Lately, it feels like I hear the word trauma all the time, in all kinds of situations,

including ones that honestly are not all that serious.

Trauma, childhood trauma, okay?

You ever so traumatized as a child, you used that as six cents?

Literally traumatizing.

I'm so tired of people saying trauma makes you funny.

Now, for sure, given the last couple of years, all of us are probably a little bit traumatized.

The riots over police-involved killings, killings that run on a loop on your smartphone.

The thing that I can tell is he couldn't breathe.

The national debates about race and a pandemic that revealed inequality in our health, education, and economy like a low tide.

But there is a difference between the shock of these events and the long-term effects of trauma on whole communities.

So what does that mean?

What do people who know about trauma think about the way it's being kicked around in pop culture?

How are they treating it differently?

How is their work changing in the age when more and more people are seeking mental help?

How is the field of psychology adapting to evidence that cultural context

is just as important a data point as, say, substance abuse? Right. So here's the thing.

Erasure is political. Right. So to say, I want to treat you as a human being, so I have to pretend your race doesn't exist, right? It's basically what we're saying. If I can't ask you about how your identity has affected your life, then basically we're saying to value you as a human, I have to pretend that we're all having an identical experience.

I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment.

Here's some context for you. Last year, during the racial reckoning, the American Psychology

Association apologized to black people.

Okay, not officially.

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