Racial trauma and its health impacts in Black people in the United States and Canada: a scoping review on conceptualizations, definitions and manifestations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite growing recognition of racism as a public health crisis, racial trauma remains inconsistently defined and under researched. This scoping review investigates how racial trauma is conceptualized in empirical literature, focusing on its manifestations and long-term health impacts among Black individuals and communities in the United States and Canada. Guided by the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for conducting scoping reviews, we systematically searched ten multidisciplinary databases and identified 29 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2025. Most included studies were conducted in the United States of America, with only two studies that included Canadian participants. We find that racial trauma is described using varied terminology, such as race-based traumatic stress or race-related stress and arises from both direct and indirect exposure to racism. While some manifestations resemble post-traumatic stress disorder, racial trauma is a distinct trauma phenomenon shaped by chronic, cumulative, and systemic racism. It causes multidimensional harm, is experienced both individually and collectively, and may be transmitted intergenerationally even to neonates. This review identifies psychological, physiological, social and community-level impacts. These findings underscore the need for a unified conceptual framework, formal recognition of racial trauma in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) and increased empirical research across contexts including in Canada. These findings have important implications for mental health policy and clinical practice, highlighting the need for culturally responsive frameworks that address the unique experiences of racial trauma among Black communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.027 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".