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Abstract
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If trauma is always "right there" for Black people, educators and practitioners must wrestle with the compounding nature of history, the body, and trauma that manifests in students' nuanced and analogous experiences. In the wake of increasing access to public acts of terror and violence, this article explicates the trauma-body-history relationship in relation to anti-Blackness and offers some implications in the service of Black student's healing and survival.
The memory of George Floyd's murder will live on in the United States consciousness. In some ways, his death--Black death--will be the site that galvanized a different type of energy about the craving for Black breath and the suffocating smog of anti-Blackness in policing, corporate spaces, and education classrooms. For more than 9 minutes and 29 seconds, the public bore witness, and for 9 min and 29 s, Darnella Frazier recorded. Frazier, a Black woman, refused to look away when she had every excuse to do so, forcing white power structures to look themselves in the mirror and hold her terror close. Frazier, giving voice to her witness, said, "I was right there. I was like 5 ft away. It is so traumatizing" (Fernandez, 2020, para 8). Readers should understand "it" as the devastating scene that was Floyd's murder. However, the "it" could be a range of scenes and events experienced by people who encounter scenes and experiences that interrupt what would otherwise be routine occurrences in the flow of their lives. "It," or trauma, however, is not just the scene of terror that took place; it doubles as the "imprint left by that experience on the mind, brain, and body" (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 21). Thus, the ways trauma lives on as an imprint affects how humans organize their worlds and survive into the future. Frazier's comments profoundly summon the closeness, and perhaps, inescapable nature of traumatic scenes imprinted on the body when she says, "I was right there." Here, she issued a critical reminder that trauma is unsettling and can have a range of effects on those who directly experience a scene as well as those who bear witness.
Language: en |