Love as a Praxis for Healing Trauma and Advancing Racial Justice

• In Event: Healing Racialized Trauma: Grief and Love as a Praxis for Racial Justice

Abstract

Emerging research shows that more than half of all U.S. children have experienced some kind of trauma in the form of abuse, neglect, violence, or challenging household circumstances—and 35 percent of children have experienced more than one type of traumatic
event (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). While those statistics for trauma are alarmingly high, they do little to account for racialized trauma (e.g., Menakem, 2019); essentially if we were to expand definitions of trauma to include factors of race, gender, class, sexuality, geography, and so forth, the trauma young people in general, and young People of Color specifically, experience is likely more pervasive than those statistics indicated. Most terrifying, however, is that these numbers are dated before a global pandemic and national uprisings, which have, overnight, uprooted the lives of children across the country.

In more ways than we can count or conceptualize, the current moment we are
experiencing is a trauma. A collective one. A racialized one. Collective trauma accounts for when a susto happens to entire communities at the same time, when our world and our relationship to it is irrevocably changed by events like war, colonialism, a natural disaster, or in our current case—a global pandemic, and rampant racism. These traumas, both individual and collective, are exacerbated by a systemic racialized trauma, which is the “repeated, ongoing violation, exploitation, dismissal of, and/or deprivation of groups of people. State institutions, economic systems, and social norms that systematically deny people access to safety, mobility, resources, food, education, dignity, positive reflections of themselves, and belonging” (Haines, 2019, p. 80).
Embedded in this research is a salient but often glossed-over point: healing from trauma cannot exist outside the container of loving relationships (Perry, 2007; Weller, 2015). In fact, research spanning the fields of public health, medicine, social epidemiology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, ethnic studies, and education agree that one protective barrier against trauma becoming post-traumatic is a loving relationship (Ginwright, 2015; Perry, 2007; Siegel & Solomon, 2003; Van Der Kolk, 2014). The aforementioned fields are joined by educational theorists (e.g., Darder, 2002; Freire, 1970; Howard, 2002, 2017) and Women of Color feminists (e.g., Combahee RiverCollective; 1974; Garcia-Rojas, 2016) who posit that love in education is a political commitment necessary for a world in which freedom and equity exist. This literature serves as the impetus for returning to the students I taught for four years to understand how we conceptualize love—as both teacher and student(s)—, as well as how love was made visible in the context of our English classroom. By drawing on a corpus of data collected throughout my tenure as a teacher- researcher (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008), I engage in pláticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016; Hannegan-Martinez, 2023) with students to collectively theorize what a practice of love looks like in the classroom. Given the detrimental impacts of trauma on the bodies and brains of young people, there is a moral and pedagogical imperative that we intervene, that we truly learn how to love.

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Michigan