that I have been meaning to share with you since I learned of it months ago. It's a conversation she had with a reporter at City Newspaper in my hometown of Rochester, NY. And it is exactly on time – up to the minute, really – in spite of its having taken place in 2009.
Joy DeGruy, (formerly Joy DeGruy Leary), in case you don't know of her, is the social worker and psychologist whose book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing has brought the not-so-well-absorbed poisons of our racial history boiling up out of the national pores. What moves DeGruy's analysis beyond the usual arguments about American slavery and racism is that she had the brilliant insight to analyze slavery-based racial relations and their lingering aftermath not simply as brutal and wrong, but as clinical trauma. Suddenly we are not speaking the squishy language of "injustice" toward black Americans and "progress" toward fairness. We are speaking the more precise and clinically-understood language of traumatic-event-based loss of healthy psychological function – and methodologies for healing and regaining healthy function. On a personal and national level.
An excerpt from the interview with DeGruy will give you an idea of where this goes:
When I studied PTS [Post Traumatic Stress], what fascinated me most was that a person can be diagnosed with PTS as a result of a single trauma. And not only that, they can experience trauma indirectly. They can hear about something happening to a loved one and be traumatized to such a degree that they require assistance.
I looked at that construct and thought, O.K., if a person can conceivably be diagnosed with a stress-related mental illness by having heard about a trauma, what in the world must have occurred with people who not only experienced trauma directly, but those who experienced the trauma of all those around them? And this traumatic episode occurred over centuries. So what people have to understand when I say "post traumatic" is that I'm giving you an etiology of some of the things we passed along from generation to generation.
When you look at the symptoms of PTS, you're looking at hyper-vigilance, outbursts of anger, difficulties going to sleep and waking up a lot, thoughts of a foreshortened future, and it goes on and on. Now just imagine the people living in those environments with people with those symptoms. After a while, with it never being diagnosed, never being treated, and never given a chance to heal, what you have is a culture with broken behaviors.
That's just for starters. The entire interview is here.


