Systemic Oppression and Trauma: Why Healing-Centered Two-Generation Approaches Are Crucial to Poverty Alleviation

From the article's overview:

Systemic racism and discrimination are forms of systemic oppression found to be root causes of poverty and hunger in the United States. Systemic racism is a form of violence that places or keeps people of color in conditions of hunger and poverty through the structural withholding of resources and opportunities, hyper-surveillance, and unjust incarceration inflicted on racialized individuals and communities. Racial discrimination consists of interpersonal and individual interventions with a person’s physical, emotional, economic, or social wellbeing because of biases against someone’s race, often in by way of access to public space, employment, housing, and healthcare. Both systemic racism and discrimination create conditions of economic insecurity that then exacerbate and foster a cycle of poor health and exposure to violence stemming from this systemic trauma. Many health professionals and policy advocates have called for approaches that seek to address, remediate, and prevent individualized trauma.