Psychological science suggests that people who experience race-based stress and trauma frequently have similar experiences to people who have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Distress can include flashbacks, hypervigilance, nightmares, heart palpitations, poor sleep and overall heightened anxiety. But where PTSD can be caused by a single event, racial stress is ongoing, pervasive, generationally transmitted, and affects both individuals and collective communities. Thus, beyond PTSD symptoms, racial trauma has enduring and retriggered cognitive, emotional and somatic consequences.
