Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. It’s mapped out in the DNA if you are a descendant of chattel slavery in the Americas and the West Indies.
A legacy of fear has been ingrained in our epigenetic pattern, so much so that some of us refuse to detangle the whitewashing of our religion matted up in our hair.
Joy DeGruy breaks down the effects of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome in her book with a study guide to collect your thoughts. As Black people who are still navigating systematic racism in America, this is a necessary read.
Black people who willfully continue to live in a country that shows no signs of amending the damage caused by chattel slavery; the question begs, why are we still so committed to juxtapositioning ourselves in a space that still believes we are inferior?
Germany studied American slavery and concluded that long-term enslavement was not beneficial to the genocidal needs of the Germans. Instead, the extermination of approximately six million Jews took place. America is now mirroring the ideologies of Nazi Germany by dismantling government agencies. What comes next?
If you don’t understand how enslavement hardwired Black people into believing their culture, spiritual beliefs, intelligence, and natural beauty had to be annihilated to control Black people, reading Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome will open your third eye, hopefully, enough to live your life in a state of being woke, not just hashtagging it.
They say it’s Women’s History Month. I will focus on Black women in my writing because their stories were not the focus of the McGraw Hill textbooks when I was in school.
Dr. Joy Angela DeGruy, we honor your scholarly work.
If there was ever a book that needed to be printed and sold until the publisher ran out of ink, this would be it.
Take the time to watch Dr. DeGruy’s lecture on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrom in London in 2008 in comments.
Share your thoughts after you’ve watched it.
