Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, I'm Kim Neely, and this is the trauma informed SLP.
[00:00:07] This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including USO.
[00:00:21] Okay, so I'm gonna start this one up front with my trigger warning. Now that we know what triggers are, right? If you start to feel physiologically uncomfortable at any of these topics, if you start to have challenging emotions, and if you are having a day where just nothing is going right, your sympathetic system is already really elevated today, or you're just super hungry or something, give yourself time. Take a break, take a drink, get a snack, maybe save this episode for a different day. Do what you need to do, because we. We are going to go over some very challenging topics today. I am going to make references to some very sensitive historical events, things that are difficult for me to read, things that are dysregulating for me, quite frankly. So do what you need to do to take care of your body and to make sure you don't get re traumatized by things I'm talking about. Okay?
[00:01:24] If you are of a minority group that I am not a part of, that I am speaking. Speaking on, and you take an issue with anything I have to say, I also want to say, please do contact me with that. I really do want to learn and improve my viewpoints and my perceptions and make sure that the information I'm putting out there is as accurate as possible when trying to discuss experiences from minority groups that I'm not a part of.
[00:01:49] That said, I have included a lot of quotes. Most of that. Most of those things I'm going to be talking about in terms of quotes from articles and other resources that I found online in the effort to emphasize the minority voices. So when they are quotes, I will let you know. And I will also, of course, include links in the show notes to all the references that I use today.
[00:02:18] Okay, so that all said, I went kind of far with the whole, like, concept of privilege and stuff in the last episode. So I didn't quite get to some of the things about historical trauma that I think as a field are things that are good to face. Given the statistics of our field. And we're a fairly homogeneous field, really. There is some diversity, but not as much as other fields. And so it's good to address some of these things. So, in my outline today, we are going to be covering the three sequential stages of historical trauma.
[00:02:55] We are going to discuss the hierarchical structure of white culture in the United States, otherwise known as white supremacy culture. It's essentially the dominant culture in our country that was adopted through colonialism and through the English being the primary colonizers here, bringing over their culture and enforcing it upon any minority group that they came into contact with. So we're gonna talk about it because it's one of those things where I think, as a white person in the United States, I am so embedded in this culture that acknowledging that certain characteristics are potentially traumatizing or re traumatizing to people is very important to bring awareness to that.
[00:03:39] And also this hierarchical structure, the fact that our society sort of is built on this hierarchical, like, here's the actual model citizen, and then everybody else follows underneath it. That leads to a moralization of a lot of behaviors and microaggressions and dehumanization for a lot of the other type of behaviors that are very typical for different people of different cultures and people of different brain structures and different neural organization, and also different gender identification and sexual orientation and all of that. It all goes into that. And minority religions versus majority religion. It all gets wrapped up into this. So it's good to talk about it. It's something I do want to bring to the forefront because it's something I've been noticing in everything, including, like, when I listen to podcasts on, like, fat phobia and, like, all that kind of discrimination. It's like, this is so built into this hierarchical structure that we have. And so I just want to start talking about it because it's. I'm just starting to notice all the connections everywhere. And it's like, such a normalized thing in our society that I think it could be difficult to discover it if we don't start to develop a shared language around it, right? Because then we start to confound, like, individual adversity with systemic adversity and oppression. And if we start to conflate those things and we start to sort of talk over each other, then nothing really gets done and nobody's perspective really changes. Right? So we have to develop this shared language around when we're talking about societal structure and systemic structures and organizational structures, and we're talking about that system level, that societal level, the big group level, and then how that impacts the individual. Yes, that's definitely an important part, but also the fact that when things come from societal systemic level, when we're talking about changing that and we're talking about social justice, and we're talking about, you know, increasing cultural awareness and cultural humility for these things, we're talking about changing the societal perceptions and the normalization of these aspects. Right. So it's more about the roles we all play in society and what we're born into and what gets normalized to us from birth and then dismantling the things that are normalized that actually end up being harmful toward other groups of people. Right. We want to dismantle that normalization, which takes some time, and it takes a lot of learning, and it really takes cultivating a practice of being flexible and listening. But I think developing a shared language is a good way to start. Right. Always nice to know that we know if we're talking about systemic things, keep it at the systemic level and discuss those things. Right. So my hope is to de trigger a lot of the discussions that we see out there about systemic oppression and discrimination by providing a shared language for us to discuss it.
[00:06:32] So we are going to talk about the stages of historical trauma, the three stages.
[00:06:38] We're going to go through a couple of examples of the stage one event, the mass trauma event in us history.
[00:06:46] Then I'm going to tie that into how those events do continue to echo in time and finish up with a short introduction into dehumanizing language, particularly in the area of microaggressions, because that's the next topic I really want to get into, because that is one way we can accidentally re traumatize our clients if we are unaware of the casual, dehumanizing language that tends to be part of how these historical traumas continue to echo. It's part of how society normalizes those events. And if you're not part of a certain minority group, you might not be as sensitive to the casual dehumanization. And it's time to start, you know, applying our cultural humility and gain more sensitivity toward that because it can be very re traumatizing for our clients and also our colleagues and our friends in social circles.
[00:07:46] All right, so let's get into it. And I want to start this episode out with this quote. This is from trauma, informed care and cultural humility in the mental health care of people from minoritized communities by Ranjabar, Erb and Mohammed and Moreno. And I might have said some of those names wrong, and I apologize if I did. I've extrapolated a few quotes here. So it says, the lived experience of so many persons involves profoundly disturbing situations such as war, sexual abuse, violence, or racism. These traumatic events are always embedded in a cultural context and identity. Rather than approaching embodied, individually experienced culture as something that could be learned, mastered, and neatly categorized. Cultural humility entails admitting that cultural experience is something one cannot fully analyze or understand, but can seek to appreciate and respect.
[00:08:43] Cultural humility is characterized by principles of mutual learning and critical self reflection, recognition of power imbalances, and the existence of implicit biases. So that's what we're really talking about today. That's we're getting at. This is cultural humility. This is bringing an awareness to all the aspects of minority culture that if you're not part of that minority group, you are going to be blind to just by nature of our majority culture, where the general, large, the big picture, United States social structure comes from, the societal norms, let's say, where those tend to come from. Right. And recognizing that, and then learning and moving beyond that.
[00:09:29] So let's go ahead and get started with talking about the stages of historical trauma.
[00:09:36] Three sequential stages of historical trauma. I am pulling this from a presentation. Well, a training that I attended, it's online, it's available all the time, is through the Arizona Trauma Training Institute. The presentation was why and how trauma informed organizations attend to equity, diversity, and inclusion training by EA AFO.
[00:09:58] And so I am pulling from her slides to discuss the three sequential stages. Okay, so this is from Ea Afo's training.
[00:10:09] The first stage is a mass trauma is experienced where a dominant group subjugates a population of people they consider different, right?
[00:10:22] And this is where you get segregation and displacement, physical, psychological violence, economic destruction and destruction of those people, that people's culture, cultural dispossession. Okay, so that's the first step. Okay. Essentially, a dominant group shows up and subjugates a population, right? And usually it results in all this violence and economic destruction and a loss of culture, oftentimes for that subjugated group. Okay, the second stage is a trauma response gets elicited in that first or primary generation that includes physical, social, and psychological responses. Makes sense, right? So the people who are experiencing that initiating event develop a trauma response, which is. That makes total sense. Their safety has definitely been violated because they've become subjugated by a different group. Right?
[00:11:24] And then the third stage is when the responses are then transmitted. So those trauma responses are transmitted to the subsequent generations through a lot of things, like environmental factors, psychosocial factors, the social, economic, political systems, epigenetics. Makes a reappearance here, right? How the genes are expressed in the subsequent generations, and legal and social discrimination. Okay, and so that third stage is where we get into that, relating to that Resnet Minneken quote from my last episode of trauma decontextualized in a people looks like culture, right? So if you decontextualize that trauma response that has now been carried through the generations, what you end up seeing is culture, is traditions cultivating a sense of community so that they can reclaim a sense of safety. Expressing their shared trauma through art, right? Through writing, through all these other expressive means, perhaps the development of traditions to cope with grief and loss and. And all that stuff. And then also perhaps traditions to try to create safety in their future generations, right? Maybe stories that they tell the do's and the don'ts that they teach their children, right. They're trying to cultivate a sense of safety in the future. So it'll be like, okay, if you do these things, then that dominant group will not come at you, and so that keeps you safe. Right? So that's how historical trauma starts to get embedded in the culture of that people, of that subjugated people. In addition to just the simple fact of having high sympathetic dominance, PTSD, you have all these symptoms happening in that primary generation, and that is also going to impact how they interact with their own children, whether they're emotionally available for their own children, right? There are definitely societies who, you know, post world War two, they don't share emotions. They're fairly dissociated. Right. I've had friends who have, like, for example, polish grandparents who, like, they don't really engage emotionally, you know, if they were present during World War two in Poland. So that's an example of that trauma response, that historical initiating trauma echoing. Right. And affecting how well they can bond with future generations and things like that. Right? I. Okay, so, like I said, this stuff happens, I mean, throughout history, anytime you're reading anything about, like, this tribe took over that tribe or, you know, this country invaded that country and took them over or whatever, like, this is the way it went. Typically, it was this horribly traumatic event, right. For that group, there's tons of examples in history. Like I said, there's clearly, like, on a global scale. In more recent history, we have World War two, we have the Holocaust, we have rwandan genocide. We have all of these things that are mass traumas that are likely to lead to historical traumas or came out of previous historical traumas in terms of Rwanda specifically with colonization and dividing the native peoples into categories, basically. And also in my own heritage, my own bloodline being a fair amount irish.
[00:14:58] You know, the irish famine was effectively an attempted genocide by the English because people were literally starving to death and country sent relief, and the English blocked it, right? They did a blockade to keep food from getting to the Irish because they actually wanted to get rid of them. So that's another example of, like, 19th century, like, clearly amassed and trauma experience, but also brought about by previous historical traumas that led to more basically. Right. So because trauma begets more trauma.
[00:15:30] That's what we see in families. That's what we see globally, that's what we see in individuals. Trauma, unhealed trauma begets more trauma. You just have this continuous cycle. Right? Okay, so let's go over a few examples from United States history that I think as a white american, honestly, to quote Hamilton. Right, like, who lives, who dies, who tells your story. Right. Like, since white people have controlled a lot of the historical narrative in the United States, a lot of this stuff is not stuff I learned about, or at least not very well. And if I did learn it, it was kind of a watered down, not so hard to digest version of it, right. Ones that didn't villainize white people too much kind of a thing. Right. It kind of got sort of danced over the details, got sort of the real traumatic details got left out. I'll put it that way. Right. So this is the stuff that's good for us to kind of know about. So I'm going to go over a few of them. I just. I selected a few. It's really not that many, but that's what's coming up next.
[00:16:37] If you feel yourself getting too dysregulated hearing about these things, please do take a break, pause. Do what you need to do. You could also skip ahead in the podcast if that is better for you at this moment in time. Okay.
[00:16:53] Okay. So examples of history in United States where the white colonists caused mass trauma events. Right. For minority groups. That's what we're going over here. So essentially, that first stage of historical trauma. I'm talking about those events. Okay. This is actually another quote from EA AfO, from her presentation that I really liked, talking about the African Holocaust, which essentially is talking about the slave trade. I think African Holocaust is a very accurate term, and it hits hard. Right. It hurts. But I mean, that's the thing about how, like, you know, when the people in position of power write the history, they get to determine the terms. You know how we couch that, right. We don't call the slave trade the African Holocaust, even though that is what it was. Right. Like, we don't. There are certain things we don't call genocide when they actually were genocides. Right. So that's what I mean by we're going to deprogram some of that okay? So take a breath. Think about your best regulation strategy, because you might want to use it. Listening to this, I'm going to need mine as well, because this stuff is just hard. It's hard to process. Okay? So this quote from Iya Afo, talking about the African Holocaust says Africans across the diaspora have endured over 400 years of slavery, colonization, abuse, and loss of cultural identity. More than 90% carry slave master surnames. Most don't know their country of origin, right? Which makes sense that they wouldn't know their country of origin. But you know how, like. So, like, you know, as a white person, you know when you're in those social situations where everybody suddenly starts talking about where their family is from, like their family of origin, their country of origin, like genetically, right? Like, I just talked about being part irish, right? And people will be like, oh, I'm part, you know, greek and italian and da da da, right? Particularly for western, for european descent people in the United States. You don't really notice African Americans do that, do you?
[00:19:01] You don't really notice it. I never really thought about this. It came to me, you know, I was older than I should have been, probably when I realized this. But they don't talk about it because they don't know.
[00:19:13] They can't say, my ancestors were stolen from Ghana.
[00:19:20] You know what I mean? They can't identify what country they are from because as slaves, as non, like, literal non humans, slavers didn't care. They didn't keep records of any of that. And once they got over into this country, they were assigned names, right?
[00:19:37] Their culture was erased. Their name was erased.
[00:19:42] So thinking of that, and then also, oftentimes, enslavers used male on male sexual assault to kind of spiritually break young, strong male slaves so that they would reduce the chance of rebellions, of people wanting to, you know, of that strong young man leading the slaves in rebellion. Right? And that continues to have echoing effects in terms of homophobia and things like that in the community. So, yeah. So that just hits hard. But that's something for those of us fellow white people to know that when you start getting into your, oh, you know, my great great grandparents came over from this country, and then on my dad's side, we're from this country, right? If you're in the presence of an african American, they are not going to be able to partake in that discussion.
[00:20:33] Okay. Just something to know about little ways this stuff tends to echo in time, right, that we don't think about. That's the whole point of this episode. Okay.
[00:20:44] The next thing I want to bring up is the american indian genocide, which I pulled that term from an article called the ten stages of american indian genocide by cameron and fan. And I will leave a link in the show notes, of course, but it doesn't tend to get called a genocide. Right. What colonists did to American Indians, to indigenous people here. But it was the numbers that were lost, the loss of life.
[00:21:14] It was absolutely genocide, quite frankly. And we should probably start calling it as such and digesting that. Right.
[00:21:23] Processing that fact. Because if we don't face these horrors, right, then we don't understand how to de trigger the mentality that led to these horrors. Right. I feel like facing them, you have to start to understand the mentality that led to it so that we could be vigilant against it. Right. Against repeating it. Yeah. So american indian genocide included. Like, you know, the indigenous tribes were moved, of course. Right. They were moved to areas that were ecologically different. They were moved to land that the white colonists decided was not valuable, not useful to them. They faced a lot of economic depression. Of course. There was an eradication of indigenous culture through boarding schools. Right. We heard about the atrocities in Canada that became big news. But those also existed in the United States. We had those same boarding schools. We had those same practices of removing indigenous children from their homes and changing their names, changing, you know, cutting their hair, throwing out their tribal clothes, and forcing them into white culture. Okay, this was a really good quote from that article that really helped open my eyes here. It says, in the words of John Cohen, as cited in Smith 1995, a higher percentage of european Jews survived the nazi holocaust than California Indians survived the gold rush.
[00:22:53] Huh? So let that sit for a little bit. When you. When it comes down to whether or not we call this an american indian genocide or indigenous people, the genocide of indigenous people, just let that sit for a little. Right?
[00:23:08] Yeah. So that often gets ignored in history. I know that when I was in my history classes as a young, a young Kim, back in, like, the eighties and nineties and in grade school, you know, we learned about american indian displacement, the American Indian Removal act. We learned about those things, but it was never put in the framework of being a genocide. You know, the sheer loss of life was never really emphasized. It was pretty much left out. You know what I mean? So I think it's important those of us who continue to benefit from colonization, which means any white person living on this continent, we have all benefited from colonization. You know what I mean?
[00:23:50] I wouldn't be here if my family didn't come over here, you know, and they came over here because it was colonized by white people. Right. It was the land of promise. It was the new land to come to for white people. Right. So just to recognize that, right. We got to start recognizing that we benefit from the historical impact of these things. Okay.
[00:24:15] The other one I do want to bring up is the practice of redlining. Really want to go through this one because this is essentially why we have suburbs in America. And for those of us who work in schools and school districts, still has a very big echoing effect when it comes to resources and who pays higher property taxes and therefore the schools are better funded and things like that. Right. So redlining came about when the United States was trying to get out of the Great Depression. And the government, the United States government basically made it really easy to get home loans, to get mortgages so that people could start to own homes and own land. And then that helps the economy and it helps them to build some wealth. So policies were put to place to make it easy to get home loans. This is like in the late, like 1930s, I believe. But then the mortgage lenders, the banks, and then also the people who are building what essentially are the suburbs now they put this other practice in place called, well, it's now called redlining. But essentially they drew, they color coded maps. So they made green neighborhoods and they made red neighborhoods. The green neighborhoods were more desirable and the red ones were considered undesirable, perhaps more crime ridden.
[00:25:36] Probably shouldn't be too much of a spoiler alert right now or too much of a surprise that, yeah, a lot of times the red lined neighborhoods were primarily minorities. Okay? So what ended up happening is if you lived in a green neighborhood or you wanted a home loan in a green neighborhood, it was very easy to get the mortgage. If you lived in a redlined neighborhood, a red neighborhood, it was nearly impossible to get a mortgage. Okay. Because it was undesirable, it was considered financially too much of a risk for the bank to loan to you. Okay.
[00:26:11] This ended up being very racial, obviously, because red lined neighborhoods were minority neighborhoods, primarily. When the us government became aware of this practice being put into place, they basically said, yeah, that sounds like a fine idea, just keep on doing that. So nothing really got changed. So for the next couple of decades, people in the green line neighborhoods, white people primarily, were able to buy homes, accrue wealth. Because it was a green line neighborhood and because it was considered low risk for the banks that attracted businesses, property values went up. They were able to sell their homes for more money, move into new homes or send their kids to college, because this was still during that time frame where if you got a college degree, you could get a good job and start accruing more wealth. So that gave rise to essentially rebuilding the white middle class of America. The suburban white middle class came from this redlining practice. And by the time the policies were considered unconstitutional and were removed, the damage had already been done. You know, people spent decades in redline neighborhoods where they continued to have to rent. They continued to be at the whim of their landlords in terms of how much they paid. They were not able to accrue the wealth. And so they were still stuck in this chronic poverty state due to systemic structures that were put into place to purposely keep them there, quite frankly, whereas the white people who were in green line neighborhoods were able to get themselves out of the poverty of the Great Depression and recover because they benefited from the system, they benefited from the banks and the people creating these suburban neighborhoods, saying, we want white people here only. They benefited from that. Right. And then this still has echoes because in a lot of states, schools are funded by property taxes. So if you're in a more expensive neighborhood, a more affluent neighborhood, there typically is more funding for those schools in those districts. Right. We all know if you ever considered having children, there's always that consideration of, is this a good school district or not? Right. I. So that's how those funds are still available and why they're still available for those more well off schools and more well off neighborhoods. Those students tend to have better facilities, more resources, perhaps more after school activities and things like that. Right.
[00:28:45] So this also gets into food deserts. Why there are food deserts in certain urban areas. Formerly redlined neighborhoods have the food deserts. This is also where we get into the issue of currently gentrification, of people coming into those neighborhoods not knowing that history making rent prices go up because it suddenly becomes more desirable. And then the people who, you know, a lot of lower ses, people who live in chronic poverty, they survive by creating a community and by supporting each other. And so if you break up that community and people get pushed out due to rent going up, it becomes much harder for them to survive and much harder for them to have some sort of resiliency against the trauma of chronic poverty. Okay. All right.
[00:29:30] So I just want to touch on that a little bit. There's a really great video. Adam ruins everything. Did a great video on YouTube. I'll link to so you can learn a little more about redlining, if you would. Like, to the next few that I wanted to go through, I'm actually just going to list them off by name. And if you have heard about them, great.
[00:29:49] Consider how much you know about it. Say, like, oh, I've heard of that. Do you know the history of it? Do you know when it started, how long it lasted, that sort of thing? And if you don't know, I will put links below for you to continue to go through that.
[00:30:06] So of course, there are Jim Crow laws.
[00:30:09] It's effectively apartheid in the United States, the Chinese Exclusion act, the massacre of Black Wall street, japanese american internment, the gay cancer.
[00:30:27] Do you know what that one is?
[00:30:29] And how much that impacted gay neighborhoods in cities, particularly mexican repatriation. Do you know all the times that has occurred as well? And that's just to name a few. There are plenty of other historical traumas. Stage one, historical traumas, mass traumas experienced by minority cultures in this country. I will include links to articles and videos to help you educate yourself on these things. If you wish to seek it out, it is hard to listen to stuff, so please do. Do what you need to do. Take it small doses at a time and be sure to process through any discomfort that comes up because reading about injustices can be a very dysregulating thing, right?
[00:31:15] So from the coco dash net.org comma, white supremacy culture and organizations, they talked about a few of the critical parts of white culture that are present a lot of times in organizational structures and work structures, right? So this is part of white culture, the sense of perfectionism. Right? We have a feeling that there's one right way to do your work. You think either or you either do this or this is the consequence. Right? Put it in writing. Right. If you put it in writing, that makes it formal and official. Right? So you have this worship of the written word.
[00:31:53] There is a concentration of power, including some level of power hoarding, which anyone who's ever had a very difficult to work with manager might know that if you have some sort of boss who wants to hide their errors from their superiors, there's a right to comfort, including a fear of open conflict. This is a big one that I think happens interpersonally, that really affects interpersonal relationship with colleagues and definitely can affect interpersonal relationships with clients from a therapist's perspective, from a speech language pathologist perspective, but right to comfort, meaning, like if you're the one with a position of power, you have a right to having some sort of emotional or psychological comfort or safety at your workplace. Or perhaps in your sessions, you shouldn't be getting upset. You have the right to be comfortable because you're the one in charge.
[00:32:45] And then fear of open conflict would be like if somebody raises an issue that causes some discomfort in that person who's in that position of power, the typical response is to just interrogate the person who highlighted that issue rather than actually investigating the problem itself. Right? Like the person, the whistleblower essentially gets punished because they get, you know, interrogated. And then the problem itself goes un investigated and unaddressed, which definitely happens in many, many companies across the United States.
[00:33:22] Individualism, we're a very individualistic society, but it's really strongly linked to this meritocracy idea, the idea that you earn your power, your privilege, and your wealth like it's afforded to you because you earned it, because you're good enough to deserve it, right? And that is a dangerous thing, because what it tends to do is it just erases any structural inequity that's happening or inequality, right? It's saying that you can very conveniently forget that you benefit from, say, redlining. For example. You grew up in a upper middle class, white suburban neighborhood, and you had parents who had wealth and you were able to, you know, whatever, and then believing that it was just through your hard work, through college and stuff that you got to where you're at, right? And so that focus on individualism and denial of systemic stuff, quite frankly, handily, kind of erases any responsibility. The people in position of power actually have to push for equality and equity. And it really does have a big impact on people's power and position. Right, and where they get to in their life. Because if I think there's one, there's an image online of, like, people starting a race and people starting way further back, right? And that's the idea of, like, the adverse community experiences, right? If you're born into adversity just by nature of the color of your skin or your religion or I, your sexual orientation or your gender, and also with your disability status, right? We definitely have an issue with not allowing disabled people access to certain rights and protections. Right? So when you automatically are just born into that situation, you're starting the race further back. Right? You have a bigger boulder to roll. You're going to be going slower. Right? Basically, we don't all start from the same starting point, right? So that's why meritocracy is a bit of a myth. Because when you have a system that's based in inequality, when you have a hierarchical system that's based in these people deserve it, and these people don't.
[00:35:27] What you end up with is systemic oppression of people. Right. You don't actually end up with a meritocracy where individuals can just work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which that whole phrase was actually supposed to highlight how silly that sounds. Because if you pick up your bootstraps and you pull, you can't. You're not gonna move. You can't pull yourself up with your arms. Which I always thought that was a weird phrase when I was a kid because I guess it's my dirty emergency. But I was like, when I would picture it in my head, I'm like, that sounds ridiculous. You can't pick yourself up by, like, your shoelaces or your bootstraps. And then I come to find out later in life, that's actually the intention of that phrase, is to highlight how ridiculous that notion is that an individual can pick themselves up and that they don't need any sort of systemic supports. And I was like, oh, look at that. My neurodivergent brain figured it out. But unfortunately, it's become a pervasive phrase that people use in a non ironic way, a non sarcastic way, a non, like, what is it called?
[00:36:27] Analogy? No.
[00:36:30] Yeah, whatever. They don't use it in the way it's intended to be used in. Okay.
[00:36:35] Also, our desire for bigger or more progress. Right. So trying to be really objective with the data and, like, quantity of output over quality of output. Right. Some sort of sense of urgency.
[00:36:48] I see this a lot. Oh. I mean, you can see this in so many places, obviously, like, in the medical system, you can see it in productivity. Right. Billing. Right. You can just see more patients. Even more patients. Right. Like, you also see it in education when it comes to, you know, test scores and making sure everybody gets good grades and making sure there's no truancy. And do, do, do, like, keeping our numbers good. Got to keep the numbers good for the school so we can get money, because that's all wrapped into the budget. Right. So one of the big reasons we really need to talk about this is because this hierarchical structure of white supremacy culture is why there is so much intersectionality with so many different minority topics. And I think it's why it gets kind of muddy out there in, you know, social media land, like fatphobia, anti queer rhetoric, sexism, anti poor rhetoric, anti, like, low SES and ableism and all of these things. They can't really be separated out from anti black rhetoric in the United States because it's all rooted in promoting and normalizing this hierarchy in our society. This idea that there's this inherent inequality among humans, right? And that the financially successful cis white, straight males are the ones at the top because they somehow deserve it or they're somehow better than everybody else. Right? So that's why we got to talk about this, because it's become so normalized that it permeates all these areas and all these spaces, and it's why so many people of any minority group or any oppressed group will likely encounter some level of implicit bias, if not outright bias, and discrimination and oppression. Right? So this is what we gotta become aware of, because as a caregiving profession, I'm pretty sure we all came into this profession to love other people and care for them, but we have to be aware of what makes a space emotionally safe for all people, not just physically safe. Right. Physical safety is, of course, important, but the emotional safety is also very important. And implicit biases have a lot to do with why people of certain minority groups don't feel safe in certain spaces. Right? So that's why we got to talk about this.
[00:39:17] So the way I kind of like to sound bite this whole concept of this hierarchical structure we've inherited and this, like, white supremacy culture that we've inherited is this. Trauma echoes through time. Right? This is a phrase I came up with to label this section of my notes. And I like that phrase. Trauma echoes through time. Untreated trauma begets more trauma at the individual level, at interpersonal levels, and also at a sociological, societal level. Right? So the impact of all those events we just talked about and a lot of the others on the global scale. Right. They continue to echo for many, many, many generations after the initial event. This now brings us to the big picture of what I really want to get to today so that we can bridge this into how to dismantle how implicit bias shows up in our work collaborations, our relationships with colleagues, but also with clients. Right, and students and patients. Okay, going back to that ten stages of Americana indian genocide article, I actually want to talk a little bit about the first few stages, because they list these stages as the ten stages are classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, polarization, organization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. Denial is a really important one, too, because denial is what it means when the winners, the victors, write the history such that it doesn't sound as atrocious as it actually was, so that the people in the dominant group can feel kind of okay about themselves. Right, or can kind of hide the atrocities essentially, and also so that you can erase it with the convenient excuse of meritocracy. Meritocracy, meaning, you know, people get what they deserve, basically. So if you work really hard and you're really awesome, then you have success because you worked for it. And if you're not successful, then you didn't work as hard or you're lazy or whatever, right? That's where that meritocracy idea comes in. It's really easy to just deny that injustices occur on a social scale if it all comes down to an individual's abilities and drive to do hard work, right? Which, quite frankly, those of us who work in schools know that meritocracy is a pretty big myth, right? I mean, come on. I always feel a little bristly when you hear, like, celebrities or, like, CEO's or whatever or whoever who makes, like, millions and millions and millions of dollars a year, and they're just like, well, I work hard for it. And I'm like, come on, now. Like, I work pretty darn hard on my ieps and on my caseload and all of that, but I don't make millions of dollars a year for that. Is it really the amount of work? Is it really, really? I don't know about that. Right.
[00:42:12] Anyways, let me just step off my soapbox here. Okay? And now let's. Let's get back to the article.
[00:42:19] So they do say that the first two stages, classification and symbolization, those are universal human qualities. Like, that's a thing that all human societies do to different societies and different groups of people, right? They don't lead to genocide in and of themselves. But that classification of us and them is binary thinking, right? That's very pathogenic. Right? You think of, you know, us. We. We're the majority. We're the. We're the good people. We're the good guys, right? And then it's. It's all too easy to frame the other guys as bad guys, right? All too easy to go into those binary categories. We are the exemplary humans, and they need our help. Clearly, they are not exemplary humans. This is where you get into, like, differences, not being respected, right? So then you get into discrimination. So this is when the dominant group is using laws and customs and political power, societal standing, to deny rights to other groups, right? And the one that I really want to tie this into is dehumanization, because I think these two things get tied up a lot in today's culture, and we get really confused about what to do and what to say. And if I use that term, does that make me this? Right? Like, this is where it gets into that kind of stuff, too. So dehumanization in this article they mentioned that is the first true step towards genocide. It denies the humanity of a group. That's what you're doing, right? So you're weakening the dominant group's normal repulsion against harm and violence and even murder toward those people. Right? So that's the whole idea there is. If you can dehumanize them and you can make them seem less than, then the dominant group won't have such an issue with what might happen to them. So this starts to spread the idea that the superior group is kind of entitled to their rights. They earn their rights, right. They earn them by being superior, obviously. Right? Tongue in cheek there. But. And then people say, like, oh, well, see, that group deserves it because look at all the problems they have. And it's like, well, but this is part of being trauma informed, right? What happened to them that gave them those problems, right? And when you look into the history of what happened to them as a group, really atrocious things happened. That's what happened. Really atrocious historical traumas, which pretty much always get left out of the narrative from the dominant group's version of history. Right. Which is why it's important to listen to minority voices. Because if we create this practice of listening to minority voices, then we can start to pick up on these echoes that have happened throughout time. From the oppression, from the rhetoric around the dehumanization of that group of people, particularly language that surrounds that dehumanization, that just lingers. Right. Sometimes that language becomes colloquialisms, becomes slang, becomes cliches. We say, sometimes they just become things that seem normal to say. And if you're not part of that group, you don't hear the same stories of oppression and the signs of dehumanization they went through. You're less sensitive to that, right. So it's easy to accidentally say or do something that belies how implicit bias has permeated the broader culture. What's important about this from a trauma informed perspective is this is about emotional safety. And it's really, honestly, a very human thing to be blind to these implicit biases. If they happen to a group that you happen to not be a part of, it's very easy to miss these things, right? So that's why I want to start talking about this a little bit more and put it in more of that historical, systemic context, the societal context, so that at an individual level, we learn not to do or say these things as much as we possibly can, and that when these things show up, we can hopefully treat ourselves with a fair amount of forgiveness and compassion, because this stuff does just sort of sink into culture and it just hangs around. Right. But also to be able to regulate and be flexible and change, and we just create that habit of sort of shifting how we think about things and the type of language we use around certain groups.
[00:46:37] So microaggressions, I don't have a whole lot to say about them right now. I just want to introduce the concept of microaggression. Okay. So for Merriam Webster, here's the definition I pulled. A microaggression is a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group, such as a racial minority. There was, I believe it's a verve article. I will put a link below, of course. But Harris 2015 is what I have written down here. This quote from that article says, a key part of what makes them so disconcerting is that they happen casually, frequently, and often without any harm intended in everyday life.
[00:47:20] This is one of the ways that, unfortunately, as treating therapists or as just colleagues with our peers, we can unintentionally create an environment that is not emotionally safe. Okay? The implicit bias and how it comes out in our language and our interactions, the casual dehumanization that occurs with microaggressions is one of the key ways that we can create emotionally harmful environments for our colleagues and our clients.
[00:48:02] And it's usually, I mean, we all came into a helping profession, right? We all came into this profession with the intention to help people. So I don't think most of us are doing it with any harm intended. But the problem is, it does cause harm if we do not gain some awareness of these things. And so we have to confront this in ourselves, and we have to learn to create a habit within ourselves to regulate. And I deprogram this stuff because it is so normalized. That's the whole problem. We inherited this way of thinking. We inherited these phrases, these microaggressions, just due to our position in a hierarchical society, due to our status, which power group we belong to, and how powerful that group is, right? So one really good example of microaggressions, which is probably, well, it ended at today as a field that is majority female presenting, or at least majority female identifying, when only given the male or female choice. At Ash's last census, we kind of know a really big microaggression that luckily social media has labeled for us called mansplaining. Right. Mansplaining became a thing because women at large got very tired of trying to explain the microaggressions that occur in casual interactions. Interactions with significant others or social or work interactions with male bosses or male mentors or male colleagues even. Right. That's why we came up with the term mansplaining. Sorry, guys, we're just gonna. I'm just gonna use this as an example. And when I say male, I mean people socialized as male. Not all, of course. Of course. Not all men. So some examples of mainsplaining when male physicians try to explain to women that childbirth isn't painful or, you know, what was that one online? I don't remember who this was. It's just something I saw online about how, like, the lady was at a party or academic party or something, this academic professor, and she was being mansplained too, about a topic that she's an expert on. And then the guy was like, oh, you should check out such and such book or article or something. And she's like, I wrote that. That's my book and article. Right? Like, classic example there. So, yeah, we've all been there. We've all done that. We've all, you know, if you've been socialized as a female for any period of time, you have experienced some level of mansplaining. But that's definitely an example of a common microaggression that at least we have a name on now. So, hey, now we get to hear about it. But there are plenty of other types of microaggressions that we do need to be aware of and to acknowledge and to learn about in our trek toward becoming socially, just because social justice is a big part of being trauma informed.
[00:51:11] All right, so I'm just going to read off some examples of racial microaggressions. This is a chart I found on the University of Minnesota's school of Public Health website. I guess basically I just googled for examples of microaggressions, and this came up. They did say it was adapted from racial microaggressions in everyday life. Implications for clinical practice from 2007, published in American Psychologist. And when I tried to look up that article, it is behind a paywall. So I'm just going to go with the chart that they adopted. But basically there are a lot of other microaggressions that happen racially out there. This is when someone's talking to an Asian American or a Latino American. And you say things like, where are you from?
[00:51:54] Like, where are you from? Right? Like, hello, I have an asian american SLP friend and colleague who still gets asked that. And she's like, a fifth generation american, you know? So she's like, from California. That's a microaggression, because the implication is this person's not really american, right? They don't look american, right? They must be a foreigner. They must be some from somewhere else, some other country. This is also, I really hope people in our field don't use this, but if you say something like, you're so articulate to say an African American, because you, I guess, missed the memo that african american dialect is a dialect and not a disorder. That is a microaggression that people say a lot, right? So it's kind of that. That idea that we kind of moralize the way people talk. We moralize accents, basically, in this country, or we place a value to them, right? Where, like, that accent means you're intelligent and that one means you're not. People say things a lot like this. Like, when I look at you, I don't see color. When people say that, they're trying to say, I see you as a human being, and I appreciate you for who you are. But that is a denial of a whole group's experiences. That's a denial that they do have to deal with everyday casual discrimination, racism, perhaps sexism. It all gets wrapped up in that person's experience of the world. And so when you say, I don't see color, that's a really convenient way to invalidate the experiences of people with color. Right? So the answer to that, the antidote to that would be to just listen. Just listen to their experiences and say, I'm so sorry. You have to experience that. Or that sounds so hard, like, validate it, you know what I mean? Use some sort of validation of, like, I believe that you go through these challenges. One thing that I always go to is it makes me so angry that people still have to live with that, because it does. It makes me very angry. That's my biggest emotion that comes up when I read about these sort of things.
[00:53:58] Injustice in general makes me really, really, really angry. So that's sort of the thing, you know, there's also the classic, like, I'm not racist, I have a lot of black friends, or I'm not homophobic, I have gay friends. Same coin, two different sides, I guess, of the same statement, but. Right, like, that's the idea that, like, okay, I don't have any individual bias that I'm consciously aware of, which the person might be trying to say, hey, you probably have some implicit bias, and you probably benefit from systemic structures that I don't benefit from. And I want to tell you about those systemic structures, right? So if you say, like, well, but I'm not racist, it's like, okay, but like, listen. It doesn't feel very culturally humble if you're not willing to listen, right, to people's when they try to explain systemic oppression and systemic struggles.
[00:54:49] So that's where I'm gonna start wrapping it up for today. It might be another long episode, but, you know, this is heavy stuff. And hoping I'm talking as accurately as I can, but wanted to talk about the stages of historical trauma. Wanted to talk about hierarchical structure that comes from white supremacy culture, comes from colonizer culture, and how we still see that echoed in our systems today, in our workplaces, even perhaps especially in the way companies structure things and how hard they push people and how entitled people feel to certain benefits or money or whatever, when other people don't get livable wages, that power hoarding and wealth hoarding, that happens, that all is part of that, right? And then having some understanding that minority cultures can be so opposed to that and so opposite of that, because their culture was erased for them and they were forced to adopt this hierarchical culture. They were forced to adopt a place in society that was considered less than. And that they still have that impact, because the things that led to those initiating events for those historical traumas continue to echo, particularly in the areas of discrimination and dehumanization and how casual and implicit and undead, unaware that the dominant culture can be of those things still persisting, right. And how hard they can make every day be and how they can lead to just continued lifelong chronic trauma for people in minority groups, in marginalized groups. Okay, so tying that into dehumanization and the use of microaggressions and the casual use of language that dismisses the experiences of people like mansplaining or like the. I don't see color. Right. Those sort of things. Another actual example of that, just throwing this in here at the wrap up is the. There's a lot of news on this now, but talking about how physicians downplay women's pain, right. Because it's just been normalized that, you know, women are just emotional or they're just exaggerating. Right.
[00:56:57] And as a white woman, I would also be remiss not to mention that that goes doubly so for women of color.
[00:57:04] They tend to get pretty atrocious medical care, even in the United States because their claims, their symptoms, the things they bring to their physicians are often not attended to with the importance that they should be or get denied outright.
[00:57:22] So coming up next, I'm going to talk. We're going to keep going from this dehumanization idea, and we're going to talk about how dehumanization starts to be seen in science and medicine, particularly the things that it's good for, the things it can be functional for, and the things it's not functional for. That's what we're going to talk about. And how that casual dehumanization shows up in medicine and science and how that can lead to some pretty detrimental results for certain marginalized groups. So I know it's like, yay, what a fun, fun time. Okay, important time. It's an important time. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what to say when I'm, like, talking about important, challenging things that are important.
[00:58:07] Maybe it's just my neurodivergency, but I'm not one to not face something just because it's challenging. You know what I mean?
[00:58:16] With all that said, I hope you go off, you regulate, you relax, watch some cute animals online, just watch a comedy, do something comforting for yourself because that was a lot of difficult information to go through. Next time, we're going to get into dehumanization a little more, particularly dehumanization in science and medicine. And I'm going to tell you a little story about the history of trauma in western culture and the study of it, which I think will be very interesting. It was very enlightening and interesting to me, so I wanted to make a whole episode about it. I hope you guys all have a great week or two. Do what you need to do to take care of yourselves, okay? It's a tough world out there, but hey, the more of us become trauma informed, the more we're just gonna validate and create a lovely community where we just all feel safe and nice and we'll have a safe space to go to. Right? So find your safe space. Create a safe space for yourself. Do what you need to do to take care of yourself and your body. And do please join me again as we all discover what it means to be trauma informed. Slps.
