental, emotional, traumatic impact. And what I did was I started to look at the African American experience starting with slavery as a real clear long-enduring trauma. I started to see that there were clear connections between that survival behavior and contemporary living in African American experience. I started to see common behaviors that I took for granted as, well, cultural. There's adaptive behaviors. Survival behaviors. Well, what are they? Let's just say, 2019 you have a Black mother and a white mother. Their sons go to school together. They find themselves at a meeting. The Black mother leans over to the white mother and says, "I just wanted to mention to you that I noticed that your son is really doing quite well." And the white mother's response is, "Oh, thank you."

1:31 She begins to go and on about, "He won the science fair. His uncle's an astronaut." She's just oozing. She realizes the Black mother's son is actually excelling her son. She says, "Well, wait a minute. Your son's the one that's really coming along." And the Black mother responds, "Oh my god, he's a handful. But oh, he just works my nerves." Now, when I'm working with African American people, it doesn't matter what the audience is. It doesn't matter what class. If I were to ask, "Is she very proud while she's saying those denigrating things?" And everybody laughs and goes, "Of course." There's a secret. Because everybody Black knows that even though the Black mother is going, "Oh, my god," she's really proud. So now let's roll that scene back 300 years. Let's say this Black mother is working in the fields and a white slave owner comes through and says,

2:19 "Wow, that boy is really coming along." What is she gonna say? "No, he's not. He's stupid, he's shiftless. He can't work." Because I don't want you to sell him. So I denigrate them to protect them. That is called appropriate adaptation when living in a hostile environment. The little white boy, say Timmy, you know, he feels really comfortable and happy about what his mom just said about him, and Trey looks at his mom and wonders, "Why can't you be proud of me?" because he doesn't understand the secret yet. And by the time he learns the secret, he will have already been injured by it. Post-traumatic slave syndrome. PTSD is a disorder that occurs

3:06 as a result of a single trauma. You don't even have to be there to actually get a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. You could just hear about something horrific happening to someone you love. So, you have people who have experienced it first hand, people who have witnessed it in their environment, people who are continuing to be oppressed. That exacerbates any possibility of healing. So it's not post-traumatic stress disorder because then it becomes part of what we call your socialization process. So, you begin to normalize a way of living and being. Everything from what we eat to what we believe it means to be a friend. You know, all of these things are colored by history. And if you don't understand it, you're gonna fold in things that you've just assumed are normal. But post-traumatic stress disorder, you know,

3:52 exaggerated startle response, outbursts of anger, a feeling of foreshortened future. There was a point where there were African American children in different urban settings that didn't expect to live to be adults because they saw so much death. They started planning their funerals like at 13, 12, as young as 10. When you start looking at the simple biology, you start looking at the impact of stress on health. And while we look at general stress, you know, finances, you have illnesses, all these different things, how about being Black? How does factoring in being Black in America impact your stress level, and therefore, your body's ability to operate its own immune system. Because we know it compromises the immune system. Once you understand it, then you can deal with it.

4:38 Because you see it's habitual, you're socialized. It becomes part of your being. So one of the ways you begin to address that multigenerational trauma is to work with the people it directly impacts, to hear from them. And when you give the people the information, they can use it. I think the first order of business is beginning to have a conversation, and the other is to educate the larger society. You have to stop the assault. So, this is not purely a clinical thing. This requires social justice and change. That's where part of the healing is. It's not in a clinical setting or in a pill. It's in fairness and justice and safety and equity. We gotta work with some of those clinical things, some of those issues of panic and anxiety, and we also have to deal with the fact that you have a system that is set up to

5:23 oppress you and to continue to injure you. Both those things have to be dealt with. And they cannot singularly by themselves affect a change. They have to be done collectively.