Essay Example on Healing Racial Trauma: Kenneth V.H. on Hidden Wounds

Introduction

The article "Healing the Hidden Wounds of Trauma" by Kenneth V. H. is about the pain people who have gone through the Racial segregation feel. Kenneth states that racial oppression is a traumatic type of interpersonal violence it affects the victim in several ways through affecting the individual's morale. The effects are not only internal but the external self-esteem is destroyed and puts the individual into the internal fear. Both the youth and the adults of color suffer from a kind of trauma. It states that pain can exist the life throughout the life of an individual. Over the years, there have extreme cases of racial trauma where one is affected for almost half of their lifetime. If there are some traumas hard to heal is racial trauma.

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Racial trauma reduces one to the least state of self-esteem. People who underwent racial trauma at some point in their lives saw themselves as the least fortunate in life (Hardy, 2013). The experience would take them through a series of hard life incidences that at that moment are the hardest to explain and comprehend. Most of them start getting affected as early as eight. This article review will try to illustrate the point in detail by using an example of a Brazilian girl who underwent hard life at a young age and later became triumphant and now holds one of the most recognized positions.

Background

The background of the narration is in the Brazilian setup, where some of the worst racial segregation happened. People of all possible ages were subjected under hard times as a result of racism (Hardy, 2013). The society in this region also subjected underage children to forced and unpaid labor. The situation itself was unbearable, let alone racism included in it. The education system did not give a chance to the child of color to enjoy education in any way.

Early Life of Creuza Maria Oliviera

Creuza Maria Oliviera was born in 1957 into a humble background where a girl of her origin was initiated into a hopeless future. She began her first work as a domestic worker at the age of ten. Her story is a representation of thousands of Brazilian children who are being forced into domestic work to work for the rich (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). A girl of color, she underwent numerous challenges.

To begin with, she worked for free she was not paid, not even a penny till the time she was at the age of 21. Her education was another struggle, and she had to drop out several to go and work as a domestic worker. She could not afford to pay her fees, and feeding herself was a hard task all together (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). The circumstances she faced could not allow her to continue with her education as well as acquire life's basic needs.

The child labor statistics at her time was the highest ever recorded. As a child between the ages of 8-12, leaving their toys and books to spend time in other people's homesteads to work for meager income, which only comes in the form of meals, is a challenging task. Such people begin to lose hope in life and find themselves in occasional traumatic experiences the prevent them from. She was born into a family where her parents were domestic workers, and as per the norms, she could have to follow the trend and work just like her parents (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). At the age of ten, she dropped out of school to work for some rich white families in the neighborhood in a bid to earn a living.

Racial segregation was not the only hardship at work. While working, she would be mercilessly beaten if she made a mistake, such as accidentally breaking something (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). The racial names hurled at her, such as lazy and monkey, would become too much for a girl of her age. She, however, managed to persevere through the worst of it all. She would be occasionally harassed sexually by her male employers. With all those troubles she went through, she did not get any payment whatsoever.

Oliveira lived a life of slavery as a result of her race. She was transferred at the age of 14 to Sao Paulo to work without any consent of her relatives, which shows the level of crude life she went through (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). Even after the transfer, it was expected that her salary would start coming, or a few things change the same racial segregation went on for a long time. She got her first salary at the age of 21.

Her life was basic with pay of food, shelter, and clothing; the fundamental rights of a worker were not possible for her to achieve. Like the children of the whites, she was denied all the rights; she did not get any education, nor any basic amenities required by children for growth. Moreover, she was denied the ability to spent time with her family. The hardship her family was going through could not allow them to come together as a family; hence each had to fend for themselves individually.

Such was the life and the daily routine of Creuza Maria Oliviera, from her young age to the time when she got into the light. It was during one of the new moments where she heard about activist against racial segregation (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). At that time, there were meetings held to fight for the rights of domestic workers. She planned and attended one of the meetings, and that is where her breakthrough began. Her life turned rapidly from an oppressed black girl with low confidence to a high self-esteem leader who could stand to fight for the rights of those who went through the same.

In all platforms, the life she experienced was an example enough to show the level of misery most of the children of her age went through. She is now the President of the National Federation of Domestic Workers (Bernardino-Costa, 2019). Her activism enabled her to unite the black women, and since then, her outcry has brought about numerous changes. She is not yet successful, but her efforts have brought about tremendous improvements

Analysis and Relation to the Reading Context

The healing of racial trauma can be hard and may take several years for one to get better. The experience becomes even worse if it happened to one at a young age. The age of an individual contributes to the way he/she will perceive life later. If it were not for Oliviera's zealous efforts to get herself on track and rise above all challenges, her whole life would have remained the same (Hardy, 2013). Thanks to her efforts, the domestic works can now get pay, have rights and powerful unions, and can afford a one day in a week's rest.

Her take on racism is strong and valid, and she tries her best to ensure that equality of all races is achieved. Since it is not possible to entirely eliminate cases of the youth of color experiencing racial trauma, it is essential to provide healing techniques and procedures to help in the process of healing from the racial trauma (Hardy, 2013). Techniques used can be a way to teach individuals on what to do when they experience these instances. Traumatic experiences can be disconcerting, and these techniques can help one be ready for such cases and thus reducing the impact one feels.

References

Bernardino-Costa, J. (2019). Decoloniality and Emancipatory Intersectionality: The Political Organizing of Domestic Workers in Brazil. In The Palgrave Handbook of Intersectionality in Public Policy (pp. 513-527). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Hardy, K. V. (2013). Healing the hidden wounds of racial trauma. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 22(1), 24.