Healing from Racial Trauma
The first time I encountered racism was on the handball court.
As the bell for recess rang, my best friend and I would run as fast as we could to the courts to claim a spot and start a game. We were fourth graders at the time, and on that day, we were outrun by older kids. We approached a court with 5th graders who’d started a game and voiced wanting to join.
We ran away shortly in tears, run off by derogatory racial slurs and motions of eyelids being pulled back telling us, “you can’t play with us.” I don't remember what they called my friend (who happens to be Latina) but I just remember the words directed at me leaving a sinking feeling. They laughed as we ran to our teacher on duty, a white male teacher to be precise, who essentially said, try to stay away from that group and play elsewhere.
I don’t recall if I ever returned to the courts after that.
On that day, I learned two things - people really, truly saw me as different and that I wouldn’t be protected by authority figures. That safety I once felt in school diminished. My experience had been discounted and brushed off before I was old enough to understand what it all meant.
I never told anyone about that experience.
Little did I know, some 20 years later, I’d come to see and learn that my experience was an example of racial trauma I had experienced while growing up in Southern California. It was the culprit as to why I sometimes felt out of place in the city and state I grew up in. Why I remain hypervigilant to microaggressions and am in lack of better words sensitive to how people are treated around me.
America is the only country I had ever come to know fully, one that I desperately want to feel included in, but could not embrace me, despite how involved I became in its society, how well I did in the classroom, how polite I was, how great my English was, how well I could write. I know I am not alone in feeling like a perpetual foreigner sometimes. My second generation status lends itself to me feeling like a foreigner in two different countries- that of my ethnic heritage and that in which I was born and raised. Claiming my identity as Taiwanese-American is my small/significant to me/radical step to carving my place in this world. One that rings true for me, one I’ve come to embrace and be proud of, one that I've had to earn through rejection.
White supremacy has a way of showing up in so many ways, including the way we see ourselves. Internalized racism is its distant cousin, repeating the beliefs set into motion like a self operating wheel. Unlearning hatred starts within.
As AAPI hate crimes and anti-Asian violence have become more visible this year, alongside our country’s reckoning with structural racism under public microscope, I felt it necessary to explore as a clinician what it looks like to name racial and historical trauma as well as heal from it.
The following primer was created by my brilliant colleague, Iesha Duncan and myself to be a guide for clinicians and clients. We hope this is a launching point for critical conversations about a form of trauma we don’t talk about too often.
