Can Higher Education Heal the Traumatic Curse of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?
Why aren’t more Black students excelling in K-12 and higher education? Black students appear to lack persistence or the motivation to graduate college; however, according to an overwhelming amount of evidence, Black students’ lack of motivation to complete a college education is an inherited genetic mutation derived from the violent brutalities of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade have left generations of African American people genetically traumatized and unable to seek their full academic and economic potential.
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade is an unimaginably horrific White American legacy. It is the ingredient in the American apple pie that few want to recognize on their palette. And yet, the taste lingers and continues to shackle our future. We need a true societal reckoning so that we stop losing our children. The facts are that European and American slave traders stole between 10 million and 12 million African people from mainly West African countries (a mere segment of the global slave trade). This three-legged trade route meant that enslaved human traffic flowed to and from three general areas on either side of the Atlantic Ocean: Europe, Africa, and the Americas, form what is known as the Middle Passage. We often hear stories highlighting the idea that slavery is over. However, the trauma that continues to impact generations of Black people in the U.S. (and truthfully, all Americans) leaves many stranded in a way between two or three shores — rarely able to find solid ground.
More than 150 years later, since abolishing chattel slavery in the United States, we still have the same discussions about equity access and diversity. And we are still assessing Black students based on standardized testing that leads to this so-called idea of “achievement gap” among Black students who have constantly compared academically to White and Asian students, without the understanding that unmet trauma is still present in DNA from 400 years of brutalization. We are still collecting race-based data on these students with minimal solutions and putting these students in “at-risk” or “marginalized” categories with no solutions that will provide positive outcomes. How can Black Americans make gains when the system of chattel slavery in America completely removed all ties to any cultural and/or financial establishments past or present?
Black, enslaved women, contributed the highest to African descendants’ gene pool in existence today. Black women were raped repeatedly by their White masters. Not only raped by White men but also forced to have sex with other enslaved men for “breeding.” Black women’s bodies were sexually brutalized, which lead to forced pregnancies, and children born while in bondage. These are only a few examples of the pain and extreme trauma that continues to stain generations of African slave descendants.
When we as educators have conversations about identity with Black students or colleagues, these conversations should be purposeful in understanding unmet trauma, needs critical solutions, not only legislative policies. Institutions of systemic racism in America are societal constructs perpetuated and grown into the 21st century to vale the psychological human guilt of European and American slave traders and slave owners.
For higher education to exist on a level playing field for all Americans, for true healing to begin for Black Americans, and for genetic trauma to be understood and allowed to manifest awareness, White America must atone for their ancestral guilt by deconstructing the institutions of coded, systemic racism in higher education. K-16 education should be in the context of supporting the student holistically, which nurtures the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual curiosity of Black Students. This happens naturally when systemic racism is deconstructed.
Black students must take the psychological space needed to reconstruct their full humanity. Education must be part of the transformation, where space is held for Black students to start internal healing of past and current racial trauma. This healing is not only an individual task but a societal must.
