 Thank you everybody for being here. This is really amazing and wonderful. Excited to have so many of you here. I'm Johanna Garvey. I'm in the English department. I'm director of women, gender and sexuality studies. I'm the coordinator of the social justice signature element in the Magis core, which is a mouthful. So I'm gonna say a few words and then I'm turning it over to my colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Petrino, who's going to introduce Dr. Ocampo. So we do this. This is our keynote event. Sometimes we combine with another program frequently with Black Studies, but we haven't been able to have this in person. We actually had to cancel in 2020. We had Dr. Amani Perry coming, but she couldn't come because it was late March. Last year we did a Zoom panel on Black Girlhood. So we haven't been in person for several years, so it's just really wonderful to see everybody. I want to do some thank yous because a lot of co-sponsors are contributing to our ability to bring Dr. Ocampo this evening. So the Magis core and Elizabeth is going to talk a bit more about that. Honors, the Humanities Institute, Latin American and Caribbean studies, peace and justice studies, health studies, the psychology department, the English department, the biology department, sociology and anthropology department, public lectures and events, the College of Arts and Sciences, and that's where the core has its home, and the Humanities Institute. And I also really want to thank my colleague, Dr. Shannon Kelly, who was really instrumental in selecting Dr. Ocampo to come and be the speaker and Shannon's students who broke into teams and did a lot of the back kind of behind-the-scenes work for this event, from getting a grant from the Humanities Institute to putting together PR and flyers and on and on and on. So I really want to thank Shannon and her students for that. So I am going to turn it over to, actually, oh Elizabeth wanted me to mention one more thing. So besides this evening's keynote, Dr. Ocampo is also doing a faculty panel tomorrow at 11 o'clock, BCC lower level, with Kim Dowdy and Latasha Smith and Shannon Kelly, and Shannon's students will be doing the moderating of that panel. So hope you can all join us and bring more people. Tomorrow, lower level of BCC will be set up with lots and lots of chairs, so lots and lots of space. So thank you for being here. I'm turning it over to Elizabeth. Thank you, Johanna, and this was a labor of love, and we're very, very honored and pleased to have Dr. Carlotta Ocampo joining us. So I just wanted to say a couple of words about the Magis Core, and then I'm the person who's going to talk to you about all her stellar accomplishments. All of you here know about the Magis Core, and the Magis Core lecture is something that we started last year when we brought Dr. Gwen Pugh, who was talking about gender matters in Black Lives Matter. The Magis Core lecture is really designed to profile the work of a scholar whose work emanates from one of the core disciplines, so those are all the ones that you're taking, whose work is transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary in approach, and whose work concerns important topics of concern for contemporary life. So I am very pleased to introduce our Magis Core lecture today, Dr. Carlotta Ocampo. She is provost and associate professor of psychology at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. After earning her PhD in Neuro-psychology from Howard University in 1997, Dr. Ocampo joined Trinity University as assistant professor of psychology. She served there on many task forces, including those of the American Psychological Association, and she's also served on a national advisory board for the Steve Fund Equity in Mental Health Framework for students of color in higher education. And those of you who are in touch with your professors about Dr. Ocampo's talk, I did send out some materials, so anybody here who's interested in accessing some of the video library or other reading materials, please do that. And if you can't get them, I can certainly send them to you. Dr. Ocampo's teaching and research interests encompass interactions among diversity, structural inequity, health, and education. She's the author of numerous publications and presentations focused especially on pedagogical reform with changing student populations, racist incident-based trauma, and ethnicity, gender, and disease. Dr. Ocampo's current research examines mobile technology, that is M Health, applications in community health. She has also co-authored and directed substantial academic grants to support women from underrepresented groups, achieves equity in STEM majors, and in general education. And she enjoys promoting student-centered academic initiatives, culturally relevant health research, and lifelong learning and holistic development. So please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Carlotta Ocampo. Thank you. I think we all have this feeling when we hear our own biographies. Like, are they talking about me? Is that me? That's a little bit of imposter syndrome in case anyone's heard of that. So I want to start by a land acknowledgement, and many of you may be aware that it is becoming a practice to do a land acknowledgement before events to acknowledge the original inhabitants of the land that we currently occupy. So, I am going to acknowledge, I am acknowledging that we gather here at Fairfield University on the traditional land of the Unqua and Paganaset peoples past and present, an honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations. This calls us to commit to continuing to learn how to be better stewards of the land we inhabit as well. For trauma work particularly, I find that it is, and I have to tell you a few years ago, I would have thought, oh, we can't do that, but the thing is that for trauma work particularly, it's really important to acknowledge the traumas that occurred right where we are, and that's part of what this talk is about tonight. So land acknowledgements are important as a part of truth and reconciliation, which is something that I'll get to at the end of the slides, should we ever get there, because it's a lot of slides, but we'll see, we'll do our best. And also, I do like exchange, you know, I'm not tremendously comfortable with just talking, and I mean, I can do it, but if you have a question or a comment, you know, please do feel free to interject or, you know, give your thoughts about anything that I'm going to cover. So thank you so much. I want to thank and acknowledge the amazing faculty of Fairfield University and the Magus Core and the WGGS keynote group who have brought me here to give this talk, and to everyone who has supported it, and especially to you, the students who have shown up to be a part of this learning journey. So I was asked to talk a little bit about how I came to trauma studies and what made me want to look into this area and kind of dedicate, you know, a significant part of my career to it. And in order to answer that question, I want to talk about actually literature, because I'm trained as a researcher, and I went through a research program at Howard University, and I learned about a variety of different ways that we construct knowledge and that we come to know and understand the world. And one of my professors at Howard used to use this way of framing research as coming to know the world, coming to know and understand the world that we can construct, you know, knowledge from the methodologies that we use to understand the world. But he started by saying one of the most fundamental ways that we come to know and understand the world is through literature. And so there's this kind of false, you know, like dichotomy between literature and research that actually you can learn a lot about the human condition from a case study that's presented in a literate, you know, in a piece of literature and through the humanities. And we're not really that separate. That's the whole idea behind interdiscipline, interdisciplinarity. So I don't want to say what year this was, but it was somewhere in the 80s, most of you weren't born. I was sitting outside Crampton Auditorium at Howard University in a big long line waiting to try to get in to see an advisor to register for my classes. And that year, so now you can go look up the year, but don't and it doesn't matter anyway. But anyway, that year Beloved had come out. Beloved is a novel by Toni Morrison. And I read that novel while I was sitting in line waiting to register. That's how long it took to register. And I read that novel and the novel, how many of you have read Beloved? Okay, many of you have read Beloved. Some of you have not read Beloved. Highly recommend Beloved, Toni Morrison Nobel Prize winner in literature, I mean, you know. But the book is about, so on the face of it, it's about a woman who it's actually based on the true story of a woman who was enslaved and who fled enslavement. And in the course of fleeing enslavement, she had her baby daughter with her who was making noise and was going to attract the attention of those who were pursuing them to re-enslave them and back them, take them back into the condition of enslavement. And instead of that fate, what the decision that she made was to kill that child. And then the family was able to, you know, eventually cross the Ohio River, settle in Lorraine, Ohio where Morrison's actually from and, you know, live a life. But the ghost of that child continued to haunt the family. And the ghost of that child was kind of like a poltergeist and did all kinds of things that the family was not able, ever able to forget that this had happened. They were never able to forget where they came from and what they had undergone. And, you know, I was sitting there reading this and it like hit me smack in the head. I was like, oh my God, this is trauma. This is trauma. This is a literary depiction of what trauma is. And that really, really stuck with me. And, you know, there's actually, this is an aside, but there's a speech in Beloved. It's the speech that baby sucks gives in the clearing. I can't remember exactly the page number, but go look it up. You can even probably Google baby sucks speech in the clearing. And it is a beautiful prayer to empowerment and self-love from the condition of enslavement. And I won't read it here, but I recommend that you read it. And I have that framed on my wall in my kitchen. So when I'm like cooking, I can read that poem and it's very impactful. It's a prose, you know, it's a speech. The next book, and has anyone ever heard of a book called Mulberry and Pichu may have, so it's about two women. And it's about one woman who lives in the United States and another woman who lives in a war-torn Asian country. And it's this dual narrative of these two women. And then at some point in the book, you understand that this woman, you know, she's kind of identified as having schizophrenia, but it's really not schizophrenia because she's cognitively intact. But at a certain point, you realize that these two people are the same person and that this is a story about dissociation and that she is dissociated because of this war trauma that she has undergone. And that was another really impactful. I was like, wow, literature is really talking about trauma. And I want to learn more about trauma. So I actually got into trauma from reading stories about women and families that underwent trauma and carried it on into their futures and were, you know, constantly being, that their lives were marked by an extra cognition about the trauma that they had endured. So they were always having to kind of like negotiate living in the world, but also carrying the trauma that they had endured with them. And that was shaping the course of their life. So I got involved in trauma studies and I began to be a, and in a minute I'm going to go into like the history of trauma, hopefully very quickly. But I began to be attracted to the idea of racist, incident-based trauma because from reading Beloved and reading Mulberry and Peach, I was going to look at, you know, whether there were pieces in the literature that could frame for me the traumas that these women, you know, were experiencing in the books or that had been written about. And there weren't. There weren't. It was like missing. There was, I could not find anything in the trauma literature about the experience of racism, you know, the experience of immigration. It was just not there. And it wasn't there in the clinical literature as well. So I, you know, we, some of us started to think, gee, maybe we need to look at the impact of racism on trauma. I mean, maybe, maybe the experience of racism could be a traumatic experience. At the time, there was really very little about it. So we said, well, let's go find it. There was an article in the Washington Post. This is from 1986. Is everyone, is it anyone familiar with Bishop Desmond Tutu? He was very involved in anti-apartheid work in South Africa and in fact had won a Nobel Prize for that work. But he was interviewed and asked to speak about his experience as a black person in South Africa in apartheid. And he said, I didn't think it apartheid was peculiar for a very long time because it was just how things were. You didn't question it. But he said, deep down in your gut, you knew something was wrong. And that was another feeling that I had sort of carried with me since the time I was very small. I can remember being like nine or 10 and feeling like something is not right. Like something is not right. I can't put my finger on it. I don't know what it is. But I know that I constantly have a feeling of being like, I'm not okay. But it's not really articulated in a way that I can frame it. And it was making me feel guilty and bad about myself. So a little bit about me, just so you understand where that was coming from, I'm a child of Latino immigrants that immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and they immigrated to Queens, New York and tried to set up a life and so on and so forth. And we grew up at a time when we were really pressured to acculturate. And so obviously in some spaces, I may not have experienced discrimination, but in other spaces I may have. And as a child, I didn't understand what that was. I just was like, is there something wrong with me? Like how Bishop Tutu says, the horror of apartheid is that it can cause a child of God to doubt that he or she is a child of God. You come to believe what others have determined about you, filling you with self-discuss, self-contempt, self-hatred, accepting a negative self-image. Now, when I read this quote from Bishop Tutu, it really resonated with me. I was like, yes, something is not right. Something is not right. And it's not me. So what might it be? So here's the paradox about race. Race doesn't exist. And yet racism does exist. So what's that about? So racism is the belief in the superiority of one human group over another based on that group's purported biological nature. It's also a set of actions, both discrimination and preference, which favor one group over another in terms of their life chances. The first thing to understand about racism is that it's based on the idea of race, an idea that is not biologically valid and has been rejected by biologists. There's no evidence to suggest that there are different human races. Did you all know that? Everybody pretty much knew that. Okay, good. So over between 99.5 to 99.9 percent of human DNA is the same. We share the same DNA, and it's actually non-expressing DNA, but it does a bunch of things. Like we all have livers and hearts and toenails. They may take slightly different shapes and slightly different forms, but overall we have the same set of things. And also, biologically any human can create a third human with any other human. So different races biologically wouldn't be able to do that. And also it's good. Like biological diversity is good because it confers advantages under an evolutionary framework. So just from a purely biologically standpoint, the ability to diversify our genetic profiles, our genetic toolkits, our genetic collections, is good because it gives us more ability to adapt to changing circumstances. But anyway, so it's a biological fact, races do not exist, not in science. The phenotypical differences between us, such as skin color, facial features, hair types, and so on, that's the external visual evidence utilized to determine race. These are made up of very few alleles in our genome. I mean, you know, tiny amount, less than .000 something percent. But they appear to make us different, even though we are biologically the same. But also it's important to understand that human traits are distributed in equal measure among all the so-called racial groups. So when you, you know, there's more within group difference than there is between group difference. So if you look with any particular group, you're going to find more difference among people within a particular group than between a group. Whole another lecture for another day. If this is true, why do we have racism? If not biologically valid, we know that race is a socially constructed category loosely based on phenotype and group affinity, although it's a very porous category, right? People can and have moved across the race line throughout the existence of the idea of race, which in modern terms has been about 400 years since European expansionism and colonization. Ever since the idea of race was used to suggest that people could be enslaved or exploited based, sorry, ever since that time, the idea of race was used to suggest that people could be enslaved or exploited based on their inferiority. And so, and this socially constructed idea has led to very different life chances for people of different perceived races. Racism is very, also tied up with the idea of colorism, which favors people with lighter skin over people with darker skin, regardless of their perceived race in racialized societies like ours. So the other important thing to remember about racism is that although we are taught it's a bad thing, racism in fact transfers many benefits towards the race that is at the top of the perceived hierarchy. So, I mean, you might say, well, why doesn't this bad thing go away? Well, because it transfers benefits towards, you know, the race of the top, the quote race, right, quote race, because remember, these are socially constructed categories. Therefore, dismantling racism is not just about learning to appreciate and love diversity, which is important. It is also about examining the structures that transfer benefits towards one group and away from another, and finding ways to create more equitable outcomes along all the social continuum that are impacted by the idea of race. That includes economics, personal wealth, education, health, criminal justice, even the church, and in fact all of our social institutions. We will be able to say that racism is getting better as a thing of the past when all people's outcomes on these measures are able to be the same. And when resources for each of these institutions are distributed equally throughout the total population, and that is not true at this time. So, race doesn't exist, but racism does, and it exists for a reason, and it has impacts, and it confers benefits as well as causes harm. Any questions? Questions or comments? All right, now. We're going to shift gears back and forth a little bit between talking about race and racism and talking about trauma, and then eventually we're going to talk about both of them together. But you all have probably been exposed a little bit to trauma studies, so I'm going to go through this quite quickly. But the first kind of recognition of trauma in the literature was with people like Charco and the famous Sigmund Freud and so on, where they identified something called hysteria, which was technically the word hysteria comes from the Greek for wandering uterus, so this was the idea that women's uterine would detach and wander around their bodies and make them act crazy. But that's kind of the first, where you first see right, and Freud actually wrote quite a bit about trauma, that again is another lecture for another day. So that was the late 1800s, then you kind of fast forward to 1915, and you have something called shell shock. So folks who were turning from World War I were exhibiting a variety of symptoms like intrusive memory, flashbacks, altered cognition, altered mood, and sort of kind of trancing out and having the variety of symptomatology that we now call trauma, and they started to call it shell shock, or battle fatigue. And in military terminology, for anybody who's associated with the military, you've probably heard the term combat stress reaction. So that's that construct. And then kind of for a while, nobody talked about it, and that was World War I, and then World War II happened, and sort of they talked about shell shock. And then in the late 1960s and 70s, as Vietnam War veterans were returning from Vietnam, they were exhibiting this constellation of symptoms, and they started calling it PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder. It still wasn't technically in the psychological literature, but it started to be described. And in the women's liberation movements, and the various civil rights movement, not civil rights, sorry I shouldn't have said that, the rights movements, with respect to women's liberation and the early Latino liberation movements and these early movements, they sort of got onto this idea and connected PTSD to sexual violence and domestic violence, family violence. And there was this thing called battered women's syndrome that was a subcategory of PTSD, never in the DSM, but it described kind of how people would develop the same kinds of symptoms that war veterans and people who underwent war trauma, but they would develop it in the context of family violence or sexual assault. And in fact, we now know or the research suggests that women are even more likely to develop PTSD than men because of the high prevalence of family violence and sexual assault that targets women. So in the 1980, finally, the psychologists got together and, you know, the ones that, you know, the thinkers that get together and decide what gets to go in the DSM, DSM by the way, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, this is the manual that clinical psychologists, counselors and doctors use when they're diagnosing a mental disorder. So it's extremely influential and also, you know, your diagnosis has to be in the DSM now five, if like your insurance is going to reimburse a medical clinic or specialty to treat you for one of these disorders. So this is just the way there's a physician's desk reference for physical, you know, trauma. There's a, you know, there's the DSM for psychological trauma or psychological disorders generally. One of the things that I was going to point out, and I'll point it out now, is that of all of the disorders in the DSM, the only one that is completely dependent on an outside event occurring is trauma, is PTSD, trauma and other related disorders. Like people can develop schizophrenia, people can develop bipolar disorder, people can develop anxiety, people can develop all kinds of disorders that can have a, you know, internal etiology, but they can be influenced, you know, by something outside. But trauma is the only disorder where something has to happen, right? Something in the environment has to happen in order for this trauma to occur. So one of the things that tells us is that if we could stop trauma from occurring, we would stop people from experiencing post-traumatic stress, right? So, but that makes this diagnosis unique. In the 1990s, so when the trauma went into the DSM, the DSM specified that a precursor to being diagnosed with PTSD would be war, experiencing a war, experiencing sexual violence, and experiencing natural disaster, okay? So those were the, that's the category, that's how you can get this disorder if you're exposed to one of these events. Then in the 1990s and the 2000s, a construct began to emerge called complex trauma. And I'm going to talk more about that in a minute. But this construct basically was, there was a group, a work group within the APA, trying to, when they updated the DSM for revised to the DSM-5, which is the current version, they were trying to get complex trauma as a recognized category in this diagnostic manual, but they were unsuccessful. They were unsuccessful. So, this is a brief history of trauma in the clinical literature and the DSM and the way that the, you know, the way that we've constructed it. What's missing? What's missing? Can you think of any other major traumatic event that a group of individuals say might have undergone that is not, like, a part of the trauma framework? I've got some hints on my PowerPoint. So this is about, like, who deserves to experience trauma? Who deserves to be acknowledged for having a trauma experience? And hint, what's missing was what I call Jim Crow domestic terrorism. But, you know, it actually goes back to enslavement, you know, reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, fighting for civil rights, morphing into modern-day kind of aversive, colorblind, symbolic racism that we're going to talk about. So this is completely missing from the trauma literature so far. The idea of the trauma wound, and we use the imagery of a trauma wound very consciously. Well, for one thing is, you know, trauma is also a medical term. And when someone has a trauma, like, say, they have a blunt force trauma, you know, they might have visible evidence of that trauma. So their head, you know, has been, you know, they've been in an accident, their head has hit a, you know, windshield, they're bleeding, you can see the blood, you can see the wound. And as they're recovering and healing, you can still see the blood and the wound. But also, if they keep picking at that wound, you know, and they keep picking at that wound, and they keep picking at it, and maybe they, they maybe, you know, they hit their head a few more times, or maybe they're subjective, subjected to more trauma in more insidious ways, those wounds don't heal, right? They keep, they keep being fresh. They keep being fresh. So now we're getting to the idea of not only why we say hidden in plain sight, and this is for trauma generally, but I say specifically for the ways in which people of color have been traumatized by racism, by racist-based incidents, because there is a double repression going on. I mean, thing one, we don't like to talk about trauma in our society. We like things to be beautiful and wonderful and great, and let's not talk about that, right? Because that's kind of like messing up everybody's good vibe. But on top of that, let's not talk about racism, right? So let's not talk about this twice, and we repress it, and our society represses it, and we don't accord like the privilege of trauma to people of color. But also, the trauma is now becoming complex, because there's a trauma wound. If it were a medical wound, it'd be visible. We could see it. We could see it not healing, but trauma, the trauma wound is an, the psychological trauma wound is an invisible wound. You can't see it. You would not be able to look at me right now, and you know, you're thinking, gee, has she ever, you know, gone through trauma? Like how would you know? Unless I told you, right? So you can't look at someone and determine whether or not they've undergone a psychological trauma generally, you know, when someone's really like in a flashback or having some kind of, you know, reaction, you might be able to say, oh, something's psychologically wrong with that person. But generally, look at someone, you can't see their trauma. So it's kind of hidden in plain sight. So we talked about acute trauma. That's exposure to one traumatic event like a natural disaster. We talked about chronic trauma. That's long term exposure to a trauma or a traumatic environment that could be like war, you know, being exposed to war, maybe domestic violence. And then there's complex trauma, which is exposure, exposure to varied multiple, often inescapable traumatic events and environments over time. And what does that sound like? Right? Sounds like racism. It's not the only thing, but, but definitely racism fits that category. And I mentioned that this, that there was a work group that was really lobbying to get this into the DSM-5 and they were not successful. But I am very hopeful that someday they will get this definition into the DSM-5 as a diagnostic category and that racist incident based trauma will be subsumed within it in the DSM-5. So that'll be up to some of you. Thank you for doing that work. And, you know, come and visit me when I'm old and tell me how that went. Well, you know, older than I am now. I just want to put in here, if anyone is interested, so the criteria controversy, the diagnosis has been hotly contested since 1980. Some people even were like, take it out of the DSM completely, seriously. The new category is called trauma and stress related disorders. That's the new category in the DSM-5, but it does not include complex trauma. Precondition is exposure to a stressful event. And if anyone is interested in trauma studies, there's a very interesting, the adverse childhood experiences study. I'm just going to tell you about it. You can go look about it, look it up. If you're going into education or you're going to be working with kids if you're nursing and you want to do pediatrics, whatever it is, adverse childhood experiences study, write it down, look it up. Lifelong learning. It's a way to measure the extent of trauma that children might have had during their developmental phases. And it is a, you know, pretty valid, reliable. There's been a number of large-scale studies done on it, so it's kind of an interesting measure for those of you who are interested in research. The symptom groups for the expression of trauma in the DSM-5 include intrusion, which is like intrusive memories of the event, you know, the inability to stop thinking about the traumatic event, like ruminating on the traumatic event, like you want to think about something else, but you can't, your mind keeps coming back to the traumatic event. Intrusive, intrusion, avoidance, avoiding situations that remind you of the traumatic event, negative alterations in cognition and mood, and this can include depression and, you know, sometimes suicidal, suicidal, excuse me, suicidality, and also alterations in arousal and reactivity. And this is really where I want to focus with respect to the biopsychology of trauma. So trauma is not something that is just something that someone experiences and it's psychological. It becomes encoded in the body. And I have taken this title, What My Bones Know. So this is from a book by an author, Stephanie Fu. It's the book I'm currently reading about trauma. It's a memoir of her own trauma. She's also an NPR reporter, and so she's a journalist, and she really is able to communicate some of this information in a very accessible way for folks who are not in the field, so I do recommend the book. And she talks about healing from complex trauma, but I love this kind of idea of what my bones know, because trauma actually does get into the bones, right, by mediating a physiological response that can be toxic, that can be maladaptive. And here we have some different, like, things that might be impacting chronic social environmental stress, physiological stressors, and major life events. There are individual differences in vulnerability, for sure, and resiliency factors that people can bring with them into any kind of traumatic situation, and then there's a behavioral response, typically, that can be adaptive or maladaptive. And all of this is what we call the allostatic load. So the allostatic load is, like, the total sum of traumatic events and or chronic trauma or life events that cause adaptation. And at this point, I can pause and say that not all stress is maladaptive. So stress is a part of life. Trauma is kind of an extreme form of stress. But basically, the definition of stress is a physiological adaptation to a novel stimulus that brings the system into homeostasis. So biology majors, you know that your system is constantly striving to stay in homeostasis, that means the biological balance necessary to sustain life, because you have to have the right temperature, you have to have the right breathing cycle, you have to have the right circadian rhythms, you have to have all of these things to sustain life and be healthy and continue, you know, to walk around and do stuff. But when you encounter a life event, you have to adapt to it. And that causes an autonomic nervous system reaction, right? It causes a reaction, your sympathetic nervous system activates. And the activation impacts what's called the limbic system of the brain. And this is where, you know, brain and behavior comes really in handy. This is your brain on stress, okay? So just imagine this is your brain on stress. And here you've got like your cortex, and that's where you're doing all your, like, thinking and talking and math and, you know, thinking about stuff and imagining things and creating things and everything. And then down here is kind of where your memories are and where you're like feeling emotion and where you're sort of reacting to stimuli at a very kind of, again, at the level that you need to in order to maintain life in order to keep breathing, keep doing all that good stuff. And back here, by the way, it's where your motor functions, a lot of your motor functions are going through there. Anyway, I can get too involved in the brain, so I'm not going to do that. But some of the structures that are very important in the stress response include the hypothalamus and the amygdala, which has been shown to be very associated with the fear response, right? And the hippocampus is where memories are stored. So you notice that these structures are very close together, which doesn't necessarily mean anything in the physiology of the brain because cortical regions can communicate in an instant. But still, it tells us something about the way the brain developed that these things layered on top of each other. So memory lays on top of emotion. So maybe there's something about emotion that makes us remember things better. Or maybe when emotions are too great, it makes us block things out. It makes our memory stop working, right? So there's something about these brain areas being kind of related to where they're located in the brain that suggests to us that they are intimately connected for functioning. So these brain areas, for example, I don't want to go too much into all the literature, but studies of children who have endured developmental complex trauma suggest that there can be changes that occur actually with these brain areas that you can identify differences in the way these brain areas are formed and the way that they function for children who expose to complex trauma. So this suggests that during development, complex trauma, something external from us, can impact the way that our brains actually develop. And there's a system. So let's say that, I don't know, pretend like I'm Fred Flintstone or something, and that might be before y'all's time. I don't know, somebody from the cartoon network, the Powerpuff Girls, I don't know. And I'm like, I have to fight an enemy or whatever. And so there's this enemy. So you spring into action and it's fight or flight. And so what's happening there is that there's a neurofeedback loop, right, by which the hypothalamus excretes corticotrophin releasing hormone down to the pituitary gland, which excretes an adrenal corticotrophin hormone that gets down to the adrenal glands, which actually sit on top of the kidneys. So this is a neuro biofeedback system that is in the nervous system, but it involves the central and the peripheral nervous systems. And then the adrenal gland, and this is pretty broken down, like it's even more complicated than this, as you can well imagine. But anyway, then cortisol is the main hormone that is associated in stress. And then cortisol is released and then boom, we spring into action and we fight whoever it is. And then we win and we're victorious. And then now we have to return to normal, right? So then the feedback loop brings us back to normal and back into homeostasis, that word again, like we always have to be in this balance. But what if that doesn't happen? What if somehow chronic stress means that we are unable to deactivate the system appropriately or that the system starts to deregulate so that it is now unable to act in the way that supposed to. So now maybe when a threat comes, we don't do anything because we're not, you know, but then at a completely other time, when there's some kind of a trigger, we all of a sudden have the response, right? And the system just becomes deregulated. Well, that is the difference between regular stress and toxic stress or traumatic stress, right? So not all stress is bad. And, you know, I mean, I thought about whether to mention this, but I'm just gonna mention it. So I understood that there may have been some controversy on your campus recently about a Black Lives Matter banner and that some people, that there was an explanation given that seeing a Black Lives Matter banner might make some people feel uncomfortable, so it should come down. Well, that feeling of discomfort may be an adjustment in response to a novel stimulus. And that may feel uncomfortable because that does feel uncomfortable sometimes, but that doesn't make it traumatic. That can be, I mean, sometimes we need stress to grow, right? I mean, we, you know, again, the father of stress research, quote unquote, that's how he's referred to, so I'm referring to him that way. Don't like the language, that's what it is. Han Selwe, he said, you know, that if you're not experiencing, if you're not experiencing stress, you're not alive. Like some things that are stressful are good, like going on a vacation, anybody planned for a vacation and, you know, you got to get to the airport and you got to do all these things, you got to pack and you got all these things, that's stress, right? But, you know, when you get there, it's your vacation. So that's like positive stress and stress can be a platform for growth and for lifelong learning. So not all things that make us uncomfortable are by nature bad. Traumatic stress is bad, right? Or, you know, traumatic stress causes deregulation of the system that can then truly become. And I, you know, I use that example, but it's also the whole, you know, argument that's going on right now around CRT, which, you know, whatever that is, it's that, you know, children are gonna feel bad if they're exposed to, you know, American history. But, you know, like feeling bad about learning about bad things is not abnormal. Feeling bad when you learn about terrible things is a natural reaction. That's how you're supposed to feel. So anyway, differentiating that kind of feeling of uncomfortability from what's actually traumatic stress. So now we're going to get to acknowledging racism and the stress of racism. And this is really what I'm here to talk about today. But you have to understand stress and trauma before you can understand racist, incident-based stress. And this is the Legacy Museum in Alabama. It is founded by the Equity and Justice Initiative. And it is the first American museum to honor those who died by lynching. And there is a, there, at this link, which you all will have access to the PowerPoint, I'm not going to click on it now because we won't have time. But at this link, you can go and kind of hear about the mission of this museum. And the other thing, like I, I'm not a big fan of portraying over and over images, you know, of black people being traumat, like physically traumatized. Like, like in, in, I mean, I think it's important and museums like this are important because these are important things that we have to remember. But, you know, trigger warning on all of this material. I'll just put it like that. So I kind of went back and forth whether to show it to you at all. But, you know, you all are adults, you can go look at it when you feel prepared to. But this image, I think, is very stunning. So what they have done is for every known person who was lynched in America, that person has a block and under the block is their name. So you can go and kind of appreciate the magnitude of, you know, the trauma. So lynching wasn't just like a one-time, couple-time thing. In the era of Jim Crow terrorism, and some might even say, sort of continuing today in some context, many, many people were lynched. And there I have this famous quote from H. Rob Brown, violence is a part of America's culture. It's American as cherry pie. So, but change begins with consciousness, awareness, and acknowledgement of the problem. And that's kind of like part of what trauma studies, racial trauma studies do. So racial trauma is a specific form of race-based stress that encompasses BIPOC people's reactions to real and perceived experiences of racial discrimination and situations of danger in a white supremacist framework. Like PTSD, racial trauma involves ongoing collective injury, individual and collective injury due to repeated exposure to stress. Experiences can include personal experience of threats, of injury or harm or humiliation or shaming, or witnessing discrimination towards others, or the perception of systemic oppression and more. And I did want to make a point that it can also, you know, there's a lot of, now that we have social media, there is, you know, a proliferation of images of, you know, people being racially traumatized. And people from within these groups can also, you know, develop trauma from witnessing those videos or witnessing discrimination towards others. So we're going to talk next about a paradigm of racial trauma called racial battle fatigue, which you will remember sounded like combat stress response or battle fatigue, racial battle fatigue. But before we do that, I just want to mention that there's also a very important construct in trauma studies and particularly trauma studies with oppressed populations that is the construct of historical and multi-generational trauma. So historical and multi-generational trauma is trauma that can be passed down with communities and across generations. And it's passed down in a variety of ways and it's been identified in a variety of different communities. You may have heard of post-slavery trauma syndrome. You may have heard of intergenerational trauma with Native Americans or Indigenous people. And in fact, one of the first researchers to articulate this construct was Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart. And you can find her on the internet and, you know, she was a social worker and, you know, you can find her talking about this. There is a number of studies were done of families of Indian survivors of people whose forefathers had been raised up in the Indian schools, you know, the Indian school systems like in Canada and the United States and the trauma they underwent there. It's interesting, like, if you click on this link, when you have the PowerPoint, this link goes to the APA on historical trauma. And interestingly, it starts with apparently one of the biggest studies on historical trauma was done with people in the Ukraine who survived what they call the Holodom, which means famine, I learned, which was the experience that the Ukrainian people had, you know, a couple generations back with Russians, you know, with the Russians who are now, of course, invading their country, that had prevented them from, you know, getting food and had kind of prevented them from having a livelihood. And so there was intergenerational trauma there. And also with Holocaust survivors. There's just a number of different constructs that have looked at historical intergenerational trauma and a variety of different constructs and among a variety of Japanese, the children of people who were interned in Japanese concentration camps or internment camps or whatever they called them during the Second World War here. So a lot of research has been done on this. But very interestingly, in addition to, you know, trauma being transmitted just through culture, right, which one might expect, it also appears that historical trauma can change the way DNA works to express in sequential generations. So there are, you know, there's one's DNA and then there are kind of these regulators that tell DNA when to express in certain ways and when not to express in certain ways. And one of the studies that I read that I was exposed to in the Stephanie Food Book, what my bones know, was they looked at rats. I told you rats was going to come into it, right? And so these, a generation of rats was exposed to the smell of cherry blossoms, which are lovely. And then they were, that was paired with an electric shock, which is aversive for rats and pretty much anybody. And so they began to be aversive towards the cherry blossoms. That's classical conditioning, right? To, you know, a stimulus that would not elicit a particular response is paired with a stimulus that would, and then you get a third response, which is the classically conditioned response. What was interesting was this classically conditioned response of aversiveness towards the smell of a cherry blossom was passed on to the next generation of rats, even though they were never shocked. So they went and like looked at their DNA and stuff. They sacrificed them. That's the word they use in science. And they looked at their DNA and they found that the little switch that had been turned on in the parent generation in their DNA was still turned on in the baby rats that were born in the next generation. So that could be one model for how intergenerational trauma is passed on, not just, you know, culturally, which makes sense. I mean, we can conceptualize that, but also actually maybe at the level of our DNA, right? So trauma can be, you know, insidious. And again, we can actually impact the experience of trauma by, you know, trying to do away with the causes of it. Racial battle fatigue, and I sent you all a reading, hopefully you had a chance to look at it, is about specifically a set of research in the field of Black Missandry, which is, you may have heard, we were talking at dinner about the term misogynoir, which is specifically a set of, you know, negative effect towards Black women. There's also a construct called Black Missandry, which is the same. It's like just a set of like negative stereotypes and negative feelings about Black men. And racial battle fatigue has been highly studied in college campuses around the experiences of Black men in predominantly White institutions, historically White institutions, where they feel like they are othered. And so there, the Stephen Quay, who's one of my associates, is one of the co-authors of this particular study, where they looked at the cumulative, you know, racial battle fatigue, similar to combat stress responses, cumulative psychological, social, physiological, and emotional impacts of racial, macro, and microaggressions and abuse in, you know, a variety of different contexts. These particular studies were done on college campuses, so that this requirement of Black men to cope with persistent, hostile, violent, and demeaning stressors depletes their physical, emotional, and mental resources. And then there's a variety of symptoms, which look very much like classic trauma symptoms. And, you know, when you read the article that I sent, which is called Assume the Position, you fit the description, it's just really, really interesting to see how many times over the course of, you know, their college experience, Black men were challenged for being in the space and thought to be, like, not belong there, right? So, like, show me your ID. Well, I'm using the computer, I'm writing a paper, you know, show me your ID, right? That kind of thing. And it's often something that can, you know, the problem with some of modern racism is that it can be ambiguous. You know, like, it can be confusing. Like, is this really happening? Is this really racism? Or is it just like, are they asking IDs from everybody? Is it just me? You know, there's a whole kind of set of confusions and ambiguities about it. And so, one of the, you know, one of the recommendations about learning how to navigate in these environments is to do, like, pre-work. I mean, now, the crazy thing is that one of the symptoms of stress, complex trauma, is hypervigilance. You know, people are always walking around, is this going to happen? Well, the thing about living in a racist society, you know, for people who, you know, are experienced racism, is that it probably is going to happen. Like, it's kind of like, probably going to happen. And so, having a framework to deal with it when it happens, so it's almost like hypervigilance, which is considered to be a negative symptom, here becomes like a positive coping response, right? Because, hey, you have to be hypervigilant, you have to know that this is going to happen, and you have to be prepared for when it happens, how you're going to respond, and, you know, also be prepared for the fact that people might not, like, you know, want to acknowledge what you're experiencing. I'll put it like that. So, I have this article on racist, incident-based trauma, and I just want to say we use the term racist, incident-based trauma very consciously, because we don't want, one of the problems with this field is in over pathologizing, you know, black people. Black people already get over-diagnosed with certain psychological disorders like, surprise, surprise, paranoid personality disorder, you know, because they might walk into a therapist's office and be like, I feel like people are always watching me, and the police are always coming after me, and, you know, like, I just feel like I'm being surveilled all the time, and the psychologist is like, oh, paranoid personality disorder. That might be really happening, right? So, we want to not continue to over pathologize. So, at the same time, we do want to acknowledge that racist incidents can cause trauma, but we don't want to call it, now the term that's most in common uses, racial trauma, but it's not my preferred term. But if you're googling this, you can google racial trauma, it's just not my preferred term. I like racist, incident-based trauma because it makes it clear that it's happening in the incident, not within the person. So, questions, questions from the students, from faculty, questions about Dr. Ocampo's presentation, or questions you have about where we are? Hi. So, at some point in your presentation, you talked about this idea of a colorblind society, and I thought that was great because I'm doing actually some research right now about racial trauma in a colorblind society. Colorblindness is a form of racial trauma. Exactly, and so that's what I've been doing is analyzing, even in a society that claims to not be judging you on race, if it's built on underlying institutions that are intrinsically racist, you are going to still experience trauma. Well, on top of that, we have these things called eyes that seem color. Yes. Okay, go ahead. Now, I do think that the people who claim to support a colorblind society do so generally with noble intentions, they don't want to be racist, they don't realize they are in that scenario, but what would you say to somebody who supports a colorblind society? Colorblindness is a form of racism. It's a form of racism that is sometimes referred to as discontious racism because it is connected to the idea that it's kind of this pull yourself up by your bootstraps idea that everyone here has free will and the ability to self-actualize across the lifespan, and if we can just not see color, then all of this problem would go away. And so, discontious racism means, and it is a very comfortable position, it means that you're basically not acknowledging the systemic structures that kind of keep us in this place where we are right now. It's a whole field of literature, so I agree with you 100%. Now, most people do not think that they're racist. There's a few people who will proudly say I'm racist, right? I mean, there's a few, but most people in today's day and age, oh, I'm not racist, but in fact, we are all raised within a racist society. I don't quite know how to say this without sounding facetious, but it is impossible for us to be raised in this society and not be racist, and that is partly because we are invested in the status quo, because the status quo has been here for a while, it confers advantages, like I said before, it confers, you know, it is. So this is why like, I mean, Martin Luther King wrote letter from the Birmingham Jail, you know, he wrote like the white moderate is the one we have to worry about the most, because they're the ones that want to uphold the status quo while smiling in our facing, we want equality for all. We're not at a place, we're not at a place of equality for all, so saying that for a person to say that they're colorblind is basically saying, I don't want to look at the problem. That would be a quick answer. Longer answer would take longer. My pleasure. Questions, people? I love that you all are staying. I really thought this was going to 830, so I was like, yes. Hello. Hi, Dr. O'Connel. Thank you for your presentation. So I'm thinking about racial trauma, and again, you gave the example of this research being done on predominantly white campuses, college campuses, we are on one. What advice might you have for instructors, for faculty, not just to be aware of racial trauma and students who are experiencing this day to day, but how can instructors sort of manage their classrooms, not manage, but sort of teach, instruct with this sort of framework in mind? Absolutely. So thank you so much for asking that question, and I want to first acknowledge that, in fact, it's on one of the examples that I give on one of my slides, let's see here, of an example of systemic racism is here under institutional systemic racism, here you see example. So systemic racism is a system of structuring opportunity, assigning value based on social interpretation of phenotype, right? That's systemic racism. Example, BIPOC professors tasked with extra committees and advising, but these are not rewarded in the tenure process, right? So just right from the get-go, our structures, and like I'm a provost so I can do this, like I can decide what to reward in the tenure process, and I can decide that I can start rewarding faculty of color or all faculty, because in my view, faculty of color can't do this work alone, right? That's not fair. What we need, I mean it's important, it's important for students of color to see themselves in institutions, I think that's very important, and it's important for all faculty to be invited to come into the space of doing this work, and I think that many white faculty are afraid that they're going to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or do it in a wrong way, and these are by nature uncomfortable conversations and uncomfortable spaces to be in, like, true intercultural spaces are by nature uncomfortable, but faculty, white faculty must, in my view, learn how to conduct these conversations in this framework to make sure that, and again, it's not just like racism harms everybody, you know, it doesn't just harm people who are the victims of racism, it is, it is a, it causes moral disengagement, you know, and I mean this is a Catholic university, so I'm just gonna say it, so apologies to everyone for being like this, but, you know, racism is a sin, it's a sin because it detracts from life, like the church is about, the church is about the dignity of all human life, and racism contradicts that, you know, it, thank you, you know, it just, it prevents people from self-actualizing across the lifespan, and that's just not a good thing, and we have to change that, and it's not just black faculty who have to do that, it's all faculty who have to do that, so I think that, like as provost, there's a couple of things, you know, first thing, I specifically look at the workloads between all the faculty and acknowledge those workloads in their tenure processes based on the, the, the water that they're carrying for the institution, and from my perspective, if, you know, faculty members are enabling students to stay retained and learn and get to graduation, then that's water that they're carrying, and that counts for me like a publication, for example, okay, so, so I can do that because I'm a provost, but also, I can enable our faculty, and I have done this by the way, so I'm not just talking off the top of my head, I can enable our faculty to engage in, you know, an ongoing training program called inclusive excellence, so this is what we have at Trinity, and it's for all faculty, including adjuncts, because students, when you walk into a classroom and the professor that you see, that's your professor, right, you don't differentiate who's full-time and who's a part-time professor, right, that person is your teacher, that person is a representative of the institution, so it's also enabling faculty, but also adjuncts to learn how to have these conversations, and to recognize symptoms of distress and to engage in the ally practices of amplifying, you know, so when students have good ideas, you know, amplifying those ideas, and, I mean, that could go for faculty meetings too, like amplifying good ideas, as well as, you know, recognizing signs of distress, but also, you know, knowing how to make sure that they create safe spaces for students to really be authentic, and part of that is us being authentic, you know, I mean we have to be authentic in order for our students to be authentic and to feel safe, so I don't know if I completely answered, was that good and good? Yeah, okay. Is there a difference on the brain chemically between trauma and stress? So the difference is that what I was saying before about, like, adaptive stress, which is just an appropriate reaction to anything, like you're on a roller coaster, you know, yay, woohoo, it, so it's the same chemicals, all right, it's the same chemicals. The difference is the way that the chemicals are deployed, all right, so the difference is that when you're experiencing traumatic stress, the hypothalamic pituitary axis that I showed you before, that it's dysregulated, so it is unable to properly function to turn you on when you need to be on, wake you up in the morning, shut you down at night, you know, things like that, it becomes unable to properly complete that function, so there is a difference, and you can see that difference in neuroimaging and stuff. Yes. I was thinking about our healthcare system, the profit-based healthcare system, and the desire to include some of these new diagnoses in the DSM. Yes, very great, wonderful. I think that's going to affect the healthcare system. I can only imagine that it's going to, I mean, there's not enough mental healthcare right now, so I'm just curious. I would like, Kamara Jones, have you heard of her? Okay, she is a public health expert, and she has a whole framework around mental health and racism, and just, you know, but when you get this, when you get this PowerPoint, if you go to this public health models link and click on it, it'll take you to a little video where explain some of our ideas, but anyway, we have been working to broaden the definition of trauma so that people can get more healthcare for trauma, but in fact, the definition in my view has narrowed, and I definitely think that there are some, I think that there is a concern that if the definition becomes too broad, then everyone can get healthcare, right, you know, and that's going to like, I mean, we're already in a stressed, I know, I know, right, but you feel me, right, you see where I'm going with this, so part of, I think, some of the resistance, the idea of broadening the definition of trauma is really about, well then, all of a sudden trauma will be what, a disability, and oh my gosh, then we have to pay for all of that, and then we have to change our, you know, we have to follow the laws, and we have to change all these things, and you know, so I think that part of the resistance to really broadening the definition of trauma is the idea that we'll then have to provide more subsidized, you know, mental healthcare. In the meantime, is there even enough quality mental healthcare for right now? Like, no. So part of what we really need there is more mental health providers, and you know, I'm pretty sure we need more mental health providers that are really well trained in constructs like these, because these are what, these are what people are really going to walk in the door with. I have one more question. Can you tell us about the Steve Fund? Oh, sure. The Steve Fund is, I'm on the board of an organization called the Steve Fund, which specializes in equity and mental health for students of color and higher education, and let's see if this, oops, I don't know, oh here we go, okay, so I can at least, if you ever go, if you want to go the link, but, well, that doesn't tell us much, but the equity and mental health framework is a set of initiatives that are research-based, that are evidence-based. It's a set of initiatives to support students of color and higher education, and the Steve Fund can partner with your university. There's a whole, if you go to the site, there's a whole toolkit and a whole bunch of different things that you can, you know, that you can, here we go. So here's the framework, it looks like it's going to make me download it. Well, anyway, but if you want to go and read this, it's a whole set of strategies to, I mean, there are recommendations that campuses can use to, who asked me, oh, I'm sorry, there are recommendations that can really, there are recommendations that campuses can use to put in place more support specifically for students of color, and it's a national organization. It's the only, it's a very authentic organization, it was founded because, okay, the people who founded this were a very well-connected Black family in New York, old wealth, you know, very hooked up. One of their sons was at Harvard, and while he was at Harvard, he committed suicide. Yeah, and so it's a very, their mission is incredibly authentic, so part of their response to that was to found, to use their resources and their network and their connections to found this national organization for students of color because, as the founder would say, I don't want any other family to ever have to go through what we've gone through, and so they do a variety of programs, they put on a variety of symposia, and they have just a variety of resources and consulting services and things that institutions, and it's national, and yeah, check them out. And they have a bunch of videos, I think I sent you all a link with a bunch of their videos and people talking about different constructs, and yeah, thank you for asking that. We didn't even get to like what to do about this problem, so I guess that'll be tomorrow. Okay, well, again, sorry I didn't get through everything, but thank you everyone for being here, and again, tomorrow morning, BCC lower level, 11 to 12 or 12, 15. Latasha Smith, who just raised a question, will be one of the panelists, and Shannon Kelly. So thank you everybody, and thank you again to Dr. Ocampo. Have a good rest of your evening.