Introduction
In this piece, gathering several reflections I shared on social media over the past few weeks, I argue that the sense of injustice is core to traumatisation, yet remains significantly under-recognised in how we understand racial, collective and group-based violence. Trauma is not only about overwhelm, loss of control, fear or chronicity of exposure to racialised violence.
It also involves moral injury: the profound violation of our sense of ethics and justice.
From a decolonial/Afroanalytic lens, I explore how injustice is carried not only individually, but intergenerationally and communally, through collective memory and the role of memory bearers (Griots and Nzonzis). Clinically, this invites us to rethink the centrality of injustice, attend to intergenerational and communal harm, and think differently about justice-seeking, not as maladaptation or dysfunction, but potentially as an attempt to repair moral injury, restore balance and sustain the community.
The absence of thinking on injustice in the clinic
In my formulation of racial trauma, and particularly in Living While Black, I proposed that the sense of injustice is central to traumatisation. Yet, most common racial trauma frameworks tend to focus primarily on loss of control, suddenness, overwhelm (or fear or pain), chronicity as the drivers of racial traumatisation or racial distress.
In my view, the sense of injustice requires unique attention, but it has been significantly under-recognised in understanding how racism inflicts psychological injuries.
I have never encountered someone who was experiencing racial trauma who was not also contending with a deep sense of injustice. In fact, this observation holds for most people I have worked with who were in distress more broadly.
It may not always be articulated explicitly as such, but as soon as injustice is offered as a framework, everything falls into place and gains meaning. This is why I argue that injustice is essential to understanding racial trauma, thus collective trauma, mass trauma and group-based violence.
These experiences are harmful not only because they cause overwhelm, create powerlessness, grief or erode one’s sense of safety in the world, but also because they inflict profound moral injury. Specifically, a fundamental breach of our sense of ethics.
This moral injury lies at the very heart of racial traumatisation.
However, though my work focuses on such violence, this is not unique to racism: accounts of survivors of other forms of traumatisation and mass violence also centre this sense of injustice; the feeling that the fundamental moral order has been violated, transgressed, creating a sense of ontological insecurity.
Yet this dimension has rarely been developed as something crucial we must attend to clinically.
But our sense of ethics and justice is deeply tied to our very being and to how we make sense of the world; hence to our sense of safety, order, meaning, agency, predictability…
Although some therapeutic models — such as CBT — often dismiss this expectation as maladaptive, I argue instead that the expectation of justice is a central compass to help us navigate the world; which social structures attempt to socialise us into disconnecting from.
Given that even very young infants and children show signs of distress when they witness injustice, long before they have been taught what justice means and been socialised into ethics or morality, there appears to be something innate in that expectation.
My aim is to invite you to hold injustice at the centre of your thinking as I continue to muse on the centrality of injustice in trauma.
From this consideration we can start to be curious about injustice in the collective sense. When the sense of injustice is not confined to the individual’s personal experience, but involves several generations and entire communities.
Injustice and Intergenerationality
So far I proposed that the sense of injustice is central to traumatisation and made the case that existing frameworks focus on loss of control, overwhelm, chronic exposure, fear or pain to explain the wounds racism inflicts. I posit that injustice is significantly under-recognised as a unique source of harm in its own right and that this must be corrected.
I also want to again stress that it is important to understand this not just as part of racial trauma, but as a component needing attention in collective, mass and group-based violence. These experiences inflict significant moral injury: a fundamental breach of our sense of ethics, lying at the very heart of trauma, and that connection to injustice may be ever so present.
This connects closely to what is known in social psychology as justice sensitivity: the tendency to notice, feel, and respond intensely to fairness or unfairness, experienced from four perspectives: when we are wronged ourselves as victim, when we see others wronged as observer, when we gain from unfairness as beneficiary, and when we cause harm as perpetrator.
This framework of injustice sensitivity was developed by core authors including Schmitt, Gollwitzer, and Maes. It is not simply a reaction we learn; it is a fundamental way we are oriented in and towards the world.
There is value in acknowledging that individuals may vary in how they relate to justice and injustice, but the danger is in over-individualising this as an idiosyncratic personality trait or an inborn temperamental disposition.
Instead, I want to suggest that our sensitivity to injustice engages multiple levels of human functioning. Of course, the personal is always relevant when we speak of individual responses, but these responses are always situated within broader relational, structural and historical contexts.
I have observed that for those who consistently call out injustice, attempt to hold systems to account, and seek redress in ways the system routinely deems inappropriate and, of course, often dismisses as unreasonable, there is often an initial injustice needing recognition.
In a way, this is akin to trauma repetition. That injustice created the wound; the original injury may in fact evade consciousness, and that wound gets reactivated with every subsequent moral injury or injustice encountered. Every attempt made to seek redress is also an attempt to repair the original wound.
There is an important disclaimer to be made about the limitations of repetition compulsion, which locates the obsessive drive to reenact what has been wounding within the individual’s psyche. I think a note of caution is required, as what I am saying here is that the drive, or even impulse, to seek justice finds its origins in collective memories, passed on intergenerationally. I do accept that part of the mechanism is likely unconscious, as it is not held in conscious awareness, but I do not propose that the intentionality is intrapsychically curative, born of psychic deformity or of internal regulatory orientation.
In this way we could say, seeking justice is not only a way to address the harm in the here and now; it is also an attempt to address moral injury and injustice that happened in the then and there, though once more this is not always consciously known or clear.
This raises another important question: whose injustice is being carried, remembered and sought to be repaired? The answer may take us beyond the individual altogether, towards the communal.
Injustice, Communality and the Afroanalytics
I am not arguing that contemporary acts of injustice carry no weight to injure or harm morally; rather, that new harm will be mapped onto an injustice template already needing repair.
I first spoke about this in an article I wrote a few years ago, about the treatment of Diane Abbott by the Labour Party, and the profound impact it had on the Black community, and particularly on Black women. Partly this was because of prior personal experiences, but also because the treatment of earlier generations, including our own mothers, grandmothers and older forbears, were reactivated in people’s memories.
When we seek justice, in sum, we are often not only seeking it for ourselves or for wrongs we have experienced personally. There is a communal or group element engaged, one that takes us beyond individual harm, psychic makeup or personal histories.
This connects us to the collective struggle, to role designation and to the wrongs that have been done to groups across time and their impact on our relationship to (in) justice, taking us to an Afroanalytic lens.
My main thesis once more is that the sense of injustice is central to traumatisation, though it remains under-recognised as a unique source of wounding.
We drew from social psychology to explore justice sensitivity, the tendency to notice, feel and respond intensely to unfairness, but rather than over-individualising this capacity, I suggested, as an extension and critique, that sensitivity to injustice engages multiple levels of human functioning which need to be situated within broader relational, structural and historical contexts.
There too, a question arose about which and whose injustice needs recognition: the injustice template, as I called it, upon which attempts to seek justice are fundamentally connected and onto which contemporary experiences of injustice come to be mapped.
Hence, seeking justice, I concluded, may be a way to address moral wounding one may not be conscious of and for injustices one may not have personally experienced, linking injustice sensitivity to intergenerationality.
This takes us to Afroanalytics and its core claim when it comes to memory and inheritance: wounding histories are passed on from generation to generation as part of the community’s very survival mechanism.
As part of this, justice seeking must be considered in light of the functions it serves for the collective’s continuation, healing and survival.
In Afroanalytics I propose, in line with African interconnection and communal ethics, that certain bodies are designated to be memory bearers of the harm, wrongs and injustice that have been done to the community across time and space.
What that means for our understanding of this social sensitivity to injustice is that it becomes a communal mechanism of collective memory rather than an idiosyncratic trait, and that the weight of remembering and the work of seeking justice is not uniformly distributed within any group, family or community.
Instead, this important burden is carried by memory bearers, collective witnesses, the griots of the community.
Those so designated would therefore be much more likely to remember, to notice, to speak to and to try ‘to address injustice.
In fact, if we return to the role of the Griot in Central Africa e.g. in the Kongolese context, the Nzonzi, the role also exists to help ensure justice and balance in the community and to attempt to restore harmony in case of conflicts and disturbances. Justice and balance are the core raison d’être of the role, sustaining a communal reading of justice sensitivity.
An important interrogation arises at this juncture: what might be the impact of memory bearing and of sensitivity to imbalance, disturbance and lost harmony in contexts where the relevant infrastructures of recognition have been destroyed by modernism and epistemicide?
This question brings us to the clinical implications of all of this: what does it mean to work therapeutically when injustice, intergenerationality, communal memory and moral injury are understood as central to traumatisation?
Injustice and Racial Trauma: A Few Clinical Implications
As we considered communal and interdependent/Ubuntu ontologies, drawing on African formations of the roles and functions of justice keepers as memory bearers, we perhaps need to consider clinical or therapeutic implications. I want to suggest four* that are interrelated.
1. Centre the sense of injustice and moral injury as primary, not secondary or peripheral, to traumatisation, particularly in racial and political trauma work.
Since the sense of injustice lies at the very heart of such traumatisation, centring ethics and the moral and political dimensions of harm can help us reframe the overwhelm, loss and destabilisation in the world that follows trauma.
Dismissing the expectation of justice as maladaptive or immature deepens the moral injury and negates the very ethical compass that helps us navigate and make meaning of the world. It is also an act of epistemic violence (and complicity to harm) that protects structures of power, thus enforces compliance.
We need to affirm that the wound of being wronged is not a psychic distortion/deformity, but a fundamental, human, and often innate response to a violated moral order; it is evidence of sanity and humanity. A sense of grieving will likely be activated by this recognition.
2. Attend to the intergenerational and communal injustice experiences.
The distress we see in the patient’s present may be mapped onto an older, often unconscious, injustice template: moral wounds passed down through generations. Seeking justice for them may be an attempt to repair both current, personal and historical, intergenerational harm. We cannot fully understand an individual’s response to injustice without situating it within the broader relational, structural and historical contexts.
3. Honour the role of memory bearers and communal justice work.
We covered the danger of pathologising or over-individualising the work of those who carry the community’s memory: the griots, the Nzonzi, those who consistently name and seek to address injustice. Framing their relationship to injustice as sensitivity or a personal temperamental trait is Eurocentric and individualistic. It misses their vital communal and group function, and other ways to think about justice, particularly justice-in-community.
Justice seeking here becomes an attempt by the community to restore balance, repair collective harm as well as holding the continuation of the community.
4. Support structural & epistemic reparation.
A justice-centred approach is not only about contextualising responses and experiences intergenerationally. It is also about facilitating rather than dissuading resistance to injustice. We do not have as clinicians to head to the trenches … but we can hold thinking spaces* and foster the conditions (in particular cerebrally) for people to organise for justice.
We can explore what reparation may look like in the clinic; we can make explicit what justice seeking has entailed, we can create opportunities to imagine justice as a living embodied reality.
My own understanding of justice has shifted profoundly over the years I have been doing this work. The idea of micro repair I have suggested elsewhere is relevant here: noticing how things tend to re-balance themselves in small, unassuming ways rather than only through grandiose changes, matters, when we take the time to pay attention.
For now, what do you think? If you have been in therapy, how much attention was paid to (in) justice? If you are a clinician, do you find these suggestions useful?
Thank you for reading
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I’d be delighted to receive some feedback and comments on the issues I raise here.
If you are interested in furthering the conversation on injustice and/or any decolonial framework to understand racial traumatisation and distress more broadly, please join us for the decolonial racial trauma reflective group. We’d love to have you on board and think together about the ways that we may enrich and disrupt dominant understanding of distress and traumatisation, click here more more details.