Trauma Pouring: On the Uses, Costs, and Risks of Re-Telling Racial Trauma

• In Event: Troubling Gender and Sexuality: Meditations on Performances of (Un)Gendering in Black Educational Spaces

Abstract

Black suffering is not only an issue in K-12 schools but also in postsecondary institutions (Dancy et al., 2018; Dumas, 2014). Black college students are unduly distressed and deeply disturbed by hate crimes and spectacles of violence, hypersurveillance and policing, subtle racist interactions, and rampant underrepresentation and marginalization (Hughes, 2013; Nelson, 2019; Willians et al., 2021). Yet, Black students also recognize how institutions tend to disregard and overlook Black suffering (Bazner & Button, 2021; Jones, 2019; Squire, 2017). Consequently, Black students engage in various forms of social action to contest both the causes of Black suffering and the ways in which it is disregarded (Mustaffa, 2017; Turner, 2020).
This paper emerges from a multi-year Black feminist ethnography about the dilemmas that Black students, staff, and faculty (n=107) face when trying to address Black suffering at their elite public university. More specifically, the paper focuses on the dilemmas involved with telling stories of racial trauma in an attempt to demand institutional change, prompted by a Black undergraduate woman's remark to senior administrators that she “[doesn't] want to have to use trauma to get change”. Based on semi-structured interviews with ten Black women who organized and participated in a Black community listening session in 2020 (an event where administrators were asked to listen to grievances and calls for institutional change), I analyzed the choreography of how Black undergraduate women made use, navigated the risks, and felt the costs of re-telling racial trauma. Drawing on Black feminist studies and Black performance studies (Lorde, 2012; Hartman, 1997; Nash, 2019; Smith, 2016), I argue that Black suffering is institutionally reproduced in these performances of trauma for administrators even as these performances of trauma are retooled as a means of redress for Black life. In alignment with this year’s AERA theme, this paper ultimately explores how Black undergraduate women strategically deploy their experiences of racial trauma as they seek to structurally disrupt and dismantle anti-blackness and Black suffering at their University.

Author

• Caleb E. Dawson, USCB