Reconceptualizing Racism and Presenting a Theory of Race-Based Traumatic Stress

In the preceding chapters, we discussed racial discrimination’s effects as emotional distress and race-based stress and trauma. Here we discuss the idea introduced by Carter and Helms (2002) that racism be reconceptualized since most definitions do not allow a clear connection to be established between the racial event and a person’s emotional and psychological responses (cf., Carter, 2007; Carter & Pieterse, 2020). We also present here the conceptual model of race-based traumatic stress injury.