Editorial: Racialized Trauma and Emotion Regulation in a Dysregulated World

Abstract

Racialized trauma can come directly from other people or can be experienced within a wider system. It can come as the result of a direct experience when racism is enacted on you, vicariously-such as when you see videos of other people facing racism-and/or transmitted intergenerationally. More and more, research in child and adolescent psychiatry has supported that race-related stress and racialized violence has systemic roots and psychological and physiological consequences. The term "emotion regulation" is generally used to describe a person's ability to effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience and to adapt to the demands of their environment. At the time of writing this editorial, youth of color have witnessed a pandemic in which their families and communities have been disproportionately impacted and devastated, the death of George Floyd and other racialized violence against unarmed people of color, murder of their elders in grocery stores and churches, their peers shot by assault weapons while attending school, all compounded by discrimination against sexual and gender minority people in some regions, climate change heating up our earth, and immigrant children separated from parents or dying at the border. What will be the response of the adults around them to protect them? What is the role of emotion regulation skills for youth experiencing race-related stress and trauma in a dysregulated world?