The Promise of Racial Healing to Achieve Health Equity Through School-Based Prevention

In the wake of the American Public Health Association's formal declaration of racism as a public health crisis, there is an urgent need for more approaches to promoting the socioemotional well-being of K-12 Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) students, educators, and families.1 Cumulative exposures and reexposures to direct and indirect acts of racism can adversely affect emotion regulation and the ability to sustain meaningful relationships, disrupting socioemotional health and well-being.2 Race-based stress can lead to racial trauma, and merely perceived experiences of racial discrimination can produce such stress.2Household and community-level experiences of racial trauma have effects similar to those of other adverse childhood experiences,3,4 and calls to address racism within K-12 schools by interrupting and preventing the transmission of intergenerational cycles of trauma at the systemic, institutional, and individual levels are well placed.5,6 Such action will need to counteract the whitewashing of the public K-12 curriculum, evident through the censoring of antiracist books and the movement to ban the teaching of accurate US history about race, exacerbating generations of systemic disadvantage in BIPOC communities.7