Poverty Is the First Trauma

EVER SINCE THE release of Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score, trauma education has proliferated. I have seen training in everything from trauma-informed lawyering to trauma-informed care in emergency rooms. Trauma-informed practices have even started making their way into some correctional facilities and corporate boardrooms. Yet much of the popular writing tends to focus deeply on the more personal elements of trauma, rather than systemic elements, such as poverty.

My colleague Derrick Stroud, who survived 27 years in prison and now is a clinician, once described poverty as the “first trauma” in communities of color. The impact of poverty increases the chances of both low educational attainment among children and placement in foster care; this, combined with the challenges faced by under-resourced schools, can become a pipeline to prison. Neighborhoods impacted by poverty can reinforce traumatic conditions, since residents are more likely to witness or experience violence or be profiled by the police. These ecosystemic conditions impact human bodies and produce negative health outcomes that can have detrimental generational effects — all of which can be traced back to under-resourced systems.

But if trauma can be passed down generationally, so too can healing. The Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, a healing justice movement, recognizes healing trauma as long-term work. Cara Page, a founding member of the Kindred Collective, describes healing justice as a political framework “that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on intergenerational trauma and violence.” Healing justice is distinct from trauma-informed practice because it seeks to address and abolish systems — such as the carceral system or aspects of the medical industrial complex — that continue to perpetuate harm. It does this while paying attention to the healing lineages and collective care created by communities through “workarounds” formed because of failed systems.

One such justice-based work happened in East Harlem in 1969, when the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican community-based organization modeled after the Black Panther Party, approached First Spanish United Methodist Church about using  its space for a breakfast program for children. The church refused, but the Young Lords physically occupied the church for 11 days and established a hot breakfast program, a daycare center, and other health and social services. This act stood as a prophetic witness to the failures of the church and the public school system. Eventually, thanks to the consistent efforts of school breakfast activists throughout the United States, the program was adopted by the federal government as a national initiative in 1975.

I believe that the church, like the Young Lords, can be nimbler than the systems that fail our communities. What if the church coalesced with others to master the workaround, providing alternative webs of support? Our investment in this long-term work would be good news for communities impacted by poverty.