My family teases me about how much I listen to Urban View Radio. If you don’t know about it now you do. Lurie Daniel Favors, Karen Hunter, and Clay Cane are outstanding radio hosts that speak empowerment to our community. This article is from a combination of discussions I’ve never had with them, but hear everything that is being said. Thank you.
Many Black people are now experiencing something difficult to name but impossible to ignore. It shows up as exhaustion that sleep does not fix, vigilance that never fully turns off, grief without a single identifiable loss, and a quiet sense that something familiar is being taken away in real time. In the midst of a strained political climate, we are witnessing the disappearance of people, the dismantling of history, and the removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts often framed as policy decisions, but lived as personal impact. As The Trauma Educator and as I explained in my first book, Black Trauma What Happens to Us!, I want to be clear: this moment is not just political, it is physiological, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and financial. And the cost is cumulative.
There is a physical cost that lives in our body and keeps us on alert. When people repeatedly witness erasure, exclusion, or the rewriting of history, the body responds as if this danger is near even when the threat is not immediate or visible. Chronic stress activates the nervous system, increasing inflammation, disrupting sleep, elevating blood pressure, and weakening our immune response. Over time, this contributes to the very health disparities Black communities are already navigating. This is not about being “too sensitive.” It is about how the human body responds to prolonged uncertainty, vigilance, and loss of safety cues. There is a mental and emotional cost to this unnamed process.
Many Black people are watching changes unfold that directly affect identity, belonging, and opportunity, yet are told these changes are neutral, necessary, or unrelated to race. This creates cognitive dissonance which is the strain of holding what we see and feel alongside messages that tell us it should not matter.
Emotionally, this shows up as irritability, numbness, anxiety, sadness, or emotional fatigue. Mentally, it can affect concentration, decision-making, and memory. When history is challenged or erased, it destabilizes meaning. When representation is removed, it disrupts the hope we had. When people disappear from classrooms, from leadership spaces, from public acknowledgment, it creates a quiet grief that often goes unmourned.
For many of us, our spirituality has long been a source of grounding, resilience, and moral clarity. Yet this moment has created what trauma professionals call a moral injury. Moral injury is the distress that occurs when systems that are meant to protect us instead violate deeply held values about justice, dignity, and truth as it pertains to us.
When institutions that once acknowledged harm begin to retreat from accountability, or when truth-telling is labeled as divisive, it can fracture a sense of purpose and trust. People begin to ask: Where do we belong? Who is protected? What does progress actually mean? Spiritual strain does not always look like a crisis of faith. Sometimes it looks like weariness, silence, or disengagement.
There is also a financial cost. The removal of DEI initiatives is often discussed abstractly, but its financial impact is real. These efforts opened doors to education, leadership pipelines, healthcare equity, and workplace protections. Their dismantling affects hiring, advancement, scholarships, training, and retention. For Black families, this translates into reduced access to opportunity, increased economic stress, and the pressure to work harder for diminishing returns. Know this, financial strain is not separate from trauma, it amplifies it, increasing stress at home and limiting the capacity to recover.
What we are witnessing is called Accumulative Trauma. Understand this, none of this happens in isolation. Our body, mind, and spirit does not compartmentalize history, headlines, or lived experience. Watching erasure happen in real time while being told it is progress creates a unique form of stress. It is the stress of being seen and unseen simultaneously. Trauma is not only what happens to us directly, it is also what happens around us, especially when it threatens our identity, safety, and continuity.
It’s important to name what “it” is. Naming the cost does not mean surrendering to despair. It means telling the truth so that healing, protection, and care become possible. When communities are told to “move on” without acknowledgment, the harm goes underground. This underground is internal. When impact is minimized, the body still remembers because the body is holding it.
As Black people, we are not imagining the weight of this moment, our reactions are human responses to real conditions. Healing begins with the recognition of what is happening, how it affects us, and what it requires of us moving forward. This is not a call to panic, it is a call to awareness, care, and collective grounding. Our well-being depends not only on what policies are passed, but on whether we are allowed to remain whole in the midst of change.
Resilience, in this moment, does not mean ignoring what is happening or pushing through without pause. It means staying connected to truth, to one another, and to the practices that restore our bodies and spirits. It means protecting our history, telling our stories, and creating spaces where care, reflection, and belonging are still possible. Black resilience has never been about pretending harm does not exist; it has always been about surviving with dignity, clarity, and an unwavering commitment to wholeness even when the world insists otherwise.
Dr. Carlian Dawson, The Trauma Educator
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