On Sunday, police officers in Seattle shot and killed Charleena Lyles in her home. She died in front of “several children,” according to reports, and her family members say she was pregnant. Just days before, Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, was acquitted of all charges. Earlier this spring, an unarmed teenager named Jordan Edwards was shot and killed by police as he was driving away from a party. By now, it’s become a sickeningly familiar sequence of events.
While the trigger (both literally and metaphorically) is the same, there is an aspect of these events that is frequently overlooked: the effects of the frequent police killings on black Americans’ mental health in the form of racial trauma, a psychological phenomenon that some experts say is similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. “Racial trauma is experiencing psychological symptoms such as anxiety, hypervigilance to threat, or lack of hopefulness for your future as a result of repeated exposure to racism or discrimination,” said Erlanger Turner, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston, who is one of only a handful of researchers studying racial trauma.
[For more of this story, written by Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez, go to http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2...f-racial-trauma.html]
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