Oppression and trauma: Examining the relationship between perceptions of racial oppression and the presence of trauma symptoms in Black Americans

Racial oppression: A life of forced compliance with unfair limitations based upon race a life fraught with the frustration of dreams, the anguish of rejection and the despair of chronic failure. For some it is unimaginable, but for many Black Americans oppression is a traumatically painful and psychologically disturbing reality. The following is a quantitative analysis of the relationship between oppression and trauma as it relates to adult Black Americans, in the wake of 400 years of chattel slavery, nearly 100 years of segregation and Jim Crow, and 5 more decades of overt and covert racial oppression. This study re-operationalizes our concept of trauma and quantifies the oppression-trauma relationship in a way that elucidates new understandings of the psychological state of Black Americans today. Perspectives and insights gleaned from this study, if applied in practice, should reduce the frequency of misconceptualizations and possible misdiagnoses among Black clients in mental health treatment settings.