Racism Broke My Brain
The psychological injury of being Black in a country that keeps pretending it ain't hurting us.
Every May, I hear people talking about “mental health awareness” as if it were a universal experience. It ain’t. Black people do not move through this country with the same mental health risks, the same access to care, or the same chance of being believed when we say something is wrong. Our mental health is shaped by a racist system that was deliberately designed against us.
So let’s tell the truth this month. Let’s talk about what harms us, what gets ignored, and what the data makes undeniable.
It Ain’t “Sensitivity.” It’s Trauma
Y’all, racial trauma is real, measurable, and chronic. It ain’t a metaphor. It ain’t “being sensitive.” It is the cumulative psychological injury caused by racism: direct, indirect, and systemic. Research shows that racial trauma produces symptoms that mirror PTSD: hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, sleep disruption, depression, anxiety, and somatic pain.
And here is the part people love to skip: racial trauma is ongoing. It builds. It compounds. It follows us into workplaces, schools, hospitals, and daily life. You cannot heal from something you are still experiencing. The fact that so many white people cannot grasp that tells you exactly how far removed they are from the conditions we live in.
Racism Leaves Measurable Damage
White folks do not like listening to our lived experiences and elevating us, so perhaps data will help here.
Let’s start here: racism is a trauma exposure. Not a metaphor. Not a feeling. A trauma exposure. We have the data to prove it. According to the 2021 study “Racial Discrimination is Associated with Acute Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms and Predicts Future PTSD Symptom Severity in Trauma‑Exposed Black Adults in the United States,” Black adults who reported more racial discrimination had higher PTSD symptoms six months later; even after the researchers controlled for age, gender, prior diagnoses, social support, and lifetime trauma.
Read that again: Even when Black people experience the same traumatic event as everyone else, the added weight of racism makes the psychological injury worse.
And it does not stop there.
Racial violence harms entire communities. A 2025 scoping review on racial trauma shows that racism produces psychological, physiological, social, and community‑level harm. Not just the person harmed. The whole community absorbs it. The whole community carries it.
Chronic racism builds chronic stress. That same review makes it clear: racial trauma is cumulative. It stacks. It compounds. It wears down the body and the mind. That chronic load is directly tied to depression, anxiety, and long‑term mental health decline.
And yes, racial trauma can be passed down. The review also documents intergenerational effects. Stress pathways shaped by racism show up even in newborns. That’s how deep this goes, y’all. So when white people try to reduce this to “hurt feelings” or “being sensitive,” I want you to remember this: these numbers do not describe feelings. They describe a public health crisis.
Misdiagnosis Ain’t a Mistake. It’s a Pattern
Black people are not just under‑treated, y’all. We are misdiagnosed at scary rates, and the reasons ain’t mysterious. The Lancet’s series on Black mental health lays it out clearly: Centuries‑old racist myths about Black emotional toughness, pain tolerance, and “behavioral problems” still shape diagnostic practices today.
That means:
Our depression gets labeled as “attitude.”
Our anxiety gets labeled as “noncompliance.”
Our trauma gets labeled as “aggression.”
Our pain gets dismissed as exaggeration.
And when the diagnosis is wrong, the treatment is wrong. When the treatment is wrong, the outcome is worse. When the outcome is worse, the system blames us. Y’all, this ain’t a coincidence. It is the predictable result of a mental health system built by racist white people on frameworks that never accounted for the psychological impact of racism, and still don’t.
Awareness Ain’t Enough. We Need Action
Mental Health Awareness Month should not flatten our experiences into a universal slogan. It should be a call to action:
To recognize racial trauma as a legitimate, diagnosable, treatable form of psychological injury.
To demand culturally competent, Black‑centered mental health care, which includes Black mental health providers.
To challenge the systems that produce the harm in the first place.
To stop pretending that “awareness” is enough when the data shows a fucking crisis.
Black mental health deserves more than awareness. It deserves accuracy. It deserves investment. It deserves the truth, spoken plainly.
And that is what we are doing here.
The Price I Pay to Stay Visible
I was going to make this section only available to my paid subscribers because it is very personal. But what I have to say is too important to be behind a paywall. So if you are reading this and you are not a paid subscriber, either upgrade or drop me a tip. Don’t be a douche.
Researching the impacts of racism on mental health was not an academic project for me. It was survival work. I have been enduring racism since I was six years old. I’m 39 now, and nothing has changed. Honestly, it has gotten worse.
I knew in my body, long before I had the language, that this lifelong racial trauma had to be connected to the paranoia I feel when I step outside, the sinking feeling in my gut when I wake up, the constant anxiety, the intrusive thoughts that will not let me rest. And I was right. My PTSD symptoms reflect a lifetime of racial violence. Racism broke my brain, y’all. And I am still healing.
But healing is hard when the wound is reopened every day.
The cyberstalking nightmare I shared with y’all did not “stress me out.” It had a tremendous impact on my mental health. The death threats. The racial hate. The threats of sexual violence. And the way all of it was downplayed, by authorities, by institutions, by white folks who still believe and support my cyberstalker, as if what I endured was not real harm. As if I do not matter.
You can use my cyberstalker nightmare to see, in real time, how everything I named in this article plays out: the dismissal, the minimization, the refusal to acknowledge the psychological injury racism causes.
So, as you consume my work, I need you to understand something: I sacrifice a piece of myself every time I log on. Every time I tell the truth. Every time I choose to stay visible in a world that keeps trying to erase me.
You are welcome.
Don’t Walk Away From This Unchanged
So here is where all of this lands. If you read the data and my story, and you still walk away thinking this is just “mental health awareness,” you missed the entire damn point.
Racism is not an inconvenience. It is not a disagreement. It is not a “difference of opinion.” It is a system that produces measurable psychological injury, and I am living proof of what that injury looks like over a lifetime.
My brain did not break on its own. This country broke it. And it keeps trying to break over and over again.
That is the part white people do not want to sit with: the harm is not theoretical. It is not historical. It is not abstract. It is happening right fucking now, in real time, to real people, with real consequences. You saw it in the research. You saw it in my life. You saw it in how the cyberstalking was handled, or ignored.
So, if you care about Black mental health, then act like it. Stop treating our trauma like a debate. Stop minimizing the violence we name. Stop pretending this racist ass system ain’t doing exactly what it was built to do.
Because here is the truth: Black people are out here trying to heal from wounds we are still being cut by. And the least white people can do, the bare fucking minimum, is stop pretending we are making it up.
If this article made you uncomfortable, good. If it made you rethink something, even better. If it made you realize you have been silent where you should have been loud, then do something about it. But don’t you dare walk away from this unchanged. Not after everything I have laid out. Not after everything I have lived through.
This is the cost of telling the truth. This is the cost of staying visible. And if you are going to consume my work, you need to understand the weight I carry in making it.
If this article hit you, share it. Put it in front of someone who needs to sit with the truth. Don’t keep this conversation in your pocket.
It’s really important for me to read about other forms of oppression to get the bigger picture here. Thank you for sharing!
Understood.