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Joy Angela DeGruy (born October 16, 1957) is an American author, academic, and researcher. DeGruy previously served as assistant professor at Portland State University School of Social Work. She is currently president and CEO of DeGruy Publications, Inc and Executive Director of the non-profit Be The Healing, Inc. She is mostly known for her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
DeGruy was born October 16, 1957, in Los Angeles, California. She was the youngest of four children born to working class parents, Oscar DeGruy, a truck driver and Nellie Parker DeGruy, a stay-at-home mom. Her parents grew up in Louisiana. Joy's maternal great-grandparents were from Belize. [1]
Joy attended elementary school, junior high school, and senior high school in Los Angeles Unified School District. She participated in a dual enrollment program that allowed her to complete junior college coursework while a student at Crenshaw High School. DeGruy has stated that her high school guidance counselor told her that she was not college material. [2]
DeGruy holds a bachelor's of science in Speech Communication from Portland State University, two master's degrees (in Social Work from Portland State and Clinical Psychology from Pacific University), and a Ph.D. in Social Work and Social Research from Portland State University's Graduate School of Social Work. [3] Her doctoral dissertation studied predictive variables for African American Male Youth Violence using Sociocultural Theory, Social Learning Theory and Trauma Theory frameworks. [4] [5] She also employed the "new" theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, which would later become the subject of her 2005 book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Professor Eileen M. Brennan served as DeGruy's dissertation advisor. [6]
From 2001 to 2014, DeGruy was an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Portland State University, where she taught core classes in Human Behavior in the Social Environment, Generalist Practice, Field Instruction, African American Community (Seminar), African American Multigenerational Trauma & Issues of Violence, and Diversity and Social Justice. [7]
In an interview for Essence Magazine, DeGruy summarizes: "research has shown that severe trauma can affect multiple generations ... no one has ever measured the impact that slavery had on us, what it’s meant for us to live for centuries in a hostile environment. We have been hurt, not just by the obvious physical assaults, but in deep psychological ways..." [8]
DeGruy's theorization is based on qualitative and quantitative research conducted by the author in both America and Africa. [9]
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), which awarded DeGruy a 2023 Presidential Citation, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing has amassed over 1700 research citations in peer-reviewed journal articles and books. [10]
The New Republic described the theory as "original thinking" that "explains[s] the effects of unresolved trauma on the behaviors of blacks that is transmitted from generation to generation," and suggested that the theory can be historicized more broadly a said P.T.S.S. "lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present, and opens up the discussion of how we can use the strengths we have gained to heal." [11]
DeGruy's theory is not without controversy. P.T.S.S. has been criticized by scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi, who included it in his history of racist ideas in America, Stamped from the Beginning. [12] [13]
Others defend her work. Notably Guy Emerson Mount, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Auburn University, offers a counter assessment for Kendi's critique: [14]
This post was inspired by Professor Ibram X. Kendi's insightful AAIHS critique of Professor Joy DeGruy's equally insightful book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. In the spirit of full disclosure, Professor Kendi and I are both contributors to a forthcoming AAIHS anthology titled New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, edited by Keisha N. Blain, Chris Cameron and Ashley D. Farmer. At the same time, Professor DeGruy is a family friend. I’ve hung out with her nephew and attended her daughter's wedding. My wife and her sisters grew up with her as a role model . . . Having said that, I am sympathetic to many of the critiques that Professor Kendi has put forward. Yet I also believe that post traumatic slave syndrome (PTSS) can still be reconciled to those critiques and, in the hands of skilled practitioners, advance an anti-racist agenda (even if it is, as Professor Kendi says, a “racist idea”). In the end, Professor Kendi is right to worry that PTSS will, at the very least, fall into the wrong hands and be used by racist forces as further confirmation of black cultural/psychological/ontological inferiority . . . Prof. Kendi anticipates racist forces will misread and weaponize PTSS in the same way that they have done with almost every other previous black self-help idea including most recently the stop the violence movements of the 1990s aimed at reducing ‘black-on-black crime.’ But Professor DeGruy is, at the end of the day, simply a black psychologist trying to help black people survive psychically in a world that is trying daily to strip them of their humanity. Professor Kendi is right—the world has not succeeded in doing so. But Professor DeGruy is also right—we could all use a little healing.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself is an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave, published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for its author. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book documents Jacobs' life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels "to address race and gender issues." She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a form of alternative therapy aimed at treating trauma and stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The primary goal of SE is to modify the trauma-related stress response through bottom-up processing. The client's attention is directed toward internal sensations rather than cognitive or emotional experiences. Peter A. Levine developed the method.
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is a stress-related mental and behavioral disorder generally occurring in response to complex traumas.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is the Research Chair in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She graduated from Fort Hare University with a bachelor's degree and an Honours degree in psychology. She obtained her master's degree in Clinical Psychology at Rhodes University. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of Cape Town. Her doctoral thesis, entitled "Legacies of violence: An in-depth analysis of two case studies based on interviews with perpetrators of a 'necklace' murder and with Eugene de Kock", offers a perspective that integrates psychoanalytic and social psychological concepts to understand extreme forms of violence committed during the apartheid era. Her main interests are traumatic memories in the aftermath of political conflict, post-conflict reconciliation, empathy, forgiveness, psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity. She served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She currently works at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein as a senior research professor.
Historical trauma or collective trauma refers to the cumulative emotional harm of an individual or generation caused by a traumatic experience or event.
Negroid is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category.
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing is a 2005 theoretical work by Joy DeGruy Leary. The book argues that the experience of slavery in the United States and the continued discrimination and oppression endured by African Americans creates intergenerational psychological trauma, leading to a psychological and behavioral syndrome common among present-day African Americans, manifesting as a lack of self-esteem, persistent feelings of anger, and internalized racist beliefs. The book was first published by Uptone Press in Milwaukie, Oregon, in 2005, with a later re-release by the author in 2017.
Transgenerational trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group. The primary mode of transmission is the shared family environment of the infant causing psychological, behavioral and social changes in the individual.
Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to create equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include the Black Lives Matter movement and workplace anti-racism.
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart is a Native American social worker, associate professor and mental health expert. She is best known for developing a model of historical trauma for the Lakota people, which would eventually be expanded to encompass indigenous populations the world over. She is Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota.
Intersectionality is the interconnection of race, class, and gender. Violence and intersectionality connect during instances of discrimination and/or bias. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a feminist scholar, is widely known for developing the theory of intersectionality in her 1989 essay, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics". Crenshaw's analogy of intersectionality to the flow of traffic explains, "Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination."
Ibram Xolani Kendi is an American author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in the U.S. He is author of books including Stamped from the Beginning, How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby. Kendi was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
Racial trauma, or race-based traumatic stress, is the cumulative effects of racism on an individual’s mental and physical health. It has been observed in numerous BIPOC communities and people of all ages, including young children. Racial trauma can be experienced vicariously or directly. It has been linked to feelings of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, as well as other physical health issues.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is a non-fiction book about race in the United States by the American historian Ibram X. Kendi, published April 12, 2016 by Bold Type Books, an imprint of PublicAffairs. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
How to Be an Antiracist is a 2019 nonfiction book by American author and historian Ibram X. Kendi, which combines social commentary and memoir. It was published by One World, an imprint of Random House. The book discusses concepts of racism and Kendi's proposals for anti-racist individual actions and systemic changes.
The Darlene Clark Hine Award is awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians for best book in African American women's and gender history. Darlene Clark Hine is an expert of African-American history and was President of the OAH in 2001–2002.
Antiracist Baby is a 2020 children's book written by Ibram X. Kendi and illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. The book, inspired by the author's four-year-old daughter, was conceived as a tool for discussing racism with young children. The book proposes nine steps for discussing racism, with the ultimate goal of teaching children to be antiracist. The book states that "Antiracist Baby is bred not born. Antiracist Baby is raised to make society transform" and that a choice is necessary: "babies are taught to be racist or antiracist—there's no neutrality."
In higher education in the United States, a Black Student Union (BSU) is an organization of Black students, generally with a focus on protest. Historically functioning as a Black counterpart to the largely white organization Students for a Democratic Society, Black Student Unions advocated for changes on college campuses during the Black Power movement. According to Ibram X. Kendi, the existence of the academic field of Black studies is a direct result of advocacy by Black Student Unions.