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

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This symposium explores the ways that racialized trauma and grief inform and impact our understanding of healing self, each other, and the world. Given that recurring grief and trauma are a manifestation and symptom of structural violence that disproportionately impacts marginalized communities (Ginwright, 2016), we argue that to ignore these fissures is to ignore the full humanity of ourselves and our students. Currently, it is reported 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 alarmingly high, this data neglects to account for social toxins such as racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of oppression and subsequent microaggressions that also constitute forms of trauma (Coates, 2015; Leary, 2005;). While these statistics indicate that there was already an urgency to study trauma as one of the most significant issues of racial injustice facing Children of Color, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these conditions and exposed deep educational inequities that have long existed between the most privileged and oppressed communities in the United States (Love, 2019).
Despite the urgency and the growing body of scholarship related to trauma (e.g., Venet, 2021), the research on how to address racialized trauma in P-12 context is nascent (e.g., Alvarez, 2020). In addition to centering race, little trauma research addresses the necessity of grief as a tool for healing trauma or the role of schools as sites of trauma and grief (Everett & Dunn, 2021) for Students of Color. In addition, more research needs to investigate the compounded impact of traumatized and grieving teachers working with students who have experienced trauma, especially in schools that disenfranchise healing as separate from the professional duties of teaching.

The presenters in this session acknowledge that much of the trauma and grief experienced by communities of color stems from white, settler colonialism and as such, race must be at the center of how we both discuss and address trauma and healing. In order to contribute to a more robust understanding of racialized trauma, grief, and healing across the P-12 spectrum, the panel of educator-organizers and scholars draw from women of color feminisms, embodied, and decolonizing frameworks, to present qualitative, auto-ethnographic and interpretive studies that respond to the following questions:

-How do educators address trauma and center grief to prioritize healing in/out of their classrooms?
-How does addressing trauma and centering healing serve to disrupt racial injustice and advance racial justice?
Each paper presents “urgent life stories that compel action in authentic relationships with commitment and responsibility” to their respective contexts (Prieto & Villenas, 2012, p. 425). Collectively, this session calls for an epistemological, theoretical, ethical, and pedagogical shift to unapologetically center healing as an act of resistance to racial injustice and as a praxis necessary for both imagining and constructing different educational possibilities.

This session aims to challenge discourses that stigmatize and pathologize the emotions of students and educators, particularly Students of Color and critical educators, and seeks to support educators in co-creating containers for healing (Weller, 2015) with and for our most vulnerable populations. In centering the healing of racialized trauma, this symposium meets this year’s call to not only disrupt racial injustice but to imagine different educational futurities -- ones that center our wellness.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, San Francisco State University

Papers

• Black Grief as the Nexus Toward the Beyond: Toward Truth Telling on the Trauma That Is School - Tiffani Marie, San Jose State University

• The Trauma and Racial Melancholia of Ungrieved Endings: An Embodied Understanding of Teachers of Color Who Have Left - Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Love as a Praxis for Healing Trauma and Advancing Racial Justice - Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Michigan

Discussant

• Dolores Delgado Bernal, Loyola Marymount University