Lifeless, drained, beaten down. This is how you feel when you constantly mentally digest experiences that relate to racial trauma whether from direct or indirect experiences. In this day and age, there seems to always be an available buffet of violence against Black people to choose from and get annoyed by: mass shootings that are streamed live, microaggressions in our day-to-day lives or the abrupt denial towards those wanting to seek justice for wrongs they have been dealt.
The violence is always there, hovering over us, serving as a reminder that it is an inevitable experience. Each experience, whether direct or indirect, eats away at your self-esteem. The term race-based traumatic stress was introduced by Robert T Carter in his published paper “Racism and Psychological and Emotional Injury: Recognizing and Assessing Race-Based Traumatic Stress”.