A current Canadian education management growth industry is in racial trauma. Female academics from diverse feminized fields including social work, psychology, and kinesiology align with Human Resources priorities by contributing to a managerial plan for disciplining and controlling educators as the cause of racial trauma. In this managerialist view, race and trauma are the emergent, long-term result of the psychological aggression of White workers, particularly teachers, upon the psychology of vulnerable children and youth.
This current managerial strategy is licensed by the Cold War Antienlightenment assumption that workers and other non-elites are degraded, the source of injustice, and owe a debt to society (Moyn 2023; Graeber 2011), which (preceded and) succeeded the long maintenance of premodern Master-Servant law in the Anglo-American countries (Orren 1991; Tigar 2000; Hay & Craven 2004; Glasbeek 2017).
This psychologizing labor management strategy defies historical work (Malik 2023; Coulthard 2014; Gilmore 2007; Graeber 2019; Murawkawa 2014; Gilmore & Murakawa 2024; Taiwo 2022; Davis 2017; Piketty 2020) that finds race to be the continually-reproduced product of market and state governance managing and otherwise policing a global working class for profit maximization. Racialization accommodates proprietarian ideology and practice proscribing democratic (AKA radical) Enlightenment ideology and organizing (Malik 2023; Piketty 2020).
Thus the direct way to reduce racialization and racial trauma is to reign in management and reduce other forms of policing, and instead permit—ideally encourage–democratic Enlightenment and economic democracy to develop. This grounded structural approach to equity and equality casts concern on proposals to reduce racism’s harms with management-designed and -driven interventions on worker attitudes and behaviour. Such approaches fail to address the generative mechanism behind racialization and the psychological trauma it inflicts, and as they assign blame for inequity in the traditional proprietarian manner, it is doubtful that they can diminish inequity rooted in inegalitarian proprietarianism.
Historical-structural research suggests that such inegalitarian (elitist, meritocratic) virtue governance creates and oscillates with its Antienlightenment complement, as where meritocratic identity politics oscillate with and reinforce feudal-patriarchal identity politics (Piketty 2020; Malik 2023). This is to say that as virtuous and comparatively doable as disciplining teachers on behalf of racialized children is, it is putting the cart before the horse in such a way as to supercharge the identity politics and thus racialization and the traumas it inflicts. As HR and other PMC meritocratic “solutions” to social problems suppress automonous working-class human capacities for organizing, communicating, learning from others, leadership, executive skills and other forms of human development, in favor of shaming, disciplining and constraining the working class on the basis of a tendentious and invalid interpretation of the cause of racialization, we see around the world that Antienlightenment leaders lie in wait to organize rightly-frustrated working class people around another set of distractionary beliefs that essentializes as natural culture the Anglo-American Cold War accomplishment of building rivalristic fundamentalist religious patriarchies around the world. These are the sources of racialized cultures and the only way to integrate populations disrupted and displaced by imperial capitalism is to a) historicize modern fundamentalist religious patriarchies as the manufactured, modern imperial product they are, and b) foster a democratic Enlightenment alternative.
Historical, structurally-grounded research into racialization shows that managerialism, as a form of policing, induces and does not reduce racialization as its elitist framework continues to divert attention from generative mechanisms of racialization and to prescribe and enforce working-class shaming, disorganization, dispossession, and decapacitation.
Historical, structurally-grounded research thus argues that to effectively reduce racialization, including its psychological harms, reliance and expenditure upon managerialism and other forms of policing must be reduced in favor of expanding social citizenship, welfare state supports including education funding, information access, and reducing tax avoidance institutions amongst the wealthy and corporations in order to fund a universal endowment for youth, as a necessary basis for wealth circulation (Piketty 2020; Pistor 2019). This problem-solving approach is based in the recognition that via militarized imperialism, severe wealth inequality generates and reliably regenerates cultural, symbolic, and psychological inequity (Du Bois 1924, 1935, 1945; Coulthard 2014; Malik 2023). This democratic socialist approach is a necessary part of reducing trauma, including racial trauma.
Trauma, the malingering embodiment of violent development suppression, is real and disabling (Maté 2008). Our collective resources should be allocated to recognize and heal trauma, not least in order to restore the capacity to express developmental democratic socialism. Racialization is a fundamental mechanism of imposing trauma. But traumatizing racialization is the crooked collectivism that elites allow the working class as working-class human development is traumatically suppressed.
And further, as experts in trauma know, race is not the only mechanism of imposing rampant trauma. This is why the inegalitarian, meritocratic, PMC (Professional Middle Class) and HR (Human Resources) approach to justice efficiently recreates its bedfellow in misanthropy, Right-wing authoritarianism. Because the origins of race are not in the degraded souls of the White working class (as the Antienlightenment distinctively hypothesizes), but rather racialized people, working-class people, colonized people, imperially-displaced people, and feminized people all are systematically exposed to trauma as they are dehumanized, denied cooperation and quality credit, it is impossible to reduce racial trauma by simply hanging responsibility for trauma on workers, including teachers, as they also carry trauma and crippling trauma is reinflicted by the torturous practice of denial and silencing. Most books on trauma, including intergenerational trauma, begin voicing the story of the author’s own trauma. For example, Oprah Winfrey’s book on racialized, intergenerational trauma starts with the story of how her own loving grandmother tormented her–passed on trauma.
This story-telling is not just about relateability. It’s about voice. What well-meaning university grant-seekers are proposing when they propose to impose upon teachers responsibility for racial trauma is to replace the voice of another predominantly traumatized group–workers carrying the intergenerational trauma of imperial displacement (inter alia)–with the voice of the true source of trauma, the interested perspective of elitist positionality. In The Body in Pain (1985) Elaine Scarry demonstrated that this is a definition of torture, which is to say it is re-traumatizing.
Contra today’s elitist consensus, schools and the feminized workers within them cannot efficiently replace all the social citizenship framework. Teachers cannot heal children when teachers are continually traumatized and the competency standard is to perpetuate trauma by kicking down, as inequality researchers Wilkinson and Pickett call the inegalitarian reflex. An approach that was actually designed to reduce race trauma would not only prioritize front and center rebuilding democratic social citizenship ideology and policies, it would recognize that trauma includes racialization as an important form of dehumanizing inequality, and extends beyond racialization as well. It could engage teachers in recognizing trauma and learning how to work with young people and others toward healing it.
But what it would not do is to re-traumatize teachers by denying their own trauma, thus continuing to cripple them, assigning them sole responsibility for racial trauma, and foisting upon teachers alone another, additional job, a healer’s responsibility that also counterproductively reproduces its Antienlightenment negation. Until ambitious, feminized university professors can design real healing supports, granting agencies and grant evaluators should not approve their HR-driven research proposals, as these ill-conceived interventions will perpetuate both racial trauma and the suite of traumas imposed systematically by inegalitarianism. As Frantz Fanon analyzed the barriers to decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), colonized intellectuals are part of the barricade maintaining inequality-based inequity. All top-down grant incentivization aside, the capacity of colonized intellectuals to perpetuate trauma is a primary problem that must be recognized and addressed.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 