The Weight of Racial Trauma

This piece is an excerpt from The Cost of Healing in Silence by Ashley McGirt-Adair. With honesty and care, the book explores the quiet, often unseen layers of trauma and healing within culturally complex lived experiences, inviting a deeper understanding of what it means to be truly seen, supported, and held.

Chapter 6 – The Weight of Racial Trauma

The therapeutic relationship is founded on trust, empathy, and connection. For patients of color, this connection can feel fragile if the therapist cannot fully understand the cultural dimensions of their lives. Feeling unheard or misunderstood can exacerbate the very issues they are seeking to address. Racial trauma, for example, is a unique form of trauma that requires specific care and awareness. A therapist without personal or empathetic insight into this trauma might unintentionally downplay or overlook its impact, inadvertently invalidating the patient’s experience.

In practical terms, this disconnect can lead patients of color to feel like outsiders in therapeutic spaces. Rather than experiencing therapy as a safe haven, they may feel that they are once again entering an environment that doesn’t truly “see” them. This dissonance can reinforce feelings of self-­doubt, shame, or anger, all emotions tied deeply to the experience of racial trauma. The isolation from not seeing oneself in positions of care can make the therapeutic space feel foreign, creating emotional barriers rather than breaking them down.

A Childhood Rewritten in Silence

It’s 2012 and you are ten years old. Your backpack hangs loosely over one shoulder, your favorite gray hoodie pulled snug against the morning chill. The cotton feels safe, like a shield between you and the world. You climb onto the yellow school bus, sneakers squeaking on the steps, and slide into your usual seat near the middle. A few of the white kids in the back start to snicker.

You glance around, unsure what’s funny. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it isn’t. But the laughter feels heavy and sharp in a way that makes your skin prickle.

Later that day, you hear the name Trayvon Martin for the first time. The teacher’s voice trembles as she explains the unfortunate event leaving words like “killed” and “hoodie” and “walking home” hanging in the air. You go home and see his face on the news. He looks like you. Brown skin. Young. Ordinary. Alive. And then no longer alive.

Your stomach tightens. You stare into the mirror that night, hoodie still on, drawstrings dangling like fragile ropes. This was your favorite hoodie, it made you feel cool, invisible, and almost untouchable. Now, you wonder if it makes you a target. If something as small as a piece of fabric can turn you from a child into a threat.

Two years later, you’re twelve. It’s summer, and the world smells like cut grass and melted popsicles. You’re outside with your friends, Nerf guns blazing, laughter echoing down the block. For a moment, you forget everything, you forget fear, forget history, and for a moment forget skin. Then the door slams open, and your mother rushes out, eyes wide, panic spilling from her voice. “Give me those!” she says, grabbing the toy from your hands. You freeze. “A boy,” she stammers, “Tamir Rice. He was twelve. He looked just like you. The police thought his toy gun was real.” You stand still, heart racing, confusion burning behind your eyes. You hand her the Nerf gun, too stunned to speak.

The next day, you sit on the stoop, sweat rolling down your neck, sun pressing against your skin. Across the street, two white boys run through sprinklers with toy guns pointed at one another. They’re laughing so hard it sounds like freedom. One sees you and waves. “Wanna play?”

You shake your head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” they ask, frowning.
You pause. “Because of Tamir Rice.”

They blink, confused as the name means nothing to them. They shrug and go back to their game. Something inside you shifts, something small and sacred.

You feel it cracking open, leaking anger, confusion, and something that feels like grief for a childhood you’re already losing. You start kicking the rail, hitting things, breaking what you can because you can’t break what’s breaking you.

Your mother comes out again, voice stern, telling you to stop, to go inside, to calm down. She doesn’t see that you’re not misbehaving, you’re mourning. Not just for Trayvon or Tamir, but for the part of yourself that just learned you can’t enjoy your childhood in its fullness, your skin is a threat, and your safety isn’t a guarantee. You sit on your bed, fists clenched, hoodie balled in your lap. The air feels thick, like it’s holding its breath. You are learning too early, too painfully that the world doesn’t always see you as a child.

You are learning this lesson in silence.

Naming the Pain That Often Goes Unseen

“Experiencing racial trauma does not put a child on an immovable downward path toward pathology. However, many children of color navigate the world without receiving treatment or services that are geared to acknowledging and naming the type of pain they have experienced. As they grow into adolescence and adulthood, they suffer in silence as they navigate through systems that lack a fundamental understanding of the type of trauma they have experienced and how to properly support them.”
—Racial Trauma in the School System: Naming the Pain by Connesia Handford and Ariel D. Marrero’

Racial trauma as defined earlier is an often misunderstood and underrecognized form of trauma. It stems from the cumulative impact of racial discrimination, microaggressions, systemic oppression, and the day-to-day stresses associated with navigating a society that marginalizes and devalues Black and Brown lives. Racial trauma is a form of race-based stress that describes the physical and emotional reaction that individuals of color have in response to frequent experiences and exposure to stressful experiences of racism. Racial trauma, while sharing similarities with post-traumatic stress disorder, is distinct in its ongoing nature. It stems from both individual and collective injuries, perpetuated by repeated exposure to race-based stress. These cumulative effects manifest in various ways, including persistent fear, hypervigilance, and a deep. Racial trauma in the school system: Naming the pain. sense of shame or guilt following experiences of racism. The symptoms can be both psychological and physical, often blurring together in the body: confusion, self-blame, chronic headaches, unexpected nosebleeds, and the constant sensation of bracing oneself for the next harm. Racial trauma is not a singular event; it is a continual burden carried in the body, mind, and spirit.

Racial trauma mirrors Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in many ways by its symptoms, its intensity, its ability to disrupt the mind and body. Where PTSD often stems from isolated, singular events, racial trauma is insidious and ongoing.

Racism is ever-present, embedded in the structures that govern our lives, seeping into countless interactions. both direct and indirect. The sheer relentlessness of it into countless interactions, both direct and indirect. The sheer relentlessness of it means that even if you aren’t the direct target, the mere exposure to stories, images, and news can trigger the same visceral, gut-wrenching response.