Ethnic and race-based stress and trauma have been neglected areas of inquiry in most trauma informed therapeutic modalities. However, ignoring ethnic and race-based stress and trauma as actualities runs the risk of re-traumatizing people and interferes with their ability to derive maximum benefit from therapeutic interventions.
When therapists lack critical awareness of race and racism, and have not adequately dealt with their own racial hang-ups (which Gail Parker regards as a symptom of their own unhealed racial wounds) and when they are uncomfortable and unprepared to deal with issues of race as they come up, they become part of the problem. To be effective therapists, we must examine how living in a racialized world affects each of us.
Now is a time to reduce the harmful effects of ethnic and race-based traumatic stress so that we can be prepared to create a future that, regardless of one's skin color, facial features, hair texture, and unique cultural racial and ethnic identity, embraces the fact that while we are not the same, we are all members of the same race, the human race. What affects one of us affects us all.
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