Black Psychological Functioning and the Legacy of Slavery

Abstract

The collective or group trauma model being explored in this volume requires that we first identify a group that has experienced a jolting, unpredictable, and monstrous assault. Second, we must be able to identify an unambiguous period that marks the termination of the trauma, for then, and only then, can we establish a before-and-after frame of reference. More specifically, the experiences of the group following the trauma must be more normative or nontraumatic in nature. When these conditions are met, we document the trauma and its termination, and then try to determine whether attitudes and behaviors originally elicited by the trauma have been passed down to the immediate and extended kin of the original victims, even though the survivors and their progeny live under conditions that are a far cry from the period of trauma. When such transcendence is confirmed across several decades or longer, we speak of the intergenerational legacy of the trauma. The trauma-transcendence-legacy model is not easily applied to the black encounter with American slavery. In the first place, how does one align the notion of a sudden and unpredictable event to an institution that lasted nearly 400 years? Trauma conjures images of victims, pain, and damage; however, slavery was a long-term, multidimensional experience involving black victimization as well as effective black coping. More will be said shortly about the legacy of effective coping. Second, even if we could find a way to depict slavery in grossly traumatic terms, how does one draw a straight line between slavery and, say, contemporary expressions of black "racial" anxiety, without necessarily trivializing the instances of oppression faced by blacks since slavery? [Text, p. 387]