UC Santa Cruz

Racial trauma (i.e., trauma resulting from racist experiences) is a persistent and harmful psychological consequence of racism, yet it is denied or minimized by dominant cultural narratives and ideologies. The current work explores how Black communities can heal from racial trauma and how racial trauma is perceived in White communities. Study 1 examines Black community healing from intergenerational racial trauma, using secondary analysis of interviews with Black participants who visited key historical sites from the transatlantic slave trade in Ghana, West Africa. I employed an integrative methodological framework rooted in Black epistemologies, including the methodology of surrender, the daughtering method, and the H.U.N.C.H. method. Findings illuminate how place-based, community-centered, and ancestrally grounded experiences can facilitate healing from intergenerational racial trauma. Study 2 examined how White participants perceive racial trauma, exploring how different levels of racism shape acknowledgment of both racism and its traumatic impacts. Results demonstrated a strong positive relationship between racism denial and racial trauma denial, with participants denying racial trauma more in structural racism conditions. This effect was mediated by racism denial and moderated by systemic racism perceptions. Study 3 builds on these findings by introducing a critical history intervention, which was an educational audio clip designed to increase systemic racism perceptions, and tests whether it increases acknowledgment of both racism and racial trauma. The intervention did not significantly shift perceptions, but Study 3 did replicate Study 2. Crucially, those with a more systemic view of racism showed greater acknowledgment of racism and subsequent racial trauma across both Studies 2 and 3, suggesting that a critical history intervention that effectively boosts systemic racism perceptions should also boost racism acknowledgment and, ultimately, racial trauma acknowledgment. Together, these studies trace the denial and acknowledgment of racial trauma across individuals and social structures while affirming that healing must be culturally grounded, rooted in community, and historically informed.