About the Educational Equity Institute

A primary and fundamental component of equity and justice work is to place an emphasis on helping individuals and communities heal from the wounds of historical trauma and white supremacy. According to the Lebron and colleagues (2015), historical trauma is the cumulative negative effects of racism on the lives of people of color. The trauma of racism has produced negative psychological, health, economic, and social effects on generations of Black people in this country. This repetitive, unresolved trauma overwhelms a person’s and a community’s ability to cope and creates feelings of powerlessness that perpetuate the cycle.

We all carry a deep shame that stems from our painful history, so we all must heal. Slavery was the original trauma that inflicted extreme pain and suffering on an entire group of people. The ideology that was needed to carry out the atrocities of slavery and Jim Crow was the dehumanization of Black people. With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, we freed millions of slaves; however, we never dealt with the trauma of slavery. We moved on, pretending that it was something from the past. This defense mechanism continues to be a common refrain. “Slavery is in the past.” “Why do we need to keep talking about slavery?” The avoidance in facing this trauma is deeply rooted in shame. Truth and reconciliation will require deep self-reflection and a reckoning that we have covered up the wounds of slavery through a false narrative that the ideals of our country have been achieved.

We offer an approach that can be used by communities to organize, focus on healing historical trauma and the effects of white supremacy, empower individuals within marginalized neighborhoods to take control of their own narrative, and engage White neighborhoods in discussions about racial inequity so that we can begin shifting the narrative within individual communities and create more equitable educational systems.