It has been more than four years since Darnella Frazier, then a teenager, captured on camera the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yet the impact on Frazier’s brain of what she witnessed could linger for much longer.
“I still hold the weight and trauma of what I witnessed,” Frazier wrote in a social media post on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s murder. “I’m not who I used to be. A part of my childhood was taken from me.”
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Burgeoning suggests racism causes stress and trauma that can take a serious toll on both body and mind. Even simply watching a video like the one Frazier recorded can be traumatic, let alone witnessing it and recording it for the world to see.
A of 134 college students in the US, who were mainly Black or of Latin American ancestry, published in the weeks after Floyd’s murder, found they reported experiencing symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder after viewing videos on social media showing Black men being killed at the hands of police. In addition, a that examined the scientific literature on racial discrimination and trauma found a positive association between the two and called for more research on the topic.
Separate points towards a potential association between past traumatic experiences and dementia risk in later life. A found a link between childhood trauma and late-life dementia among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who experience a rate of dementia three to five times greater than Australia’s wider population.
The study notes that participants’ scores in a childhood trauma questionnaire were associated with several indicators, including separation from family “by a mission, the government or welfare”. This refers to a series of implemented by the Australian government between 1910 and the 1970s, under which many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families.
Racial disparities in the incidence of dementia are also present in the US, where the prevalence of Alzheimer’s-related dementia is among Black people compared with white people. In 2019, a found early signs that this might be related to racial discrimination. Researchers surveyed 71 African American research participants about their experiences of racism. The team later scanned the brains of these people using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure their white matter lesion volume – an early biological marker of cognitive decline. This found that among older African Americans, self-reported lifetime discrimination burden was associated with greater white matter lesion volume.
Measuring the effects of racism on the brain is challenging, but these findings – and experiences like Frazier’s – suggest it is worthwhile. In particular, understanding how racism might contribute to dementia risk will be important in a world where the number of people living with the condition is to rise from more than 55 million in 2020 to 78 million by 2030.
Governments – and all of us – should pay attention. Beyond dementia, high levels of perceived discrimination among racial and ethnic minority groups have been associated with an increased risk of a broad range of health conditions, from cardiovascular disease to breast cancer to .
Race is a social construct, but that isn’t a reason to dismiss the of racism. The science tells us we should take them seriously.
Layal Liverpool is a journalist and the author of
