Reading Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy DeGruy: A Necessary and Life-Changing Weight

This book was the heaviest book I’ve read in a long time.

Every time I opened Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy DeGruy, I felt like I was being pulled through time. Page by page, it was as if I was witnessing crimes committed against Black bodies in another lifetime, yet feeling the reverberations of them in this one. Reading it felt traumatic because it was so brutally honest.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is alive and well today. The wounds it exposes did not magically close with emancipation, civil rights legislation or the passing of generations. Healing something this deep takes a village. It takes collective acknowledgment. It takes intention. It takes us closing wounds that were opened long before you or I were born.

It wasn’t that long ago that white rioters burned and lynched pregnant Black women, cut babies from their wombs, lynched Black men for simply existing and quite literally fed our babies to animals. These are not distant myths or exaggerated stories. They are documented realities. Reading them forces you to sit with the truth of how much violence was inflicted, normalized and then buried beneath silence.

This was a heavy book. A necessary book, but undeniably heavy.

It changed me.

It increased my gratitude for my mother and father, for my grandparents, for Black women and men I have never met but owe so much to. It made me think deeply about the strength required not just to survive, but to continue loving, building families, creating joy and imagining futures in the face of relentless brutality.

Reading a book is one of the most intimate experiences you can have with an author. You sit with their thoughts, their research, their vulnerability and their truths in quiet moments. With Dr. DeGruy, that intimacy felt sacred.

Thank you, Dr. Joy DeGruy, for documenting history when so many would rather forget it. Thank you for not only naming the trauma, but for offering a pathway toward healing for generations that have been pushed to the margins. Our Black men and women. Resilient. Persevering. Overcoming.

And it leaves me with one question that lingers long after the final page:

How can anyone hate what God created?

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