The Difference Between Segregation and Black Spaces

Why Black People Are Creating Black-Only Spaces

Sometimes white people confuse segregation and Black-only spaces. This could be the result of White shame and toxic/traumatic shame. Shame can distort perceptions and induce dissociative responses, activating the fight/flight/freeze/fawn reaction. Some white people in their state of guilt and shame-induced hyperarousal/hypervigilance may be losing context and just seeing the loose association of a "single-race space" which may loosely resemble segregation.

The Neuroscience of Shame | CPTSDfoundation.org

Associative Looseness Treatment | Diamond Behavioral Health

Understanding Psychosis: A Continuum of Trauma, Dissociation | Psychology Today

Black people who have experienced black-racial-specific trauma, want and need spaces where they can process and heal with people they feel most comfortable with (other black people who have been in/are in the same situations).

Being that Black People have an identity-based intergenerational trauma and are actively oppressed and retraumatized in a specific way unique to the black racial identity, there can be a distrust of White People and just a desire to connect more with People that they feel safest with.

To put this in perspective, a woman or man (white or black or indigenous, or POC) who survives a sexual assault by a man or woman (white or black or indigenous or POC) may have a reaction to people who resemble their perpetrators and might feel more comfortable with a therapist that doesn't fit that identity, or a group with the same identity, so that that person can relate more and feel a sense of safety in grieving, healing, and recovering from specific trauma.

To be continued