queen & slim

IN HER BOOK, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Dr. Joy Degruy examines the myriad ways that African Americans’ history have been fragmented by a racist society, how generations of disenfranchisement, abuse, and racist socialization have robbed black people of the underpinnings of culture and filial structure, and how as a people they’ve been affected at the cellular level by the Transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era racism that followed, and the buttress of systemic racism that still thrives at every level of the national infrastructure to this day. “Although slavery has long been a part of human history,’ she writes, ‘American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma not comparable in scope, duration, and consequence with any other incidence of human enslavement.” She argues that African Americans are “slavery’s children”, are thus afflicted with survivor’s syndrome, and she defines Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) as “a condition that exists […]

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