A Trauma-Informed Response to Racism: This Is Where We Might Begin.

The healing of trauma begins when the traumatized body can tell that it is safe.

The body’s feeling of safety is not the same as the rational part of the brain thinking “I ought to feel safe now.” It’s also not the same thing as the rational part of the brain believing, “I feel safe now.” The body is safe when the reptilian part of the brain feels safe, and with it, the amygdala, and the limbic brain (which is connected to the reptilian brain through the amygdala). It takes practice for the rational brain to learn to “listen” to the “lower” parts of the brain and be able to tell the difference between “safe” and “unsafe.”

Once the body actually feels safe, healing can finally begin. Just like a wild animal that hides under a bush and trembles after the predator runs by, our bodies need to feel safe before we can allow ourselves to relax enough to heal. We need to know when it is safe enough to turn off “high alert” and go into “rest and restore” mode. This is because the body can tell that the present moment is sufficently different from the moment of the traumatic episode. That now is different from then. Danger is passed and we can let down our guard.

It’s hard to heal the ongoing trauma of racism because there is no end to the traumatizing “event.” And because of how collective, long lasting, and inter-generationally accumulated racial trauma is, the body must check and recheck many times over before it can feel assured that it is now safe enough. And settling into safety is not instant, of course, if it happens at all; settling into the felt sense of safety is gradual, uneven, and very tentative if the traumatic event was extreme enough, (or even mild, but over a very long stretch of time). The replay of violence happening to people of color, coupled with the micro-aggressions, intolerance, and the everyday unaware, even well-intentioned, replay of white supremacy culture keeps people of color in a constant state of fear and self-defense. Too scared to fully heal from two hundred plus years of degradation, violence, threat, belittlement, humiliation, displacement, and abandonment.

The thing that it is difficult for white people to really see in themselves and one another is that we have also been profoundly, deeply traumatized by our own legacies and participation in systems of structural oppression and racism.

However, as a people who have had to develop and practice resilience in order to simply survive, African Americans have developed cultures — both religious and secular — that have encouraged healing by creating the conditions to help black people feel safe. These include: embodiment, movement, creative expression, social and emotional connection to one another, a sense of spiritual connection to a higher power, genuine warmth, and collective regulation through the combination of these traits in worship services and social and creative gatherings. These restorative elements of black culture, coupled with sufficient agility with the “master’s tools” keep the white predator appeased enough to be willing share a few resources (jobs, housing, food: usually the low-end variety).

Though deeply traumatized and retraumatized by white racism, against all odds, black Americans have created the conditions for self-healing again and again, and again. The tenacity of love, generativity, and grace in the African American community is astounding. Miraculous. Something that should not even be possible, yet is.

Becoming deeply trauma-informed as a white person becomes an opportunity to stand in awe of what blacks have managed to survive through, and, in many cases, thrive through.

The thing that it is difficult for white people to really see in themselves and one another is that we have also been profoundly, deeply traumatized by our own legacies and participation in systems of structural oppression and racism. The degradation, humiliation, threat, belittlement, displacement, abandonment, and rendering African American people invisible has dehumanized us as we have, wittingly or unwittingly, dehumanized those whom we hold back and hold down.

But in order to be ok with prioritizing our own safety — and the safety of our families — over the safety of people of color, white people shut down aspects of our own humanity.

We know now enough about trauma and trauma recovery to understand that it is not only the victims of trauma that are traumatized by acts of violence. Onlookers, observers and even perpetrators of violence are also traumatized by acts of violence — albeit in a different way, and perhaps to a lesser extent. This means that white people, who have undisputably walked away with the goods and privileges of systemic racism, are also, like African Americans and other people of color in this country, carrying PTSD from our historical and everyday observation and participation in systems built on and perpetuated by racism.

However, unlike African Americans who had to develop grassroots cultures of resilience (even if at times fleeting and limited, enough to make it through another day), whites have not had to do this. Whites have relied on privilege and resources, in all the forms that we each have access to it, to provide enough comfort and a sense of safety to survive the day, the decade, the millennium.

But in order to be ok with prioritizing our own safety — and the safety of our families — over the safety of people of color, we must shut down some aspect of our own humanity. This includes our awareness of our own cultural ancestries, our bodies, and the vulnerability we feel when we gaze upon children, the ill and/or the dying.

Of course, however, the cost of shutting down our humanity is huge. A significant part of what we shut down is our awareness of our own fear — terror, really — when we allow ourselves to gaze upon the violence of our white ancestors, and the violence to people of color that every day is being committed in the name of protecting our privilege as whites (as well as whatever claim on other privileged statuses in our world: college educated, neurotypical, able-bodied, affluent, heterosexual, cisgender identified, male, and adult … to the extent that we have access to the privilege inherent in these statuses in our social world, we do reach for the privilege we can grasp).

The truth is, there is no way to notbe scared when witnessing the constant degradation of another human being. It’s called secondary trauma or vicarious trauma, and it triggers the resurfacing of all other traumas stored in a person’s emotional memory.

As James Baldwin reminds us, the problems for whites, and the even bigger problem people of all races across the U.S. is this: white culture is not a genuine culture, but a collection of attitudes and behaviors that “whites” adopted to access privilege in the process of becoming “American.”

We don’t admit we’re scared, because we don’t always know. We are living in a racialized trauma culture in the United States, and not knowing what this really means in our bodies and brains makes us dangerous. It leads to “black and white thinking.” Brains that are stuck in fight/flight/freeze are so focused on survival that they lose the capacity for nuance. Bodies stuck in fight/flight/freeze are aggressive, jittery, or shut down.

Race trauma shows up differently depending on lots of factors, especially our “race” — because the trauma is not “different but equal” — not by any means. As whites, our racial trauma is vicarious trauma. When witnessing horrific events that we can’t stop, the body tends to freeze, and get stuck in a frozen state. Perhaps this is the source of what appears as white apathy. This display of our fear further terrifies people of other races. Our fear has dehumanized us, taught us to be far too tolerant of “other people’s” suffering. We feel powerless, which is especially tragic because as whites we hold all the power — at least the power that the human world can give.

White fear makes us dangerous. Sometimes it is masked as hubris, pretense, and grasping for control, even “do gooder” behavior, or guilt. I personally believe that our “whiteness” — which only exists as a human category because of our shared legacy of racialized trauma — is really a stuck fear response. Until we create the conditions to begin to thaw out of this state, and begin to become rehumanized as white people — we will not adequately close our achievement gap, our health disparities, our economic and housing disparities. White vicarious trauma is keeping us perpetually unsafe for the people of color in our midst. And for ourselves.

This sounds hopeless, but truly, it’s not.

(I live in Berkeley and in our community I can imagine these actions. Please apply these ideas to your community where I’m sure you have similar organizations.)

Berkeley is ripe with resource. There are people on every block who know how to heal trauma. And there are people all over Berkeley who can show us where and how racialized trauma is operating.

What’s needed now, is to prioritize safety for black and brown bodies first. This is social triage. This is NOT easy or straight forward to do!

For example, when I read that Youth Spirit Artworks tiny house village may need to leave Berkeley, I went into a week of frozen despair about it. I bet I’m not alone. I was slowed down by the thick sludge of unanswered questions lingering at the back of my mind: Have we really become a town that would turn away a creative, empowering, longterm effort to create safe spaces for our young people of color?

What would it take to wake up enough, thaw out enough to stop this exile of our people, to find or create a space for Youth Spirit Artworks to house their village? And while we’re at it, can we not give the project whatever else is on its wish list so that it can complete in a timely way?

And there are plenty other places that protect safe space for people of color in Berkeley and the East Bay. For instance:

• Healthy Black Families
• The Black Repertory Group
• Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action (BOCA)
• Spotlight:Girls
• The Way Christian Center
• Radical Resilience Institute

But wait. Please don’t now shut down emotionally. Please don’t ignore your possible feelings of guilt and burden and a bunch of other things. Don’t rush into taking this small action too quickly. To make the most out of this small gesture, please first slow down and notice.

What happens when we take a small action, with awareness to the fact that we made a choice and now, here, yes, this is what it feels like to take this action … however small, as small as we need the action to be, we begin to realize “the trauma event” is over. At least for now. For me, at this exact moment, there is no trauma happening in the room where I am. My body might be scared, my brain might be scared, but these are reverberations from my past, and from the historical trauma and vicarious trauma of my people.

Now is not really then because now I can tell I have a little bit of power, and I can do this small thing. I can write this word. I can find my wallet and get out my card. And I can find the links in this article — which I have created myself — and I can choose one, even just one, and give, whatever small amount I can.

And this small step, I can notice. And I can imagine that there are white people all across Berkeley taking out their ATM cards and doing what I’m doing. And I can imagine that resources are pouring into these amazing organizations, and that all over town, we are a people learning how to create safe space for people of color. Starting in this very moment. The moment when I actually have the power to make a small act. And as I notice that I am doing this, and notice that it feels good, and stay with the experience … I notice what it feels like, and notice the room I am in … and I notice that no one, not a single person is hurting me or humiliating me for taking this small action … I begin to heal.

Because … my ancestor may have been a small child witnessing her father doing something atrocious and horrific to a black person on the plantation they owned. Or they participated in a lynching. And in that moment, it may have been wise to freeze, to not be seen, to not protest, in order to survive and not have that rage turned on me. That might have been the best response then. But now, that event is just the echo of a memory which in some mysterious way, has traveled inter-generationally through my lineage and is now reverberating through my system. For me now, that event is over. It is safe enough to say this one word, and notice, and then the next. And it is safe enough to take this one action, and notice. And with each small step, I am thawing, and with each moment of noticing, I am building a brain pathway that says: “Now is different. Now I have power. Now I can speak. Now I can act.”

If we want to have a shot at keeping Berkeley a diverse City, or your community a diverse community, we must establish a safe place for people of color. And also safe space for whites to begin to unravel and thaw the armor of whiteness that we can only ever partially see because we are constantly marinating in it.

But if we create safe spaces for bodies — black, brown, and even white — all of our bodies will lead the way in showing us how to heal most expediently.